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Our team has been overwhelmed with other commitments over past couple of weeks, so this episode has come later than expected.
Nevertheless, there are many things to cover (!) so we actually had decided to move couple of things to introduce on next week's episode instead to make sure our readers can actually manage to get everything consumed without falling asleep :)
zkSync Era's Mainnet Alpha
Renowned zk-rollup project zkSync from Matter Labs has announced the launch of their zkSync Era Mainnet Alpha. Developers can now deploy their dApp to the rollup permissionlessly with built-in account abstraction and data compression.
Users can now bridge and use the rollup using the native bridge at bridge.zksync.io and other third-party bridges. As this is Alpha version, there are still centralized restrictions such as delay withdrawals and permissioned proof submissions, with vulnerabilities to be monitored and intervened closely. Users should proceed with caution.
According to L2Beat, there has been over 63m TVL on the roll-up 5 days after the launch, with SyncSwap being the leading protocol according to DeFiLlama.
FHE.org annual event on Tokyo
The annual FHE conference from FHE.org has been organised on Tokyo during 26th March as part of Real World Crypto - the annual cryptography conference hosted by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).
There have been speakers from Zama, Ethereum Foundation, Google, Cosic.be etc talking about various topics around FHE and its current development.
Video of the talks haven't been uploaded yet so we can only take references from few of the threads above.
The highlight for us so far has been the comment from Google's Miguel Guevara: "if the cost of FHE compared to normal computation comes down to a factor of 10, then FHE will really take off".
(We wish we could have participated in the conference!)
ZK Vietnam Resisdency Program
0xParc has teamed up with Ethereum Foundation's Privacy & Scaling Explorations to organize a month-long ZK Vietnam Residency program in Ho Chi Minh City for aspired zk builders and devs.
@PrivacyScaling's Carlos Perez has had good summary threads of the talks and sessions. There has been no video of the talks posted online yet.
Zk-gaming with Aztec
Building games of imperfect information with Aztec’s Noir language
Aztec has posted a series of interviews with ecosystem gaming project BattleZips on how have they been building games of incomplete information utilizing Aztec's general language for zk proof Noir.
There has been many interesting insights from the BatteZips developer Mach 34, including their experience of developing on Noir compared to Circom, as well as their work on zk state channel - a concept, according to them, will enable "countless use-cases across all segments of Web3".
Kakarot's Testnet is coming
Kakarot is a community project that aims to provide the same value as a standard EVM (such as Arbitrum or Polygon): the ability to write Solidity smart contracts, deploy them, and interact with them with low gas fees. It is particularly comparable to zkSync2.0 or Polygon zkEVM because it has zero-knowledge properties.
Kakarot - zkEVM project written in StarkNet's smart contract language Cairo - has been quietly building over last few months and are soon ready to launch their testnet - subject to their progress on RPC node as well as Q&A process.
Zama's FHE-EVM Demo
Crypto natives have probably heard a lot about zkEVM, but Zama has released an interesting PoC demo of a FHE-based EVM
A testnet will be launched over the next few months for people to try it out, with a whitepaper coming in the summer.
ScalingX x Buidlbox's zk Hackathon
Attention #BUILDers 
ScalingX, a Web3 developer community and accelerator, has teamed up with Buidlbox, a renowned blockchain hackathon platform that has helped…
ScalingX, a Web3 developer community and accelerator, has teamed up with blockchain hackathon platform Buidlbox to host “The Hunt for X ” Hackathon, which will happen from 12/4 to 5/5. Teams or individuals will look to develop scaling solutions that leverage zk during the hackathon.
Polygon's zkEVM launch on 27th March
Polygon has finally launched and open sourced their long-awaited zkEVM. Vitalik did the first ever symbolic transaction during the launch event.
