***Check out the 2026 ZK Industry Report from ZK Podcast & Succinct***

Research

• Magnetar: High-Speed Post-Quantum RV64 zkVM From Standard Hashes | Srinath Setty

• Aerie: Efficient Aggregation of Falcon Signatures | Alberto Centelles, Quang Dao, Mohammadtaghi Badakhshan and Justin Thaler

• Can AI Oversight Be Zero Knowledge? | Alessandro Chiesa, Ziyi Guan and Burcu Yıldız

• Watermarking Proofs With Provenance-Binding ZK-SNARKs | Wenhao Wang, Fan Zhang and Charalampos Papamanthou

• Speeding Up Sumcheck Using Algebraic Geometry | Rahul Dalal, Benedikt Bünz, Tamir Hemo and Ron D. Rothblum

• Nenya: Efficient zkSNARKs for Integer Rings Z/2kZ Via Reverse Multiplication-Friendly Embeddings | Tianyu Zhang, Nikita Borisov and Yupeng Zhang

• Polygero: Proximity Testing From Polynomial Challenges | Matteo Frigo and abhi shelat

• Improving Code Rate and Query Complexity for the Ligero-IOP System | Ignacio Cascudo, Carmit Hazay and Muthu Venkitasubramaniam

• Counterexamples to Beyond-Johnson Proximity Gaps Over Binary Fields | Quang Dao, Scott Duke Kominers, Justin Thaler and Kai Zhe Zheng

• Faster and Smaller Anonymous Credentials From Standardized Signatures | Chad Sharp and Paul Grubbs

• Nowhere Man: Device Binding for Post-Quantum Anonymous Credentials | Calvin Abou Haidar, Ryo Kikuchi, Octavio Perez-Kempner and Marcel Tiepelt

• TenseUp: Doubly-Efficient Lookup Arguments From Tensor Codes and Applications to Dynamic SNARKs | Christodoulos Pappas, Pariya Akhiani, Yupeng Zhang and Dimitrios Papadopoulos

• A Black-Box Compiler From Static to Dynamic SNARKs | Anubhav Baweja and Charalampos Papamanthou

• Post-Quantum Sublinear Lookup Arguments From Polynomial Preprocessing | Adarsh Basumata, Chaya Ganesh, Varun Narayanan, Sikhar Patranabis, Surbhi Shaw and Nitin Singh

• It Takes Two: Proofs of Work for Fiat–Shamir | Benedikt Bünz, Jessica Chen and Ziyi Guan

• Time-Space Tradeoffs for Probabilistic Proofs | Alessandro Chiesa, Ziyi Guan, Omer Paneth and Nicholas Spooner

• Succinct Arguments With (Almost) Minimal Time and Space Overheads From Symmetric-Key Primitives | Alexander R. Block, Caleb Geren and Pratik Soni

• On the Subtleties of Non-Malleability In IVC: Notions, Attacks and Constructions From Falsifiable Assumptions | Matteo Campanelli, Suvradip Chakraborty and Chaya Ganesh

• Threshold BARGs With Statistical Soundness: Weighted Threshold Encryption Without Obfuscation | Shafik Nassar, Brent Waters and David J. Wu

• StOMR: Stateful Oblivious Message Retrieval | Charles Gouert, Keewoo Lee, Dimitris Mouris, Yiannis Tselekounis and Jean-Luc Watson

• The Post-Quantum Cost of Garbled-Circuit Bitcoin Bridges | Mukesh Tiwari and Aaron Feickert

• Nobody Will Read the Lean: A Case for High-Level Cryptographic Languages | Nadim Kobeissi

• Worst-Case Hardness for Succinct and Decomposed Learning With Errors | Damiano Abram, Gal Arnon, Valerio Cini, Paul Lou, Giulio Malavolta and Lawrence Roy

• A Subexponential Time Algorithm for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm | Axel Pappalardo, Dahmun Goudarzi, Victor Hertz, Hugo Jacinto, Larissa Kroell, André Schrottenloher, Peter Shanahan, Élie Gouzien, Rémi de La Vieuville and Vivien Londe

• The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False | Samuel Schlesinger and Anton Kovsharov

Articles/Threads

• The 2026 ZK Industry Report | Succinct & ZK Podcast

• How Hard Have We Looked? | Matthew Green

• We Had It All In 1992 | Guru Vamsi Policharla, Commonware

• We Found the Origins of the NIST ECDSA Curve Seeds | Anthropic Frontier Red Team

• Zero Knowledge Podcast Blog: When the Natural-Language Paper and the Lean Proof Disagree

• What Mathematicians Should Know About the Lean Theorem Prover: Reliability and AI | Thomas Hales (on Terence Tao’s blog)

• Thread from @SuccinctJT: Reflections on the lattice vs. hash-only debate

• Thread from @Drakeof Justin: Call to begin calmly planning for “bunker mode”

• Thread from @Zac_Aztec: Response to Justin’s post

• Thread for @Wyatt_Benno:

• Introducing zkAPI: Private Usage Credits for Any API | Ethereum Foundation

• Exposing an ISA for Post-Quantum Proofs on Ethereum | Ethereum Research

• ethlambda at the Cambridge Workshops: PQ Signatures, Fast Finality, and Formal Verification | LambdaClass

• It’s Time to Talk About TEEs | Alin Tomescu

• The API Is English: The Deterministic–Agentic Border Is Shifting | David Wong

• Can Bitcoin Respond to Zcash? | Ben Schiller, Privacy Dispatch

• How Miden Is Different and Why It Matters | Ben Schiller, Privacy Dispatch

Videos/Podcasts

• Exploring the Lasers That Power Quantum Computers | ZK Podcast

• From Nova to Magnetar: Three Years of Research with Srinath Setty | ZK Podcast

• zkGolf: AI, Clean and Optimising ZK Circuits with zkSecurity | ZK Podcast

• Zcash Is Surging. Is Privacy the Reason? and Can Financial Privacy and Regulatory Oversight Coexist? | The Privacy Podcast by Miden

Applications / initiatives

• HashSmash | Eigen Labs

• zk-BAN: An Efficient Anonymous Blocklisting System With Signature-Based Revocation | Kosei Akama, Yoshimichi Nakatsuka, Koichi Moriyama and Keisuke Uehara

• GeoQuizz | Gaylord/Miden

• Pick Up Boomers | Gaylord/Miden

• DAVINCI: A Decentralized Cryptographic Voting Protocol | Pau Escrich, Marta Bellés-Muñoz, Roger Baig and Jordi Piñana

• Circuit Breaker on Yukon: Prove an unconditional lower bound on gates for one explicit Boolean family in NP | Yukon

• Google’s MPC custody preview | Coindesk

Guides and Resources

• Turn Lean code into a shareable image | zkSecurity

• Notes On BulletProofs++ Range Proofs | Philipp Jovanovic and Arnab Roy

• Measuring Cryptanalytic Effort against the assumptions behind standardized public-key encryption | An AI-conducted analysis, overseen by Matthew Green

Tools/Implementations

• Optimizing the Monad Client for zkVM Execution | Category Labs × ZisK

• Longfellow ZK Internet-Draft (draft-irtf-cfrg-longfellow-00) | Google

• commonware-simd: Many Too Many | Lucas Meier, Commonware

• Zippel: A Language, Compiler, Runtime, and Analyzer for ZK Proof Systems | Sebastian Angel, Sydnie-Shea Cohen, Eleftherios Ioannidis, Pratyush Mishra, Alex Ozdemir, Yuxiang Qiu and Alireza Shirzad

• Polyring | MIST.cash

• Proof of One: One-Person-One-Identity Polling With Encrypted Ballots | Ethereum Research

• CertiPlonk | Nethermind

Vulnerabilities

• Ledger Response to the Hardware Implant Attack | Ledger

• Binance’s Hack Disclosure / X | Binance

• A pair of actively-exploited PHP RCEs prompted emergency releases across all supported PHP versions

• SP1 Native Rust Verifier Soundness Advisory | Succinct

• CVE-2026-72711 and CVE-2026-72844 | Lean 4

• Note On Extractability of PST Polynomial Commitment Scheme | Janno Siim and Pritam Pal

• Checking the Checkers: Auditing the Ironwood Formal Verification | Mathias Hall-Andersen, zkSecurity

• Threshold ML-DSA key recovery | Conor Deegan, Project Eleven

Project Updates

• Post-Quantum Aztec | Aztec

• Noir 1.0 Is Live | Aztec

• Anthropic Acquihires Opaque Systems for Confidential AI | Anthropic

• Pico 3.0: Real-Time Ethereum Proving On 4 GPUs With 100-Bit Provable Security | Brevis

• Introducing Arca: Turn Wasted Vibes Into Income | Brevis

• Announcing cBTC Earn Vault: First Trust-Minimized BTC Vault | Citrea

• Glamsterdam Hoodi Testnet Announcement | Ethereum Foundation

• Glamsterdam On Hoodi Postponed | Ethereum Foundation

• Proof-Based General-Purpose Computing With Magnetar | Microsoft Research

• Practical Privacy Goes Live: Miden Partner Mainnet Opens | Miden

• StarkWare: 99.95% of Voting Power Supports Exploring a Post-Quantum L1 | Starknet

• Project Eleven Launches Strongpoint With Zcash Foundation | Project Eleven

• Introducing Airbender Prime | ZKsync

• NU7 Timeline | Zcash

• Zebra 7.0.0 | Zcash

• Zodl Vault macOS Beta Waitlist | Zodl

• World ID for banking and finance: AI-safe proof of human | World

Events/Hackathons

• Devcon 8 Side Events calendar | Mumbai. Nov 1 - 7

• Devcon 8 | Mumbai. Nov 3 - 6

• bitcoin++ privacy edition | Seoul. Nov 5 - 6

• TCC 2026 | New York City. Nov 10 - 13

• Asiacrypt 2026 | Hong Kong. Dec 7 - 11

• WPPT: Workshop on Privacy‑Preserving Technologies 2026 | Hong Kong. Dec 7

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!

