Network effects, as defined by Andrew Chen(a16z) in the book, The Cold Start Problem, describes what happens when products get more valuable as more people use them. As a founder of a hardcore infrastructure project building a general-purpose zkVM to unify liquidity across blockchains, how to achieve network effects for a lower-layer infra project is what I think about all day and night.

Historically, the greatest technological and corporate endeavors have been driven by a purpose that extends beyond the immediate objective of profit maximization. The companies run by Elon Musk are a great example. Consider SpaceX's ultimate mission to make humanity a multi-planetary species, or the objectives of Tesla,

ZKM is building the Quantum Network using Entangled Rollups to enable Universal Settlement.

Hello Q2! Our team is beyond excited to begin the new quarter, and we grow stronger everyday. We grew slowly after our initial launch in July 2023, but during Q1 of 2024 our community exploded to nearly 50,000 members. With this newsletter we hope to communicate our gratitude and appreciation to our community and partners who have been such an important part of the journey.

TL;DR: zkMIPS proves the correct execution of a MIPS program in five steps: it (1) divides the program in segments, (2) divides the instructions of each segment in four module tables, (3) proves instructions from each module table independently, (4) proves instructions from each segment is contained in one of its tables, and (5) recursively proves that the sequence of segment match the program execution. Step 3 is written as a STARK, step 4 is a logUp proof written as a STARK, and step 5 as a PLONK proof. All proof steps are implemented with the Plonky2 library. Optionally, one can generate a final Groth16 proof to verify the program execution on-chain.

We recently introduced a new trust-minimized multi-chain Interoperability infrastructure called Entangled Rollup.‍In this work, we implement an interoperability protocol by judiciously entangling the underlying primitives under standard security assumptions of zkRollups, leveraging our state-of-the-art recursive zkVM (zkMIPS). ‍The Entangled Rollup protocol is trustless, and a step forward to addressing liquidity fragmentation, in addition to simplifying the user and developer experience as major adoption barriers of the multi-chain world. ‍

It’s safe to say that February 2024 was the month that truly put ZKM on the map! After months of intense preparation and ardent building in relative stealth, we revealed several mouth-watering new developments in the build-up to our genesis launch of the House of ZK, which lit-up EthDenver!

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) Alpha Testnet.

We’re extremely pleased to be able to introduce ‘Delphi: sharing assessments of cryptographic assumptions’, an advanced research initiative developed by Jeroen van de Graaf and Arjen K. Lenstra.

January was a month of intense preparation — not only are we on the verge of our long-awaited testnet launch, but Eth Denver is also on the horizon and our ‘House of ZK’ hacker house is lining up to be something very special.

We’re ecstatic to move into the New Year with everything that’s coming in 2024. ZKM ended 2023 with tremendous gratitude and appreciation for our community — we couldn’t have had such a successful year without you!

ZKM is excited to relaunch our Monthly Hello World Newsletter! We understand the importance of staying connected with our community, and what better way to do so than through the relaunch of our newsletter? The ZKM team has been diligently working behind the scenes to bring you a newsletter that not only informs but also engages with a little razzle dazzle.

November began with an exciting development at ZKM — we launched Cohort 2 of our Early Contributor Program (ECP): Community Evolution

Zero-knowledge (ZK) has become a new, very popular buzzword in the Web3 world– but what does it mean, really? The Education Hub provided by ZKM is your first stop for unraveling the intricacies of ZK. The ZKM team is here for you in every step of your ZK learning journey.

At ZKM, we are on a mission to revolutionize the digital world by bringing privacy, security, and efficiency to the forefront. With the introduction of Phase 2: Community Evolution of our Early Contributor Program (ECP), we’re taking a giant step forward in achieving this goal. This program has been instrumental in fostering a community of forward-thinking developers who actively participate in shaping the future of open-source zero knowledge technology. In this post, we’re excited to unveil the new features and opportunities this new phase our ECP brings to our growing community.

The Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC 2023) is held annually at Stanford University. The local ZKM team attended, and of the attending team Chief Research Advisor Jeroen van der Graaf shares his experience and gives his insight of the events and the seminars with commentary:

August marked another month of building our universal-purpose zkVM. Let’s look back at all the happenings here at ZKM. Hack to the Future Livestream

In our article discussing the road to Hybrid Rollup technology, we talked about the evolution of Ethereum’s scaling struggle. Within that discussion, we saw how an elegant and practical solution finally emerged: a layered blockchain design, with Layer 1 as the main chain dealing with only consensus and data availability, and Layer 2 as a Rollup to provide offloaded computation validation for all blockchain users, thus creating a scalable blockchain solution.

Using zkMIPS, a client can outsource a program written using the MIPS instruction set, have it executed, and in addition to getting the result, receive an easily verifiable proof that this result is correct. The software component that creates this proof is called a zkVM.

Now that we have described the broader questions of ZK proofs security, let’s continue with Question 2. In the analysis of a two-party

Understanding the security properties of ZK proofs is a monumental challenge. Since we are building a universal-purpose zkVM (called zkMIPS, because it combines zero-knowledge proofs with the MIPS instruction set), it’s vital that we consider security within every line of code that we develop.

And We Are Off🚀 ZKM officially launched 13 July 2023. A zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) solution, incubated by the MetisDAO Foundation, aims to establish Ethereum as the universal

by Ming Guo, ZKM Chief Scientist The need for speed On the blockchain timeline, Ethereum has been around for ages, in the process evolving into the most widely used network — by a mile. Still, many challenges remain. By enabling decentralized application-building, Ethereum has fueled floods of user interest in popular dApps, only to…