Speaking to the fellows and other participants in the fellowship is a great way to:
- Sharpen your own understanding of the topic -expect good questions.
- Get feedback on your R&D work from a high-calibre audience.
- Contribute to public-goods, which the fellowships are.
- Get recognized and build awareness to your work.
- Get compensated -if the talk is pedagogical in nature.
- Fellows: highly technical select group of developers and researchers. They mostly have no prior experience in security or ZK, but are eager to level up in those areas.
- ZK residents: auditors who are relatively advanced in security and ZK generally -but not necessarily all corners of it.
- Smart Contract residents: top fellows from previous smart contract auditing fellowships who have joined our residency program and became top auditors in the space.
- Developers: the authors of the codebase being reviewed during the fellowship.
- Mentors: leading security and ZK experts who have joined our community to provide surgical help when needed.
All sessions are recorded and shared publicly in a curated playlist as part "open sourcing" all materials related to the fellowship. If you feel strongly about not having it recorded, we can accomodate that.
Topics we like and are relevant to this fellowship:
Generally, we like bite-sized low-level concepts that the speaker takes the time to unpack for the fellows. This is in contrast to high-level talks that are survey-like or lack significant amount of depth.
In other words, we prefer depth over breadth.
Example topics relevant to this specific fellowship:
- PLONK's permutation argument
- Accumulation in Halo2
- KZG commitment scheme
- Custom gates in the context of a Plonk vs R1CS in terms of efficiency (no. of constraints)
- CS Theory: the deeper theoretical implications of Plonk vs R1CS, decidability of PSPACE+ languages on a Plonk-based VM.
- Theoretical deep dive into Merkle Sum Trees
Example topics not directly related to this fellowship but would still be of great interest:
- Cycles of elliptic curves
- Lookup arguments
- Attack vectors on ZK circuits with examples, mitigations, and best practices