As a ZK Mesh + paid subscribers, you get access to it first!

Inside, we cover:

• How ZK proving stopped being a bottleneck in blockchain: rea…

Read more

Research

• Akita: A High-Performance Lattice-Based Polynomial Commitment Scheme | Quang Dao, Omid Bodaghi, Amirhossein Khajehpour, Giuseppe Vitto, Mohammadtaghi Badakhshan, Markos Georghiades, Fengrun Liu, Jiapeng Zhang and Justin Thaler

• Maltese: Succinct Polynomial Commitment From Lattices | Katarina Cheng, Wilson Nguyen and Nirvan Tyagi

• LaBinius – Fast Lattice-Based Binary Polynomial Commitment Scheme | Michał Osadnik and Gregor Seiler

• BitZ: Proofs and Commitments In Arbitrary Rings Through Binary Fields | Remco Bloemen, Albert Garreta, Marcin Kostrzewa, Shreyas Londhe and John Wu

• Couplet: Multivariate Polynomial Commitments With Two-Group-Element Openings | Weijie Wang, Alin Tomescu, Rex Fernando and Charalampos Papamanthou

• Reed-Solomon Codes Beyond Johnson: Efficient Decoding and Smaller Cryptographic Proofs | Quang Dao, Scott Duke Kominers and Justin Thaler

• Algorithmic List Decoding of Reed–Solomon Codes up to Capacity in the Low-Rate Regime | Joshua Brakensiek, Yeyuan Chen, Aaron (Louie) Putterman, Zihan Zhang and Kai Zhe Zheng

• Linear List Size Bounds for Reed-Solomon Beyond the Johnson Radius | Ariel Gabizon

• The One-and-a-Half Johnson Bound Is Tight for Proximity Gaps of General Linear Codes | Scott Duke Kominers, Justin Thaler and Kai Zhe Zheng

• Zero-Knowledge PCPs of Quasilinear Size Via Locally Simulatable Sheaf Codes | Hadas Zeilberger, Jack O’Connor, Tom Gur and Nicholas Spooner

• Incrementally Verifiable Computation Without Extraction | Abhishek Jain, Surya Mathialagan and Brent Waters

• The Cost of Rewinding for Succinct Arguments: Strict-Time Barriers and Expected-Time Security | Alessandro Chiesa, Ziyi Guan, William Wang and Yuetian Wu

• How to Instantiate Fiat-Shamir Provably and Practically? | Riddhi Ghosal, Aniket Kate, Pratyay Mukherjee, Pratik Sarkar and Rohit Sinha

• A Fiat-Shamir Transformation for Private-Coin Protocols | Shany Ben-David, Eylon Yogev and Agni Datta

• How to Prove More False Statements: Fiat–Shamir Limitations On (generated) R1CS | Giacomo Fenzi

• Lattice-Based Synchronous Signatures: Efficiently Aggregatable and Thresholdizable | Dan Boneh, Binyi Chen and Trisha Datta

• PRAWNS: Threshold Hash-Based Signatures From Threshold PRFs | Dan Boneh, Benedikt Bünz, Justin D., Yavor Litchev and Kamilla Nazirkhanova

• PQMZ: Formally Verified Falcon-PKR for Post-Quantum Cryptographic Migration in Zcash | Hannes Hacker, Shekoufeh Neisarian, Sara Zain and Elif Bilge Kavun

• Argo: Leaking a Secret From an Invalid Groth16 Proof | Liam Eagen and Ying Tong Lai

• Shielded Bitcoin: Private Transfers on the Bitcoin L1 | Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov and Aleksei Moskvin

• Provenance Proofs: Linkable Zero-Knowledge Derivation Relations for Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets | Vincenzo Botta, Michal Pospieszalski, Emanuele Ragnoli and Justus Ranvier

• Rethinking Zero-Knowledge TLS: Proof of Protocol Execution and the Reclaim Protocol | Andrey Bozhko and Kirill Kutsenok

• Private and Verifiable Outsourcing of Open-Weight LLM Inference | Kanav Gupta, Jonathan Katz and Ian Miers

• SAK: Sparse Arguments of Knowledge, From Sparse Lookup Arguments | Abhiram Kothapalli, Sriram Sridhar and Arantxa Zapico

• Rogue: Updatable Matrix Lookup Arguments and Applications to Verifiable Databases | Christodoulos Pappas, Zhuo Cai and Dimitrios Papadopoulos

• Dynasaurs: Efficient Universal Dynamic zkSNARKs From Sparse Linear Arguments | Martí Batista, Álvaro Montes, Nikitas Paslis and Carla Ràfols

• Sunshine Systems: Enabling Privacy-Preserving Compliance With Freedom of Information Laws | Aarushi Goel, Gabriel Kaptchuk and Yuange Li

Articles/Threads

• Better Codes – and How They Can Be Worse If You’re Not Careful | zkSecurity

• Out of Sight, Out of State | Commonware

• Why Is On-chain Privacy so Effing Hard? | Lauri Peltonen

• Entering the Era of Lattice SNARKs – With a Faster, Post-Quantum Jolt | a16z crypto

• Privacy Dispatch: Permissionless Financial Integrity | Ben Schiller

• From a Hidden Quantum Circuit to Open Autoresearch: The ECDSA.fail Story | Eigen Labs

• Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI: September 2026 | Anthropic

• FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses | Krebs on Security

• FROST-GKR: A Global Trace Protocol for Batched Poseidon2b | parano1d

• Thread: Privacy Adversaries ranking shipped | L2Beat

Videos/Podcasts

• The Evolution from ZKP2P to Peer with Richard Liang | ZK Podcast

• Ron Rothblum on Fiat-Shamir Attacks, Flock and SNARK.fast | ZK Podcast

• Auto Research on Yukon with Soubhik Deb | ZK Podcast

• JP Aumasson on Quantum Risk, AI Attacks and Too Much Crypto | ZK Podcast

• How Watermarks Track AI Generated Content | Computerphile

• zkML: AI’s Next Layer is Cryptographic | Archetype

Applications / initiatives

• ZK-JPEG: Zero-knowledge Image Editing and Compression | Samuel Dittmer, Steve Lu, Kimberlee Model and Joseph Near

• ProveKit

• Garfield-Naruto Encoder | Community Privacy Residency

• sig.golf — Shrink the baseline. Prove every cycle | EF & Yukon

• runflame.org - FlameVM built on burning Bitcoin | Oleganza

Guides and Resources

• The Agentic Researcher: A Practical Guide to AI-Assisted Research in Mathematics and Machine Learning | Max Zimmer, Nico Pelleriti, Christophe Roux and Sebastian Pokutta

• SoK: Zero-Knowledge Friendly Hash Functions Over Prime Fields | Clémence Bouvier, Lorenzo Grassi, Katharina Koschatko, Christian Rechberger, Fabian Schmid, Matthias Johann Steiner, Zhuo Wu and Hailun Yan

• ZK Roadmap: A structured curriculum map for learning Zero-Knowledge Proofs | SrishtiCode

• OWF Transformation Lab | cpeikert

Tools/Implementations

• Jacobian Diagnostics for Under-Constrained Zero-Knowledge Circuits | Vijay Singh

• Jolt-QED: Formally Verifying Bytecode Expansions In Lean | Ari Biswas, Quang Dao, Daniel Ross and Justin Thaler

• Boolean-kernel basis: native evaluation-form FRI folding, a multilinear PCS, post-quantum security, Lean 4 formalisation | qoosmo/kbfold

• Clean | zkSecurity

Vulnerabilities

• Chinese NGCC Algorithms: The First Week of AI Cryptanalysis | Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen— see also JP Aumasson’s Cryptographic Mass Murder

• A Better Bivariate Resultant Attack On Round-Reduced Poseidon | Antoine Bak and Maël Hostettler

• Mind Small Integers In MDS Matrix: Collision Attacks On Round-Reduced Reinforced Concrete | Jiamin Cui, Fukang Liu, Jianqiang Ni and Willi Meier

• Nothing Up My Matrix: Kleptographic Backdoors In ZK-friendly Hash Functions | Hyunsik Jeong, Malte Sander Leip and Mincheol Son

• A Deadlock Hidden in Plonky3’s Zero-Knowledge Mode — and the fix

• A “Proof” of Fermat’s Last Theorem That Fits the Margin | Marc Ilunga, Trail of Bits

• Poisoned Sync: Finding Bugs That Stalled Zcash Nodes (Zcash Part 1) | Zellic

• Sunspot Security Audit Case Study | HashCloak

Project Updates

• zk.money is back | Aztec

• Thread: Introducing Flame | Oleganza

• EF Protocol: Current and Emerging Priorities | Ethereum Foundation

• Merces Is Live · Mercle’s Face Matching · Boop’s Private Palm Matching | TACEO

• Bread Wallet: Privacy Baked In on Miden & Miden Testnet v0.16: Last Stop Before Mainnet | Miden

• SP1 Integrates NVIDIA cuPQC to Optimize Proving With NVIDIA Accelerated Computing | Succinct

• Thread: Project Eleven has acquired Riva Labs | Alex Pruden

• Zones: Private Blockchains Anchored to Tempo | Tempo

• Citrea Acquires Crest to Bring Zcash-Style Privacy to Bitcoin | Citrea

• Brevis at ECDSA.fail: A Hundred Agents, One Quantum Circuit, an 86% Cut | Brevis

Events/Hackathons

• bitcoin++ payments edition | Berlin. Oct 1 - 3

• Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress | Mumbai. Nov 2

• Devcon 8 | Mumbai. Nov 3 - 6

• bitcoin++ privacy edition | Seoul. Nov 5 - 6

• TCC 2026 | New York City. Nov 10 - 13

• Asiacrypt 2026 | Hong Kong. Dec 7 - 11

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!

