Hey folks! This week, the DOJ shifts focus away from crypto protocols, electronic voting systems enter the limelight, and Zorp starts buttoning down the hatches.
News
What we're seeing.
ZK Proofs: The Benchmarking Battle. Conner Swann of ProofLab argues that standardized ZK benchmarking is critical for the industry's growth, comparing it to how PyTorch catalyzed AI adoption. Currently companies optimize benchmarks to showcase their own strengths rather than providing meaningful comparisons. ProofLap aims to create a "glue layer" allowing developers to easily switch between different ZK proving systems based on their specific needs.
SwiftSync: Near-Stateless Bitcoin Validation. SwiftSync introduces a parallelized approach to Bitcoin blockchain validation that uses minimal hints—just a one-bit flag per output—to reduce memory, disk, and sequential processing bottlenecks. By leveraging a novel hash aggregate technique that verifies UTXO state without traditional database lookups, the system allows validation work to be distributed across CPU cores and specialized hardware, potentially offering a 5x+ performance improvement over current methods.
Director of National Intelligence admits electronic voting machines can be hacked. Tulsi Gabbard said in a cabinet meeting there is evidence electronic voting systems have been "vulnerable to hackers for a very long time." While demonstrations at DEF CON and a viral hacking demonstration publicized this problem a while ago, we're pleased to see the Director of National Intelligence raising the matter in the Presidential cabinet.
DOJ's New Crypto Focus Targets Illicit Actors, Not Platforms. A recent memo from the Department of Justice directs prosecutors to focus on individuals using digital assets for terrorism and fraud while avoiding cases against exchanges or developers for regulatory violations. This shift aligns with the Trump administration's pro-crypto stance and follows on our report from last week about the disbanding of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.
Tachyon: Scaling Zcash with Oblivious Synchronization. Sean Bowe proposes a new approach where wallets outsource blockchain state tracking to third parties without revealing sensitive information. This protocol redesign would enable validators to prune nearly all blockchain state, increasing capacity while preserving privacy guarantees through a series of compartmentalized upgrades achievable within a year.
Trump hits 'reset' on energy regulations. The executive order, "Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy," imposes sunsets on energy regulations, unless they're actively extended with public input. This "zero-based regulatory budgeting" approach, affecting key agencies like EPA and DoE, aims to stimulate innovation by ensuring only regulations that "affirmatively serve American interests" remain in effect.
Research
What we're reading.
Implementation Strategies for Mutable Value Semantics (2022). Unlike traditional reference-based programming where changes to one variable can unexpectedly affect others, mutable value semantics (MVS) ensure that each value is completely independent. The authors demonstrate this through Swiftlet, a simplified subset of Swift focused on these semantics. The key insight behind MVS is that values never share mutable state, which prevents "spooky action at a distance" where modifying one variable affects another unexpectedly. MVS is interesting because it combines the safety of functional programming with the performance of imperative programming. It would seem to make programs become easier to reason about, easier to optimize by compilers, and more resistant to security vulnerabilities from reference leaks.
Reef: Fast Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Regex Proofs (2023). Reef lets you prove that a hidden document either matches or doesn't match a regular expression (regex). Angel et al. present applications like proving password strength, verifying redacted emails, validating DNS queries without revealing content, and confirming genetic mutations privately. The key innovation is a new type of automaton called Skipping Alternating Finite Automata (SAFA) that can efficiently skip irrelevant parts of a document during verification. In experiments, Reef successfully generated small proofs (tens of kilobytes) in seconds even for documents with 32 million characters, with verification taking less than a second.
Nockchain Technical Updates
We're now beginning weekly internal dry runs of mainnet launch. As Logan reported in today's Nockchat on X, the team is conducting simulated network launches to prepare for public deployment.
"We're going to be checking in a block hash from Bitcoin at a particular block height to timestamp when the chain launches," Logan explained. "We're practicing doing that for real instead of putting fake Genesis stuff in."
These rehearsals involve increasingly complex network configurations, including connecting laptops to backbone nodes that will serve as the initial public IPs for users to bootstrap their distributed hash tables. The team is systematically testing different NAT settings and connection scenarios to identify potential issues before launch.
When asked why launch has taken longer than originally hoped, Logan pointed to infrastructure complexity rather than core technology issues: "It's really difficult to instrument and set up observability to be able to get large-scale repeatable network tests and get data out of those tests."
The team is excited. "Everyone's to-do lists are finally getting shorter instead of longer," Logan noted, adding that the core cryptographic components are not raising any fundamental questions at this point.