There has been good feedback about the developer experience from the dev community, apart from some issues with contract verification on PolygonScan on the first couple of days.
zkHack Lisbon from March 31 - April 2nd
On March 31 - April 2, we host ZK Hack Lisbon, our first IRL zk hackathon. At ZK Hack Lisbon, we will be hacking on zk tools, using zk DSLs, and building new products that showcase what zk can do.
As part of the annual zkSummit from Zero Knowledge Podcast, they first host their first in-real-life zk hackathon, where hackers will work on zk tools, using zk DSLs, and building new applications leveraging zk.
There will also be workshops happen on 1st April from the likes of Sismo, RiscZero and AlephZero.
Sismo launch "sovereign SSO" zkConnect
Demo: demo.zksub.io 
Docs: docs.sismo.io 
Builders page: build.sismo.io
Sovereign identities powerhouse Sismo has announced zkConnect - the latest addition to their protocol suite along with ZkBadge. zkConnect allows following features:
- Private authentication: utilizing the same Sismo Vault concept, allows user to authenticate privately and the app only can access vaultId from user - which is unique to the app itself so even apps can't collude to dox the user.
- request private data with zk proofs: data from both Web2 and Web3 sources can be added to user's Data Vault. App can then request selective personal data (Data Gem).
- both off-chain and on-chain applications can verify the proofs of the Data Gem using either Typescript package (on beta) or Solidity library (coming soon).
zkPass Pre-Alpha Sneak Peek
Identity attestation protocol zkPass has released some sneak peak ahead of their pre-alpha testnet. By utlizing Australia government's MyGovID.
zkPass's Google extension needed to be installed so proof can be generated information from MyGovID. zkPass uses random MPC nodes to check on data integrity (without being able to retrieve the data as the encryption key is owned by the user).
After the zk proofs are generated, it will be sent on-chain and an zkSBT (soul-bound token) will be generated representing the succinct fact about your nationality and age (for example: Australian, > 25 years old) without disclosing the full information.
Lurk announcing paper on their recursive zk-SNARK language
Lurk is a statically scoped dialect of Lisp, influenced by Scheme and Common Lisp, which execution can be proved by zero knowledge.
They have released a paper about how they can achieve Turing-completeness for their language without compromising the size of the resulting proof.
NounsDAO's Private Voting Research results
Following up on what we have covered on zkWeekly #0, NounsDAO has announced the 3 proposals that will get funded on their Private Voting Research Sprint, including the two that we have covered from Poisedon x 0xDigitalOil and Aztec x Aragon.
The other proposal that got the funding is Nouns Vortex from Team Mizu, which details can be seen here.
Succinct Labs announced zk-SNARK based interoperability protocol Telepathy
Succinct Labs has finally introduced the highly-awaited zkSNARK-based interoperability protocol Telepathy.
Telepathy's mechanism relies heavily on what the team called "Proof of consensus", which allows generation of zk succinct proof of Ethereum's light client protocol. With it, smart contract on another chain can run a light client and validate Ethereum state directly without relying on a middle actor like most of other interoperability design.
Mina's Improvement Proposal to upgrade proof system to Kimchi
Hello everyone, Brett Carter here, a PM at O(1) Labs. We've recently drafted an official MIP which proposes upgrading Mina's proof system to Kimchi. Take a look here to read up on the specifics: https://github.com/MinaProtocol/MIPs/pull/9/files.
Brett Carter from O(1) Labs - the core developers of Mina protocol - has published a proposal to upgrade Mina's proof system to Kimchi.
Kimchi is a variant of PLONK - a popular zk proof system used by zkSync and others. Kimchi would supposedly improve on Mina’s zk proof system on all dimensions, hence enable both larger and more complex applications and higher performances, at the cost of a slight increase in proof size.
First ETH Privacy Hackathon announced
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Leading Privacy Alliance (LPA) is a Swiss association founded in August 2022 to raise awareness, implement solutions and educate users about privacy.
LPA has announced their first ETH-focused privacy hackathon in Istanbul from 27 - 30 April. There's gonna a privacy conference hosted on the 30th as well.
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