Research

• Zk-Cinema: Proving Video Provenance In Zero Knowledge | Alexander Frolov, Jianfeng Guo, Xinyi Zhao, Trisha Datta, Dan Boneh and Ian Miers

• Verifiable Compression of Images | Yue Zhang, Mingxun Zhou and Benedikt Bünz

• OpenLLM: Modular and Scalable zkSNARKs for Verifiable LLM Inference | Yunbo Yang, Yupeng Ren, Changtong Xu, Rui Zhang, Xuanming Liu, Jin Tan, Tao Wei, Bingsheng Zhang and Kui Ren

• Not to Break, but to Attest: Adversarial Probes for Privacy-Preserving LLM Verification | Cameron Wilding, Mina Shaker and Fatemeh Ganji

• From Lattices to Tensor Cores: Accelerating Private Information Retrieval | Sidaarth Sabhnani and David J. Wu

• A Polynomial-Time Quantum Algorithm for the Dihedral Coset Problem | Daniel R. Simon (see also the refutation by Gupte, Ragavan and Zhandry)

• Quasipolynomial Cryptanalysis of the McEliece Cryptosystem (or: PIR Meets McEliece) | Ashrujit Ghoshal, Yuval Ishai, Aayush Jain and Nuozhou Sun

• Cofactor-torsion Attacks On Hinted Scalar Multiplications In SNARK Circuits | Youssef El Housni

• AI Grinding for Fun and Cryptanalysis | Lukasz Olejnik and Bartosz Naskrecki

• EA Codes Approaching Singleton Bound (with Application to Field-Agnostic SNARKs) | Chongrong Li, Runtian Xu, Yun Li, Yu Yu and Yuncong Hu

• Limber: Low Overhead SNARKs for Integers From Any PCS | Jessica Chen, Lucas Xia, Wilson Nguyen and Benedikt Bünz

• Non-Malleable Reductions of Knowledge | Antonio Faonio and Lili Tong

• Threshold Lattice-Based Zero-Knowledge Proofs | Scott Griffy, Victor Youdom Kemmoe, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen and Tjerand Silde

• On Removing Interaction From Quantum Proofs | Nicholas Spooner and Max Tromanhauser

• Transient Quantum Resistance, With Application to Ethereum Consensus | Pranay Anchuri, Matteo Campanelli and Rosario Gennaro

• Comparing Privacy-Preserving Revocation for the EUDI Wallet | Andrea Flamini, Anja Lehmann, Giada Sciarretta, Mario Scuro, Nicola Smaniotto, Alessandro Tomasi and Silvio Ranise

• Aegon: Self-Auditable Key Transparency | Hossein Hafezi, Alireza Shirzad, Benedikt Bünz, Kevin Lewi, Dillon George and Joseph Bonneau

• Practical Silent Threshold Signatures and Silent Threshold Encryption for Dynamic Committees | Yifei He, Zheng Zhou, Yu Chen, Zhi Guan and Zhong Chen

• Efficient Transaction Traceability for Auditable Privacy-Preserving Ledgers | Elli Androulaki, Angelo De Caro, Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, Rebekah Mercer and Elina van Kempen

Articles/Threads

• Optimizing Cryptography with AI | Kobi Gurkan, zkSecurity

• Variants of KZG Part III: Zeromorph, Part IV: Gemini and Part V: Mercury | Varun Thakore, zkSecurity

• Zero-Knowledge Proofs Aren’t Age Verification Silver Bullets | EFF

• Obfuscation (Part III): Local Mixing | Vitalik.eth

• What Surveys Tell Us About Privacy | Ben Schiller, Privacy Dispatch

• Thread: Introducing an interpolation attack on 28 out of 31 rounds of Poseidon | 3mi Labs

• Thread: Criticizing “interpolation attack on 28 out of 31 rounds of Poseidon” | Antonio Sanso

• Thread: Review or all (algebraic) attack vectors & how recent progress affects the security of Poseidon | Àlex Rodríguez García

• Thread: Poseidon2b is secure! | ignotusnemo, Ethereum Research

• Raising Machine-checked Security Benchmarks to Advance Hash-based SNARKs Through Agentic Collaboration | Ethereum Foundation

• Who Can See Your Book? Evaluating Onchain Privacy Models | TACEO

• Zcash Private Transactions Could Go From Three-Second Waits to Under 200 Milliseconds | CoinDesk

• The Real Threat of Quantum to Cryptography | Kimberly Underwood, SIGNAL Media

• Neighborhood Watch: Privacy Risks in Seeded Local Combination Synthetic Data | Hadrien Lautraite, Tristan Allard, Anne-Sophie Charest, Jean-François Rajotte and Sébastien Gambs

Videos/Podcasts

• SBC’26 Talk Recordings | Science of Blockchain Conference

• Ethproofs call #10 | binary fields | Ethereum

• Zero-Knowledge III (Eurocrypt 2026) | IACR

• World-leaders in Cryptography: Ralph Merkle | Bill Buchanan OBE

• How Do You Prove a Computer Isn’t Lying? | Purple Mind

• Hacking State 38 - Logan Allen: Zorp, Nockchain, and A Market For Zero Knowledge Proofs | Hacking State

Applications / initiatives

• How Google Is Making Private AI Practical With Homomorphic Encryption | Google

• Better Codes Challenge | Ethereum Foundation

• Flock Challenge | SNARK.fast

Guides and Resources

• The ZK Chronicles: Exotic Domains | Arkana

• A Quick Look at Zero-Knowledge Proofs | Max Bernstein

• How to Run Guardian on Miden: A Production Setup Guide | OpenZeppelin

• The Ironwood Book | Zcash Protocol Developers

Tools/Implementations

• zk-genomics | Alexander Frolov

Vulnerabilities

• Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576 | Leonardo de Moura, Lean

• Signal’s Contact Discovery Bug | V12

• GPT 5.6-Cyber Escapes an Agent-Sandboxing VM Three Times | Trail of Bits

• Poseidon cryptanalysis:

  • Slipway: Accessing Finite Subspace Trails in Poseidon | Giuseppe Vitto

  • From Round Skipping to S-Box Skipping: Attacking Poseidon’s Partial Layer Via Subspace Restriction | Amit Singh Bhati, Sundas Tariq and Tomer Ashur

  • Beyond Linear Subspace Trails: Nonlinear Subspaces for Gröbner Basis Attacks On Poseidon/Poseidon2 and Neptune | Enyan Li, Fukang Liu and Gaoli Wang

  • Midpoint Reset: A Full-Round Poseidon Collision From an Adaptively Chosen MDS Matrix | Sunghyeon Jo

• Stolen Thoughts: Proprietary Reasoning Can Be Recovered From Its Encrypted Traces | Alexander Panfilov, David Schmotz, Ilia Shumailov, Luca Beurer-Kellner, Joachim Schaeffer, Ameya Prabhu, Jonas Geiping and Maksym Andriushchenko

• How to Steal Reasoning Without Reasoning Traces | jxmnop

• Critical Vulnerability in the Alpha V5 Proving System | Aztec Network

Project Updates

• ZKPassport Goes Live on the TACEO Network | TACEO

• Goodbye, Poseidon! | Justin Drake

• How HashCloak Helped Secure Privacy Cash | HashCloak

• First Double-Blind Evaluation of a Proprietary Language Model | AVERI

• Offering Zero Data Retention for Frontier Models | OpenAI

• Succinct and Offchain Labs Bring ZK Settlement to Arbitrum | Succinct

• Ethereum Strawmap Update | Vitalik Buterin — strawmap.org

• Announcing the PriFi Stack: Private Finance Infrastructure on Miden | Miden

Events

• Common S3nse | Amsterdam, Netherlands. Sept 4

• Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress | Mumbai, India. Nov 2

• Devcon 8 | Mumbai, India. Nov 3-6

• TCC 2026 | New York City, USA. Nov 10-13

• Asiacrypt 2026 | Hong Kong, China. Dec 7-11

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!

This week, we have a special podcast clip that we are sharing with zkMesh+ paid subscribers first. This segment is a continuation of episode 408 of the Zero Knowledge Podcast featuring Patrick O’Grady, founder of Commonware.

