The interest rate model of Aave V3 and Compound V2 Interest rates in TradFi (traditional finance) are largely determined by central banks and influenced by market factors. In contrast, DeFi interest...

Understanding ABI encoding for function calls ABI encoding is the data format used for making function calls to smart contracts. It is also how smart contracts encode data when making calls to other...

The Beacon Proxy Pattern Explained !Beacon Proxy Pattern Banner by RareSkills A Beacon Proxy is a smart contract upgrade pattern where multiple proxies use the same implementation contract, and all...

How Ethereum address are derived (EOAs, CREATE, and CREATE2) On Ethereum, smart contracts can be deployed in one of three ways: An Externally Owned Account (EOA) initiates the transaction where the...

How a ZKVM Works A Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine (ZKVM) is a virtual machine that can create a ZK-proof that verifies it executed a set of machine instructions correctly. This allows us to take a...

Circle FFT — Part 1: Building the Circle Domain Circle STARKs is a new zk-STARK scheme that has been implemented in Stwo and Plonky3, and it has been adopted by several zkVM projects. Its key...

Compute Then Constrain "Compute then constrain" is a design pattern in ZK circuits where an algorithm's correct output is first computed without constraints. The correctness of the solution is then...

32-Bit Emulation in ZK The default datatype in ZK is the field element, where all arithmetic is done modulo a large prime number. However, most “real” computation is done using 32, 64, or 256-bit...

Hello World Circom Introduction This chapter shows the relationship between Circom code and the Rank 1 Constraint System (R1CS) it compiles to. Understanding R1CSs is critical to understanding...

Logarithmic sized proofs of commitment In a previous chapter, we showed that multiplying the sums of elements of the vectors $\mathbf{a}$ and $\mathbf{G}$ computes the sum of the outer product terms,...