In this bonus segment, Guillermo asks Patrick how Commonware keeps its abstractions clean while leaning heavily on AI-assiste…

Read more

Research

• Catching Many Traitors In Threshold Traitor Tracing: Lower Bounds and Constructions | Dan Boneh, Aditi Partap and Mark Zhandry

• How to Define Expected Quantum Polynomial-Time Zero Knowledge Simulation | Zhengnan Lai, Nicholas Spooner and Max Tromanhauser

• ZKPoSP: Post-Quantum Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets | Vincenzo Botta, Michal Pospieszalski, Emanuele Ragnoli and Justus Ranvier

• Bob DyLean: A Framework for the Symbolic Analysis of Cryptographic Protocols in Lean | Théophile Wallez and Cas Cremers

• 88-XOR Implementation of the AES MixColumns Matrix | Jérémy Jean

• 3PaaS: Privacy-Preserving Post-Compromise Security As a Service | Cas Cremers, Abhinav Nakarmi, Aleksi Peltonen and Eyal Ronen

• On the Formal Verification of Polynomial Commitments: Two KZG Constructions and the Algebraic Group Model | Tobias Rothmann

• Formalizing Privacy of Anonymous Credentials: A Provably Secure Framework With Predicate Proofs | Yu Zhang, Zongbin Wang and Jian Hou

• The Small-Field Turn In Succinct Proofs: A Systematization of Finite-Field Choice In Modern SNARKs and STARKs | Christos Skatharoudis

• TIM: A Sensitive-Parameter-Privacy Blind Watermarking Based On Zero-Knowledge Proof | Haoran Si, Xi Lin and Huiyan Chen

• Chimera: A Hybrid GPU Backend for Sumcheck Acceleration In Zero Knowledge Provers | Kashfia Farheen and Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos

• ZK-Audit: Proving Power Side-Channel Resilience In Synthesized Hardware | Sakib Anwar Rieyan and Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos

• FiltrumVote: Scalable, Verifiable, and Coercion-Resistant Internet Voting | Leonardo Kimura, Dimitri Leskow, Diego F. Aranha, Roberto Araújo and Marcos Simplicio

• TRAPGC-DV: Trapdoor Garbled Circuit Designated Verification of Groth16 On Bitcoin | Ariel Futoransky, Fadi Barbàra, Ramses Fernandez, Gabriel Larotonda and Sergio Demian Lerner

• RainHash2.0: Hardware- and Arithmetization-friendly Hash Function | Jiamin Cui, Lorenzo Grassi, Katharina Koschatko, Florian Krieger, Shibam Mukherjee, Christian Rechberger, Sujoy Sinha Roy, Markus Schofnegger and Verena Schröppel

• Celer: A Lookup Argument for Large-Scale Queries | Wenjie Qu, Yanpei Guo, Zhen Xuan, Xuanming Liu and Jiaheng Zhang

• SwitchFold: Code-Agnostic Succinct Polynomial Commitments Via Recursive Code Switching | Mingshu Cong, Tsz Hon Yuen and Siu-Ming Yiu

Articles/Threads

• LLMs won’t break symmetric crypto | JP Aumasson | bfSwA

• Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude | Anthropic

• AI Agents Are Pulling The Post-Quantum Deadline Forward | Forbes

• ZK/SEC Quarterly | zkSecurity

• Can you build the fastest circuit? Prove it. | zkSecurity

• ZK Client-Side Proving: Myth or Imminent Reality? | Amira Bouguera

• What is Distributed Key Generation (DKG)? | Stoffel Blog

• Obfuscation (Part II): Diamond iO | Vitalik.eth

• Two Questions That Decide Whether a Payment Is Private | TACEO Core

• Your Data Is Your Property: What a Supreme Court Concurrence Reveals About the Future of Digital Privacy | Aleo

Videos/Podcasts

• Private Information Retrieval (PIR) with Alex Hoover | ZKPodcast

• Alex Ozdemir on where Theorem Provers and ZK meet | ZKPodcast

• Sergey Gorbunov on TEEs and the Arc Privacy Sector | ZKPodcast

• Session 10 of Proof is in the Pudding: Groth16 | Archetype

• Protecting Privacy in the AI Age, Featuring Sudo | Privacy Podcast

Applications / initiatives

• I Built a Private Genomics Study with Stoffel MPC

• snark.fast

• zk.golf

• verifier.cash

• ZKPassport X LootSurvivor

Guides and Resources

• Groth16, Incrementally | mimoo

• Meet Stoffel through three builder tutorials | Stoffel

• Tutorial: Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean (Part 1) | HashCloak

• SoK: Hash-Based Polynomial Commitments and Low-Degree Tests: From FRI to Basefold, STIR, and WHIR | Christos Skatharoudis

Tools/Implementations

• Longfellow ZK | Google

• Stoffel Release 0.1.1 | Stoffel

Vulnerabilities

• Axiom Auditors found a soundness vulnerability in stwo-cairo | Axiom

Project Updates

• BLAKE3 live on zkGolf | zkSecurity

• Announcing snark.fast autoresearch competition | Succinct

• Distributed compute startup Boundless expands 4,000-GPU network from ZK to AI | The Block

• Announcing the Athena Consortium | Miden

• Formal Verification of Zcash Ironwood Completed | Tachyon

• Ironwood is live on Zcash | Zodl

• Google Wallet is helping improve users’ privacy by open sourcing Zero-Knowledge Proof libraries | Google

• 1 month in: Stoffel 0.1.0 Launch Retrospective | Stoffel

• (Re) Introducing Stoffel: Announcing Stoffel 0.1.0 | Stoffel

• USAD: A private stablecoin designed for real people | Aleo

• USDCx on Aleo: The first private, programmable stablecoin | Aleo

• How does Zorch evaluate constraints without an interpreter? | Zorch

• c8s is now public. Confidential Kubernetes. | Confidential AI

• Zero-knowledge cryptography is live on Cardano | Cardano

• Collaboration between Projecteleven and Jim Posen | Project 11

• Toward Decentralization, zkVM & Compute Markets | Nockchain

• Explaining Verona | Verona Dev

• Starknet privacy is entering Stage 2 | Starkware

• DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is now available on Venice, fully private | Venice

• Fhenix acquires Sunscreen | Fhenix

Events/Hackathons

• Common S3nse | Amsterdam, Netherlands. Sept 4

• Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress | Mumbai, November 2nd

• Devcon India | Mumbai, India. Q4 2026 ​​

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!

As announced on the Zero Knowledge Podcast, we have a special exclusive podcast clip to share with zkMesh+ paid subscribers. This segment is a continuation of episode 404 of the Zero Knowledge Podcast featuring Benedikt Bünz from Espresso Systems and NYU.

In this segment, Anna, Kobi, and Benedikt discuss whether AI poses a genuine threat to the fou…

Read more

Research

• Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations | Benedikt Bünz, Ron D. Rothblum and William Wang

• Top Gun: Degree Annihilation Attacks On Poseidon | Antonio Sanso and Giuseppe Vitto

• Resultants Meet Resultant: Improving CICO-1 and CICO-2 Attacks On ZK-Friendly Permutations | Antoine Bak, Augustin Bariant, Maël Hostettler and Vincent Neiger

• SIGMA-RS: A Modular Approach for Keyed-Verification Anonymous Credentials | Michele Orru, Lindsey Tulloch, Victor Snyder-Graf and Ian Goldberg

• Pushing the Boundaries of Group-based Aggregation With Zero-evading Generators of Low Additive Complexity | Ariel Gabizon and Dmitry Krachun

• ProtogaLattice: Constant-Round Lattice-based Folding for General Polynomial Relations | David Balbás, Anca Nitulescu and Maxime Plançon

• Grand Danois: Succinct Multilinear Polynomial Commitments over Lattices | Anders Kallesoe and Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh

• zQR: A Verifiable QR-Driven zkSNARK Proof Verification Framework for Mobile Platforms | Goshgar Can Ismayilov

• Verifiable Bootstrapping From Lattice-based Folding | Amit Deo and Louis Tremblay Thibault

• TruthTable: A Verifiable Query Engine | Bharath Namboothiry, Alireza Shirzad, Spencer Solit, Ryan Marcus and Pratyush Mishra

• Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Generalized Regular Expression Matching for Anonymized Email Verification | Shreyas Londhe, Aayush Gupta, Sora Suegami, Yogesh Shahi, Rute Figueiredo, Parisa Hassanizadeh and Shahriar Ebrahimi

• Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms | André Schrottenloher

• A Simple and Unified Approach for Proving Knowledge of Isogenies Between Abelian Varieties | Jonathan Komada Eriksen, Riccardo Invernizzi, Jannik Spiessens and Frederik Vercauteren

• Correlation Intractability for All Batched Relations | Damiano Abram, Giulio Malavolta and Lawrence Roy

• TensorZKP: Repurposing GPU Tensor Cores for High-Performance Zero-Knowledge Proofs | Tao Lu, Jipeng Zhang, Yanpei Guo, Xuanming Liu, Wenjie Qu, Zonghui Wang, Wenzhi Chen and Jiaheng Zhang

Articles/Threads

• Clean: From Verified Circuits to Verified zkVMs | zksecurity

• On hybrid signatures | Sophie Schmieg

• Binius64 is now, finally, zero-knowledge | Jimpo

• Building quantum canaries and tripwires with smart-contracts | Random Oracle

• What the Zcash Orchard Bug Reveals About Verifiable Supply | Blockstream

• The Devil’s Bargain - The hidden cost of privacy without credible neutrality | Zac Williamson

• Obfuscation: building the final boss of cryptography (Part I) | Vitalik.eth

• Cooperative UAV swarms for zero knowledge verification of edge generative AI using trust-aware multiagent learning | Nature

• Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks | The White House

• LeanIMT+: Efficient Merkle Tree for Membership and Non-Membership Proofs | Vivian Plasencia

• Two Fun Facts about ECDSA | Ian Miers

Videos/Podcasts

• Privacy Podcast, EP 7 Zero Knowledge: The Holy Grail of Privacy | Miden

• What’s up with Quantum Bitcoin | Blockspace

• Episode 403 - Building ZK-Powered AI Guardrails with Wyatt Benno | ZKPodcast

• Episode 404 - Pushing the Limits of Proof Systems with Benedikt Bünz | ZKPodcast

Guides and Resources

• Plonky3 merkle tree proof tutorial | HashCloak

• Chopped, Stored, Secured — The Story of the Hash Function | Math behind Security

Tools/Implementations

• Paid Private File: sell a file for shielded ZEC, delivered over Nym | Michae2xl

• Starkscan is here | Starknet

• Circle STARK over M31 *𝑓𝑙𝑦* in Plonky3 | Robin Salen

• zkao released | zksecurity

• https://github.com/Verified-zkEVM/clean | zksecurity

• Formally verified arguments of knowledge in Lean | Derek Sorensen

• Binius64 is now, finally, zero-knowledge | Jim Posen

• Chai: Agentic Discovery of Cryptographic Misuse Vulnerabilities | Corban Villa, Sohee Kim, Austin Chu, Alon Shakevsky, Raluca Ada Popa

• A Toolkit for Succinct Lattice-Based Zero Knowledge Proofs | Beatrice Biasioli, Madalina Bolboceanu, Vadim Lyubashevsky, Antonio Merino-Gallardo, Michał Osadnik, Gregor Seiler and Patrick Steuer

Vulnerabilities

• Exploit of Depreciated Aztec Connect - June 14

• Exploit affecting a deprecated Aztec payments - June 17

• Compromise of Taiko’s chain state verification mechanism

• InjectV: Modeling Fault Injection Attacks in RISC-V Simulation Environment

Project Updates

• AZUP-2 is Ready for Proposal | Aztec Network

• We Just Broke the Speed Record for SNARK Proving | Espresso

• An end-to-end post-quantum secure Starknet | Starknet

• Formal Verification of a Plonky2 Gate | Zellic

• Notice to Alpha V4 users | Aztec Network

• Ethlambda: Devnet 5 and Beyond | Lambda Class

• The EF’s New Structure | Ethereum Foundation

• Compliance Enforcement Comes to Merces With Predicate | TACEO

• PSE is winding down | PSE

• Algorand Post-Quantum Cryptography Roadmap | Algorand

• Orchard Vulnerability Successfully Remediated | Zcash

• Stoffel 0.1.0 | Stoffel

• Ironwood, a new shielded pool for Zcash | Ironwood

Events/Hackathons

• Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium | Calgary, Canada. July 20–25

• Common S3nse | Amsterdam, Netherlands. Sept 4

• Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress | Mumbai, November 2nd

• Devcon India | Mumbai, India. Q4 2026 ​​

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!

As announced on the Zero Knowledge Podcast, we have a special exclusive podcast clip to share with zkMesh+ paid subscribers. This segment is a continuation of episode 403 of the Zero Knowledge Podcast featuring Wyatt Benno from ICME Labs.

Continuing our conversation, Wyatt describes the world of “vericoding”—the next stage after the era of “vibecod…

Read more

Research

• Zinc+: SNARKs for Polynomial Rings | Alexander Abdugafarov, Albert Garreta, Amit Kumar, Michał Osadnik, Psi Vesely, Ilia Vlasov and Kai Zhe Zheng

• Extending FRIDA Beyond Unique Decoding for Free | Nicolas Mohnblatt and Benedikt Wagner

• Jevil: A Catastrophic-Failure-by-Design Signature Scheme | Nadim Kobeissi

• Merces: Confidential Token Transfers Via MPC and CoSNARKs | Daniel Escudero, Florian Lugstein, Christian Rechberger, Verena Schroppel and Roman Walch

• Field-Agnostic SNARKs With Small Proofs Via Encode-Repeat-Accumulate (ERA) Codes | Anubhav Baweja, Giacomo Fenzi, Pratyush Mishra and Tushar Mopuri

• Bolt: Faster SNARKs from Sketched Codes | Kobi Gurkan, Andrija Novakovic and Ron D. Rothblum

• Doubly Aggregatable Signatures | Georg Fuchsbauer, Pranav Garimidi, Joachim Neu, Guru-Vamsi Policharla, Max Resnick and Ertem Nusret Tas

• Scaling Intelligence: Verifiable Decision Forest Inference (ZKML via GKR) | Makis Arsenis, Ryan Cao, Nick Cosby, Vishruti Ganesh, Ende Shen, Daniel Shorr and Benjamin Wilson

• UnifOMR: Oblivious Message Retrieval With Near-optimal Concrete Efficiency | Ben Fisch, Zeyu Liu, Eran Tromer and Yunhao Wang

• How to Simulate Random Oracles With Auxiliary Input | Yevgeniy Dodis, Aayush Jain, Huijia Lin, Ji Luo and Daniel Wichs

• From NIZK Arguments to ZAPs, Generically | Anish Banerjee, Brent Waters and David J. Wu

• On Succinct Non-Interactive Secure Computation With Malicious Security | Maya Farber Brodsky, Arka Rai Choudhuri, Abhishek Jain, and Omer Paneth

• Titan: Efficient Polynomial Commitments From IOPs Over Groups | Chethan Kamath, Ravi Prakash, Samipa Samanta, Sruthi Sekar and Nitin Singh

• LogVOLE: Succinct and Efficient Chosen-Input VOLE for ZK and Beyond | Lucien K. L. Ng, Peter Rindal, Akash Shah

• Icy-DVRF: A Distributed Verifiable Random Function Based On FROST Signatures | Ahmet Ramazan Ağırtaş, Arda Buğra Özer, Zülfükar Saygı, Oğuz Yayla

• FRI Soundness Above the Johnson Bound Via Threshold Halving | Raullen Chai and Xinxin Fan

• Device Binding for Anonymous Credentials On Legacy Phones | Anja Lehmann and Alexandros Zacharakis

• PQKryvos: Post-Quantum Secure E-Voting With Flexible Ballot Formats and Public Traceability | Nicolas Huber, Pascal Reisert and Ralf Kuesters

Articles/Threads

• zkSummit Recap | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• Vega: Zero-knowledge proofs for digital identity in the age of AI | Microsoft Research

• All the Ways Lead to Rome — zkSummit + zkProof + Eurocrypt recap | LambdaClass

• What Litecoin’s Attack Would Have Done to Zcash | zkDragon

• Groth16, Intuitively | zksecurity

• A shallow dive into formal verification | Vitalik Buterin

• How Ethereum plans to replace BLS with Post-Quantum signatures | Hashcloack

• VEIL: Adding Zero-Knowledge to Hash-based Proof Systems | Succinct

• An update on the ZK readiness into the execution client | Nethermind

• Honey, I Shrunk the Proofs! | Commonware

• User Research: Uncovering Problems in the Private Transfers Space | PSE

• Anonymous Credentials for Trustless Agents (ACTA) | zulu0echo

• PACTs: Protecting Your Bitcoin From a Quantum Sunset | Paradigm

• This week in Privacy | Miden

Videos/Podcasts

• All zkSummit14 videos | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• The Quantum Question Panel | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• Episode 400 - Quantum Advances, Hybrid Signatures and SNARKs to the Rescue with Dan Boneh | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• Episode 401 - From Access Control to Encrypted Execution with Auryn Macmillan | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• ZK Proof 8 in Rome | ZKProof

• Which types of cryptography will be broken by quantum computers and which will not? | Eli Ben-Sasson

• Without Privacy, Crypto Doesn’t Survive | Privacy Podcast

Guides and Resources

• How to use Plonky3 to generate proofs for Merkle trees | Hashcloak

• A Decade of Lattice Cryptography | Chris Peikert

Tools/Implementations

• Hybrid PoA On Aztec: Proof of Asset Ownership Over Public and Private Balances Via ZK Proofs | Rio Kanehiro, Yohei Watanabe, Mitsugu Iwamoto

• ERC-8263: Onchain Proof Layer for AI Agents | VincentWu

• ERC-8262: Zero-Knowledge Compliance Oracle | DROO

• Wired the stacked sumcheck layout into the full WHIR polynomial commitment scheme in Plonky3 | Thomas Coratger

Vulnerabilities

• CVE-2026-40323: SP1 V6 Recursive Shard Verifier Soundness Vulnerability

• Court-ordered Circle freeze traps $12.6 million in Zama cUSDC contract amid Overnight Finance suit

Project Updates

• This week on Aztec | Aztec

• The Aztec Stack | Aztec

• Computing with Secret Shares - Introducing Beaver Triples | Stoffel

• Brevis Vera Is Now Live | Brevis

• Introducing Confidential Transactions to OP Succinct | Succinct

• Announcing Lineth: a production-grade ZK rollup stack joins Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust | Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust

• Zcash Foundation Q1 2026 Report | Zcash Foundation

• Zebra 4.5.0 Release | Zcash Foundation

• Zodl 3.4.0: Keystone Management | Zcash Foundation

• Introducing SpeakUp | PSE

• OpenAC: ZK Proof of Personhood Using Government Credentials | PSE

• Spartan-WHIR: Transparent Post-Quantum SNARK | PSE

• Merces: 6 Months in | TACEO

• The Privacy Gap in Agent Payments | TACEO

• o1js 2.15.0: The One with the Native Prover | o1labs

• Introducing Protokit: Privacy-Enabled Applications on Mina | o1labs

Events/Hackathons

• ETHConf | New York, USA. June 8-10

• Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium | Calgary, Canada. July 20–25

• Common S3nse | Amsterdam, Netherlands. September 4

• Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress | Mumbai, India. November 2

• Devcon India | Mumbai, India. Q4 2026 ​​

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!

Research

• VEIL: Lightweight Zero-Knowledge for Hash-Based Multilinear Proof Systems | Rahul Dalal, Tamir Hemo, Eugene Rabinovich and Ron Rothblum

• Proximity Signatures | Guillermo Angeris and Kobi Gurkan

• Open Problems In List Decoding and Correlated Agreement | Gal Arnon, Dan Boneh and Giacomo Fenzi

• ZK-VSA: Zero-Knowledge Verifiable Speaker Anonymization Leveraging Phase Vocoder with Time-Scale Modification | Shuang Liang, Yang Hua, Peishen Yan, Linshan Jiang, Tao Song, and Bin Yao

• The Sum-Check Protocol Over the Monomial Basis, and Other Optimizations | Quang Dao, Ari Biswas, Liam Eagen, Andrew Milson, Shahar Papini and Justin Thaler

• Efficient Batch Threshold Encryption Using Partial Fraction Techniques | Dan Boneh, Rohit Nema, Arnab Roy and Ertem Nusret Tas

• HyperVerITAS: Verifying Image Transformations at Scale On Boolean Hypercubes | Garrett Greiner, Toshi Mowery and Pratik Soni

• VeriRAG: Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Verifiable Retrieval-Augmented Generation | Chenqi Lin, Yubo Cui, Zhelei Zhou, Cheng Hong, Yufei Wang, Zhaohui Chen and Meng Li

• PlasmaBlind: A Private Layer 2 With Instant Client-Side Proving | Pierre Daix-Moreux and Chengru Zhang

• Verifiable Divide-and-Conquer | Omer Paneth and Rafael Pass

• PipeSC: A Resource-efficient and Pipelined Hardware Accelerator for Sumcheck Protocol | Kaixuan Wang, Yifan Yanggong, Xiaoyu Yang, Chenti Baixiao and Lei Wang

• Secure MSM Outsourcing Computation for Zero-knowledge Proof Generation | Wujie Xiong, Arefeh Rahaei, Sangwon Shin, Xinxin Fan, Taeweon Suh, Veronika Kuchta, Sica Francesco, Weidong Shi and Lei Xu

• Failure of Proximity Gaps Close to Capacity | Dmitry Krachun, Stepan Kazanin and Ulrich Habök

• zkRAG: Efficiently Proving RAG Retrieval In Zero Knowledge | Yanze Jiang, Xinyang Yang, Xuanming Liu, Yanpei Guo and Jiaheng Zhang

• Zero-Knowledge Proof of Progress: Secure Multi-Phase CTF Competitions | Salam Khanji, Behzad Abdolmaleki, John Clark and Aryan Pasikhani

• Code-based Scalable Collaborative SNARKs | Christodoulos Pappas, Dimitrios Papadopoulos and Charalampos Papamanthou

• ACTS: Attestations of Contents In TLS Sessions | Pierpaolo Della Monica, Ivan Visconti, Andrea Vitaletti and Marco Zecchini

• Secret-Carrying Puzzles and Garbled Circuits Optimized for Zero-knowledge Proofs | Debasish Ray Chawdhuri and Manoj Prabhakaran

Articles/Threads

• Sum-Check as an Algebraic Tensor Reduction: Part I | ZK Security

• ZK on Bitcoin — Proof is in the Pudding #9 | ZK Security

• Frame Transactions and the Three Gates to Privacy | Nero_eth

• Insights for Shielded CSV from Tachyon | Gus Gutoski

• Verifiability in the Coordination Trilemma | The Interfold

• Scott Aaronson: On the Google Quantum Computing Paper | Scott Aaronson

• We beat Google’s zero-knowledge proof of quantum cryptanalysis | Trail of Bits

• A Mathematical Introduction to Lattice Cryptography: The Quantum Security Solution | CalBlockchain

• ERC: FHE Computation Verification Standard — Trustless verification of encrypted computation via recursive ZK proofs | Valisthea

• Understanding the Ultrahonk Verifier | HashCloak

Videos/Podcasts

• Proof is in the Pudding #9 — ZK on Bitcoin (with Archetype) | zksecurityXYZ

• Verifiable Databases with Shyam & Emanuele from Provably | ZK Podcast

• Is ZK dead? Or has it just begun? with the ZK Pod co-hosts | ZK Podcast

• Dev Ojha on the Osmosis Story and his Return to Privacy | ZK Podcast

• Fireside Chat with Jordi on EEZ I Jordi Baylina & Kartik Talwar | EthGlobal

• How to Build Private Smart Contracts on Aztec for Solidity Developers | Aztec

• Guardian Live: Present & Future Use Cases | Miden

Guides and Resources

• The Inverse Number Theoretic Transform | RareSkills

• A tutorial on building a merkle tree AIR script in Plonky3 | HashCloak

• The Grand Comparison: Every ZKP System, Every Dimension — ZKP Systems Series | Ümit Aygül

• Protocol Study Series: 12-session guided reading of the Zcash Protocol Specification | Mark H

Tools/Implementations

• Dropping a new testnet for post-quantum signatures — Falcon + ephemeral PQ scheme | asanso

• Introducing Spawned: Erlang-Style Actors for Rust | Lambda Class

• Building an open-source Zcash hardware wallet SDK for constrained embedded systems | ZecVault

• ZecVault: goal-based savings wallet on Zcash shielded transactions | Gorusys

• zk-autoresearch — autonomous LLM agent optimizing a production ZK prover | Barnadrot

• EU ZK ID project picked Noir | eu-digital-identity-wallet

• UltrafastSecp256k1: a multi-backend secp256k1 execution engine for wallets, ZK, and high-throughput Ethereum tooling | Vano Chkheidze

Vulnerabilities

• Zebra 4.3.1: Critical Security Fixes, Dockerized Mining and CI Hardening | Zcash Foundation

• Critical soundness bug from Jolt zkVM | Minsun Kim

• Proximity Gaps Conjecture Fails Near Capacity over Prime Fields | Antonio Kambiré

• Soundness Failures in LaBRADOR Implementations from NTT -Friendly Rings | zkSecurity

• New Circom Bugs | Stefanos Chaliasos

Project Updates

• All blockchains should have a clear path toward post-quantum security | Starknet

• People don’t understand the sheer volume of what is shipping in Zcash 2026 | Zcash

• Zcash roadmap to becoming Post-Quantum | Zcash

• Introducing Guardian: The Missing Piece for Institutional Privacy | Miden

• Private State Management on Miden | OpenZeppelin

• SP1 Verifier: WASM-compatible PLONK & GROTH16 verification | Succinct

• Zcam: an iPhone camera app to Prove What’s Real | Succinct

• Google Uses SP1 to Prove Quantum Security Threat | Succinct

• Post-Quantum Citrea | Citrea

• Finality In Leanconsensus: How Ethlambda Implements 3SF-mini | Lambda Class

• Audit of Aptos Confidential Assets | Aptos & zkSecurity

• Just write ‘if’: Why Payy left Halo2 for Noir | Aztec / Payy

Events/Hackathons

• zkSummit14 | Rome, Italy — May 7

• Zcash Dev Summit | Rome, Italy — May 8

• Zkproof 8 | Rome, Italy — May 9 - 10

• ETHDam | Amsterdam, Netherlands — May 9 - 10

• Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium | Calgary, Canada — July 20 - 25

• Common S3nse | Amsterdam, Netherlands — Sept 4

• Devcon India | Mumbai, India — Q4 2026 ​​

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!

** zkSummit14 will take place on 7 May 2026 in Rome. Submit your application to attend here!

Research

• Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations | Ryan Babbush, Adam Zalcman, Craig Gidney, Michael Broughton, Tanuj Khattar, Hartmut Neven, Thiago Bergamaschi, Justin Drake, Dan Boneh

• Interactive Proofs for Batch Polynomial Evaluation | Gal Arnon, Alessandro Chiesa, Giacomo Fenzi and Eylon Yogev

• Icefish: Practical zk-SNARKs for Verifiable Genomics | Alexander Frolov, Maurice Shih, Rob Patro and Ian Miers

• SoK: Understanding zkVM: From Research to Practice | Yunbo Yang, Yuejia Cheng, Haibo Tang, Guomin Yang, Bingsheng Zhang and Kui Ren

• Optimizing FROST for Message Capacity | Philipp Jovanovic, Ben Riva and Arnab Roy

• A Universal Blinder: One-round Blind Signatures From FHE | Dan Boneh and Jaehyung Kim

• Lattice HD Wallets: Post-Quantum BIP32 Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets from Lattice Assumptions | Conor Deegan, James Fitzwater, Kamil Doruk Gur, David Nugent

• Binohash: Transaction Introspection Without Softforks | Robin Linus

• S-two Whitepaper | Dan Carmon, Lior Goldberg, Ulrich Haböck, Leonardo Lerer and Ilya Lesokhin

• On the Security of Constraint-Friendly Map-to-Curve Relations | Youssef El Housni and Benedikt Bünz

• Speeding Up Sum-Check Proving (Extended Version) | Quang Dao, Zachary DeStefano, Suyash Bagad, Yuval Domb and Justin Thaler

• The Art of Linearization: From a KZG’s Trick to a General Commitment Framework | Janno Siim

• RoKoko: Lattice-based Succinct Arguments, a Committed Refinement | Michael Klooss, Russell W. F. Lai, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen, Michał Osadnik and Lorenzo Tucci

• Proof-Carrying Data Via Holography Accumulation | Nikitas Paslis, Carla Ràfols and Alexandros Zacharakis

• VEIL: Lightweight Zero-Knowledge for Hash-Based Multilinear Proof Systems | Rahul Dalal, Tamir Hemo, Eugene Rabinovich, and Ron D. Rothblum

• A Resource-Efficient Hardware Accelerator for Large-Size NTT Via Algorithm–Architecture Co-Design | Kaixuan Wang, Yifan Yanggong, Xiaoyu Yang, Chenti Baixiao and Lei Wang

• FHorgEt: A Cryptographic Solution for Secure Machine Unlearning | David Balbás, Dario Fiore, Georgios Raikos, Damien Robissout and Claudio Soriente

• zkBSA: Auditable and Compliant Stealth Addresses for Blockchains | Siyuan Zheng and Zhe Han

• Human-Extractable ZK Proofs of Knowledge: A Solution to Dark DAOs | Zeyuan Yin, Leiyuan Tian, Bingsheng Zhang and Kui Ren

• New Approaches to Zero-Knowledge SNARG Constructions | Chaya Ganesh and Mor Weiss

Articles/Threads

• Comments on two breakthrough papers on quantum computing and cryptography | Justin Drake

• What if post-quantum Ethereum doesn’t need signatures at all? | 0xjasonw

• Post-Quantum Threats to Ethereum Privacy | namnc

• The Roadmap to Lean Ethereum | Thomas Coratger

• Revisiting Falcon signature aggregation for PQ mempools | Antonio Sanso, Thomas Thiery, Benedikt Wagner

• Why encryption alone will not protect your vote | Roman

• ZK proofs, x402, and Fairer Internet Markets | Kevin Leffew

• Agents Need Private, Verifiable Actions at Scale. No Current Infrastructure Delivers That. | Lukas Helminger

• Post-Quantum ZK is an Architecture Problem | Encryptorium

• KZG vs IPA vs FRI: Picking the Right Polynomial Commitment Scheme | zkSecurity

• Frame Transactions vs. SchemedTransactions for Post-Quantum Ethereum | Giulio rebuffo

• Private ETH and ERC-20 Transfers | Tom Lehman

• AI, ZK, and Blockchain: Use cases I believe in | Eli Ben-Sasson

• A response to Canton claims about ZKPs | Alex Gluchowski

• Scaling Privacy: Evolving Nullifiers | Roman

Videos/Podcasts

• Ethproofs Call #8 - Poseidon | Ethproofs

• lean Ethereum Part 3: Security of PQ SNARKs and an update about the Proximity Prize | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• lean Ethereum Part 4: leanVM, a Custom VM for Signature Aggregation | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• lean Ethereum Part 5: Devnets & Upgrade Coordination with Will & Raúl | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• lean Ethereum Part 6: Formal Verification with Alex Hicks | Zero Knowledge Podcast

Guides and Resources

• AnyFeed: ZK-verified price feeds for any token with a DEX pool | Jacob Everly

• PSE Vibecoding Hackathon Results | PSE

Tools/Implementations

• WHIR implementation to Plonky3 | Thomas Coratger

• New Plonky3 release | Robin Salen

• Optional Execution Proofs) in EthRex client | EthRex

Vulnerabilities

• Critical vulnerability in Zcash Foundation’s Zebra node | robustfengbin

• Critical Vulnerability in Alpha v4 | Aztec Network

Project Updates

• Announcing the Alpha Network | Aztec Network

• The Ethereum Economic Zone | ZisK & Gnosis

• Linea is moving to RISC-V | Linea

• Building ZK Proofs for Ethereum With Nethermind Client | Nethermind

• Ethproofs v3.2 is Live | Ethproofs

• Scalable Compliant Privacy On Starknet | Lior Goldberg, Maya Dotan, Ittay Dror, Gideon Kaempfer, Nir Levi, Noa Oved, Arad Reder, Anat Veredgorn and Noa Wolfgor

• Aztec Network: Roadmap Update | Aztec Network

• Aptos Confidencial Assets: A cryptographic deep dive | Alin Tomescu, Aptos

• ZODL update on Zcash | ZODL

• powdr-wasm release | powdr labs

• STRK20s Technical Paper | StarkNet

• S-Two Paper | Starknet

• Brevis Vera: Proving What’s Real In the Age of AI | Brevis

• How Privacy Layers Make Blockchain Work for Regulated Finance | Hylé

• The Promise of Ethereum: Introducing the EF Mandate | Ethereum Foundation

• How Ethrex Heals State During Snap Sync | Lambda Class

• The TACEO Network Is Live | TACEO

• How L1 and L2s Can Build the Strongest Possible Ethereum | Ethereum Foundation

• Verifying True Randomness in Cryptographic Systems | Spacecomputer

• Tachyon is live on mainnet | Rath

Events/Hackathons

• RWC 2026 | Taipei, Taiwan. March 9 – 11

• Privacy on Ethereum MeetUp | Amsterdam, Netherlands. February 5

• zkSummit 14 | Rome, Italy. May 7

• Zcash Dev Summit | Rome, Italy. May 8

• ETHDam | Amsterdam, Netherlands. May 9 - 10

• Zkproof 8| Rome, Italy. May 9 - 10

• Eurocrypt 2026 | Rome, Italy. May 10 - 14

• Common S3nse | Amsterdam, Netherlands. Sept 4

• Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium | Calgary, Canada. July 20–25

• Devcon India | Mumbai, India. Q4 2026 ​​

————

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!

** zkSummit14 will take place on 7 May 2026 in Rome. Space is limited. If you’re planning to attend or speak, please submit your application as soon as possible here.

Research

• Zero-Knowledge IOPPs for Constrained Interleaved Codes | Alessandro Chiesa, Giacomo Fenzi, and Guy Weissenberg

• Nudge: A Private Recommendations Engine | Alexandra Henzinger, Emma Dauterman, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs and Dan Boneh

• Implementable Witness Encryption From Arithmetic Affine Determinant Programs | Lev Soukhanov, Yaroslav Rebenko, Muhammad El Gebali and Mikhail Komarov

• Cyclo: Lightweight Lattice-based Folding via Partial Range Checks | Albert Garreta, Helger Lipmaa, Urmas Luhaäär and Michał Osadnik

• eDAS: Extending Data Availability Sampling With Privacy and Compliance | Isobel Watkins, Nicolas Mohnblatt and Philipp Jovanovic

• Bolt: Faster SNARKs From Sketched Codes | Kobi Gurkan, Andrija Novakovic and Ron D. Rothblum

• Special Soundness and Binding Properties: A Framework for Tightly Secure zk-SNARKs | Erki Külaots, Helger Lipmaa, Roberto Parisella and Janno Siim

• Lightning, Field-Agnostic Super-Efficient Polynomial Commitment Scheme | Wenjie Qu, Yanpei Guo and Jiaheng Zhang

• UltraFold: Efficient Distributed BaseFold From Packed Interleaved Merkle Trees | Wenhao Wang and Fan Zhang

• OpenAC: Open Design for Transparent and Lightweight Anonymous Credentials | Liam Eagen, Hy Ngo, Vikas Rushi, Ying Tong, Moven Tsai and Janabel Xia

• A Cryptographic Framework for Proof of Personhood | Arka Rai Choudhuri, Sanjam Garg, Keewoo Lee, Hart Montgomery, Guru Vamsi Policharla and Rohit Sinha

• Bitcoin PIPEs V2 | Michel Abdalla, Brent Carmer, Muhammed El Gebali, Handan Kilinc-Alper, Mikhail Komarov, Yaroslav Rebenko, Lev Soukhanov, Erkan Tairi, Elena Tatuzova and Patrick Towa

• Relaxed Modular PCS From Arbitrary PCS and Applications to SNARKs for Integers | Alireza Shirzad, Sriram Sridhar, Dimitrios Papadopoulos and Charalampos Papamanthou

• Hachi: Efficient Lattice-Based Multilinear Polynomial Commitments over Extension Fields | Ngoc Khanh Nguyen, George O’Rourke, Jiapeng Zhang

• Neo and SuperNeo: Post-quantum Folding With Pay-per-bit Costs Over Small Fields | Wilson Nguyen and Srinath Setty

• WillowFold: Secure Aggregation With a Lightweight Committee | Hossein Hafezi, Kasra Abbaszadeh, Adrià Gascón, Phillipp Schoppmann, Mariana Raykova and Benedikt Bünz

• Zero-Knowledge Proof-Carrying Data From Accumulation Schemes | Tianyu Zheng, Shang Gao and Xun Liu

• Verification Theatre: False Assurance in Formally Verified Cryptographic Libraries | Nadim Kobeissi

• On the Complexity of Interactive Arguments | Idan Baril and Iftach Haitner

• Do Androids Dream of a Dead Internet: Interactive Watermarks for Bot Detection | Brennon Brimhall, Harry Eldridge, Maurice Shih, Ian Miers and Matthew Green

• Plonk Without Random Oracles | Georg Fuchsbauer and Marek Sefranek

• PANCAKE: A SNARK With Plonkish Constraints, Almost-Free Additions, No Permutation Check, and a Linear-Time Prover | Yuxi Xue, Peimin Gao, Xingye Lu and Man Ho Au

• Sumcheck-based zkSNARKs Are Non-Malleable | Antonio Faonio and Luigi Russo

Articles/Threads

• ZK API Usage Credits: LLMs and Beyond | Davide Crapis and Vitalik Buterin

• PrivateX402: Privacy-Preserving Payment Channels for Multi-Agent AI Systems | Conor McMenamin and Artem Grigor

• ZAI: Shielded Stability Primitive | ColludingNode

• ML-DSA: To Pre-Hash or Not to Pre-Hash | Conor Deegan

• ZK History Refresher | xiamaomao

• Why ZK Will Win | Shiv Shankar

• Quantum Recoverable Zcash | zkDragon

• Inside the SVM - sBPF JIT Security Pitfalls and Memory Leaks | Zellic

• On the Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs paper | Ian Miers

• AdversIm | Succinct

Videos/Podcasts

• Stateful ZK Identity with Ian Miers | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• lean Ethereum Part 1: Introduction with Justin Drake | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• lean Ethereum Part 2: PQ Signatures and Poseidon with Dmitry and Benedikt | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• Tachyon Whiteboard Session | Arjun Khemani & zkDragon

• Zero-Knowledge Technology with Jordi Baylina | CypherTalk

• Proving Ethereum in Real-Time With OpenVM | Yi Sun (Axiom) | EthDenver

• Inside SP1 With Tamir Hemo: Succinct’s Approach to ZK-VM Performance & Security | Veridise

• Formalising FRI: A Lean Blueprint of Security | Petar Maksimovic (Nevermind) | EtheDenver

• Security Blindspots Beyond L2s | Luca Donno (L2BEAT) | EthDenver

• ZisK: A zkVM Foundation for Next-Gen Blockchains | Jordi Baylina (ZisK) | EthDenver

• ZKPs on Bitcoin | Ying Tong, David, Volokh, Keagan | EthDenver

• Compliant Cross-Chain Lending With ZK Pre-Checks | Kacper Koziol (Amish Protocol) | EthDenver

• Keeper: Turning Geth Into a zkVM Guest Program | Guillaume Ballet (EF) | EthDenver

• Jolt: Making Client-Side ZK into a Commodity | Andrew Tretyakov (a16z crypto) | EthDenver

Guides and Resources

• Formally Verified Arguments of Knowledge | Nethermind

• Chunky: Weighted PVSS and DKG for field elements | Alin Tomescu

Tools/Implementations

• Ethereum Should Enshrine Private Transfers (+ Demo!) | Tom Lehman

• Midnight City | Midnight

Vulnerabilities

• Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs | Simon Lermen, Daniel Paleka, Joshua Swanson, Michael Aerni, Nicholas Carlini and Florian Tramèr

• Skipping Class: Algebraic Attacks exploiting weak matrices and operation modes of Poseidon2(b) | Simon-Philipp Merz and Àlex Rodríguez García

• Analysis and Vulnerabilities In Zklogin | Sofia Celi, Hamed Haddadi and Kyle Den Hartog

• The first two known exploits against live ZK circuits | zkSecurity

Project Updates

• zERC20 Privacy Wrapper | zERC20

• Zashi Is Becoming Zodl | Zodl

• TACEO:OPRF Service Is Live In Public Beta | TACEO

• Ethlambda: Building a Post-quantum Ethereum Client With the Help of Shared Tooling | Lambda Class

• Optimism Chooses Succinct to Bring ZK to the Superchain | Succinct

• Testnet v0.13: Major DevEx & Protocol Improvements | Miden

• Shielded Labs: Thoughts on Polling & Governance | Shielded Labs

• PSE February 2026 Newsletter | PSE

• StarkWare integrates EY-built Nightfall privacy tech into Starknet | StarkNet

• Shield Launched | Aleo

• Ligero Pilots Onchain Payroll Platform on Espresso | Ligero

• o1js Goes Native | o1Labs

• Hypercube is live on mainnet | Succinct

Events/Hackathons

• RWC 2026 | Taipei, Taiwan. March 9 – 11

• Privacy on Ethereum MeetUp | Amsterdam, Netherlands. February 5

• zkSummit 14 | Rome, Italy. May 7

• Zcash Dev Summit | Rome, Italy. May 8

• ETHPrague | Prague, Czech Republic May 8-10

• ETHDam | Amsterdam, Netherlands. May 9 - 10

• Zkproof 8 | Rome, Italy. May 9 - 10

• Eurocrypt 2026 | Rome, Italy. May 10 - 14

• Common S3nse | Amsterdam, Netherlands. Sept 4

• Devcon India | Mumbai, India. Q4 2026 ​​

————

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__ or @zeroknowledgefm!

** A quick note: we’ve just launched zkMesh+, a paid subscription tier for community members who want deeper technical insight, extra context, and to support us in the making of the ZK Mesh newsletter and the Zero Knowledge Podcast. We recently shared our first two exclusives: the State of ZK Report (Q4 2025) and a bonus podcast clip with Sean Bowe (Zcash) on the quantum threat.

Research

• OOPS: One-time Oblivious Polynomial Signatures | Kobi Gurkan, Philipp Jovanovic and Andrija Novakovic

• Argo MAC: Garbling With Elliptic Curve MACs | Liam Eagen and Ying Tong Lai

• The Billion Dollar Merkle Tree | Thomas Coratger, Dmitry Khovratovich, Bart Mennink, Benedikt Wagner

• Aborting Random Oracles: How to Build Them, How to Use Them | Gottfried Herold, Dmitry Khovratovich, Mikhail Kudinov, Stefano Tessaro and Benedikt Wagner

• Private Proofs of When and Where | Uma Girish, Grzegorz Gluch, Shafi Goldwasser, Tal Malkin, Leo Orshansky, Henry Yuen

• Round-Optimal Pairing-Free Blind Signatures | Julia Kastner, Stefano Tessaro and Greg Zaverucha

• BABE: Verifying Proofs On Bitcoin Made 1000x Cheaper | Sanjam Garg, Dimitris Kolonelos, Mikhail Sergeevitch, Srivatsan Sridhar and David Tse

• Jindo: Practical Lattice-Based Polynomial Commitment for Zero-Knowledge Arguments | Intak Hwang, Hyeonbum Lee, Jinyeong Seo and Yongsoo Song

• A SNARK for (Non-)Subsequences With Text-Sub-Linear Proving Time | Dario Fiore, San Ling, Khai Hanh Tang, Hong Hanh Tran, Huaxiong Wang and Yingfei Yan

• Policy-based Access Tokens: Privacy-Preserving Verification for Digital Identity | Kiran Pun, Daniel Gardham and Nick Frymann

• zkRNN: Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Recurrent Neural Network Inference | Fatemeh Zarinjouei, Behzad Abdolmaleki, Maryam Zarezadeh, Bhavish Mohee, Aysajan Abidin and Stefan Köpsell

• Formalizing Privacy In Decentralized Identity: A Provably Secure Framework With Minimal Disclosure | Yu Zhang and Zongbin Wang

• Lether: Practical Post-Quantum Account-Based Private Blockchain Payments | Hongxiao Wang, Muhammed F. Esgin, Ron Steinfeld and Siu-Ming Yiu

• HYPERSHIELD: Protecting the Hypercube MPC-in-the-Head Framework Against Differential Probing Adversaries Without Masking | Linda Pirker, Quinten Norga, Suparna Kundu, Anindya Ganguly, Barry van Leeuwen, Angshuman Karmakar and Ingrid Verbauwhede

• Designated-Verifier Dynamic zk-SNARKs with Applications to Dynamic Proofs of Index | Weijie Wang, Charalampos Papamanthou, Shravan Srinivasan, Dimitrios Papadopoulos

• Structured Matrix Constraint Systems for Architecture-Hiding Succinct Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Neural Networks | Mingshu Cong, Sherman S. M. Chow, Tsz Hon Yuen and Siu-Ming Yiu

Articles/Threads

• Permutation Proofs Déjà Vu | Jens Groth

• A sharper look at FRI | LambdaClass

• Lean4 Formalization of “a Simplified Round-by-round Soundness Proof of FRI” | zkSecurity

• Why Shielded Pools Matter: The Math of Privacy | Sombra

• ZK-SNARKs Changed My Mind | Vitalik Buterin

• Measuring the Privacy Experience on Ethereum | PSE

• RISC-V ZKVMs: the Good and the Bad | Argument

• Tokenization Privacy Solutions: An Institutional Review | JP Aumasson

• Generating ZK Proofs In Browser Today | Lauri Peltonen

• State of ZK Report - Q4 2025 | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• SoK: Privacy-Preserving Transactions in Blockchains | Mysten Labs

• Privacy Trends 2026 | a16z

• the transparent money problem | mert

• Client-Side GPU Acceleration for ZK: A Path to Everyday Ethereum Privacy | PSE

Videos/Podcasts

• Zcash Founder on Privacy, AI, and How ZEC is ‘Encrypted Bitcoin’ | Bankless

• Sean Bowe on Tachyon and the Evolution of Zcash | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• Bonus Clip with Sean Bowe on the Quantum Threat | zkMesh+ (paid members only)

Guides and Resources

• Companion book to LeanSpec | Thomas Coratger

• ZK Book | 0xParti

• Lean Ethereum - LeanSig | Ziemann

Tools/Implementations

• ZK circuits in Noir on Solana | Solana Foundation

• A privacy-hardened Unified Address light client for Zcash | Tanya

Vulnerabilities

• A Practical Guide to Finding Soundness Bugs in ZK Circuits | Bernhard Mueller

• The Unverified Public Key Attack: When Your ZK Proof Proves Nothing | Nethermind

• Analysis and Attacks On the Reputation System of Nym | Xinmu Alexis Cao and Matthew Green

Project Updates

• The new Post Quantum (PQ) team | Ethereum Foundation

• OpenVM 2.0 and the SWIRL proof system | OpenVM

• qedb: Rethinking Verifiable Databases from the Ground Up | Provably

• { 𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙖𝙡 } is launching | { 𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙖𝙡 }

• zkEVM on L1 | Ethereum

• Order out of Chaos: A Neutral Verification Layer for Zcash | ZCash

• Zypherpunks Hackathon Results | Zypherpunks

• Airbender just took the #1 spot on EthProofs | ZKSync

• Brevis ProverNet Mainnet and $BREV Are Live | Brevis

• AnomaPay private beta is live on Base | Anoma

• What to Expect From Citrea Mainnet: Privacy, Payments, and Earn With Your Bitcoin | Citrea

• 2025 In Review at Hyli | Hyli

• Building a Stylus-compatible UltraHonk verifier for the WASM world | WakeUp Labs

• Celestia Private Blockspace | Celestia

• Zcash Foundation: 2025 Year in Review | ZCash

• Practical Privacy Is Key To Blockchain’s Next Era | Miden

Events/Hackathons

• RWC 2026 | Taipei, Taiwan. March 9–11, 2026

• Privacy on Ethereum MeetUp | Amsterdam February 5, 2026

• zkSummit 14 | Europe tbd. May 2026

• Eurocrypt | Rome, Italy. May 10-14 2026

• Devcon India | Mumbai, India. Q4 2026 ​​

————

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!