Contest Proposal: Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification Use Cases

Ever TON Dev Experience Sub-Governance
#1

Contest Proposal: Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification Use Cases

Submission period: May 1, 2021 00:01 UTC - May 31, 2021 at 23:59 UTC

Voting period: 20 days

Background and Description

=nil; Foundation as an initial member of Free TON community developed an upgraded version of TON Virtual Machine, which includes cryptographic primitives required for usage zero-knowledge proof verification within the virtualized applications. =nil; Foundation also prepared C++ (GitHub - NilFoundation/cpp-ton: Cryptography-enhanced Telegram Open Network Protocol C++ Implementation) and Rust-y (GitHub - NilFoundation/rust-ton: Cryptography-enhanced Telegram Open Network Protocol Rust Implementation) ZK proof verification instruction-enhanced TON protocol implementations.

A test protocol instance was launched using the C++ ZK proof verification instruction-enhanced implementation. Network configuration used for the contest is available at: ton-proof-verification-contest/testnet.config.json at master · NilFoundation/ton-proof-verification-contest · GitHub.

ZKP test network visualization is available at https://live.freeton.nil.foundation and at https://nil.ton.live.

Before the Free TON community will be able to patch a mainnet node-clients this ZKP clients should be tested for security and stability.

This document proposes the first in a series of “ZKP contests” aiming motivation of Free TON developer community to try prepared tools and to crowdsource simple ZKP use cases for testing purposes.

Instructions for participants

Participants are expected to create any trivial sample case which uses Groth16 proofs.

Contest repository (aka place to start) is available at: GitHub - NilFoundation/ton-proof-verification-contest: Telegram Open Network LSCS Examples

Advanced proof generation and circuit definition documentation is available at: Crypto3 Cryptography Suite.

General requirements

  • The use case implementation is a correctly functioning FreeTON LSCS.
  • The use case is not a TONCash-alike or any anonymous transactions/token proposal. There is/will be a separate contest for that.
  • The use case should involve VERGRTH16 TVM instruction usage.

Evaluation criteria and winning conditions

  • Apart from uploading a submission a code should be submitted in accordance with GitHub - freeton-org/readme.
  • A participant should do a presentation of her solution at a convenient time agreed with DevEx members. A solution should include tests with clear instructions.
  • If a test does not cover some scenarios, then jurors can develop their own tests, but it should reduce such a submission score.
  • The solution should have an open source license.

Voting

  • Jurors whose team(s) intend to participate in this contest by providing submissions lose their right to vote in this contest.
  • A jury from other sub-governance groups could be added to this contest to provide additional technical expertise.
  • Each juror will vote by rating each submission on a scale of 1 to 10.
  • Jurors should provide feedback on each submission.
  • The jury will reject duplicate, subpar, incomplete, or inappropriate submissions.

Reward

Only submissions with an average score equal to or more than 4.0 can get a reward.

1st prize … 80,000 TONs

2nd prize … 60,000 TONs

3rd prize … 40,000 TONs

4th-10th place … 5,000 TONs

Note: If the number of winning submissions is less than the number of rewards available, any remaining rewards are not subject to distribution and are considered void.

Jury rewards

An amount equal to 10% of all total tokens actually awarded will be distributed equally between all jurors who vote and provide feedback. Both voting and feedback are mandatory in order to collect the reward.

Governance rewards

An amount equal to 1 % of the prize fund will be allocated to members who participated in organizing the contest, to be distributed equally among them:

  • @nemothenoone
  • @prigolovko
  • @Futurizt

Procedural remarks

  • Participants must upload their work correctly so it can be viewed and accessible in the formats described. If work is inaccessible or does not fit the criteria described, the submission may be rejected by jurors.
  • Participants must submit their work before the closing of the filing of applications. If not submitted on time, the submission will not count.
5 Likes
#2

Contest Proposal: Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification Use Cases

Submission period: May 7, 2021 00:01 UTC - June 30, 2021 at 23:59 UTC

Voting period: 20 days

Background and Description

=nil; Foundation as an initial member of Free TON community developed an upgraded version of TON Virtual Machine, which includes cryptographic primitives required for usage zero-knowledge proof verification within the virtualized applications. =nil; Foundation also prepared C++ (GitHub - NilFoundation/cpp-ton: Cryptography-enhanced Telegram Open Network Protocol C++ Implementation) and Rust-y (GitHub - NilFoundation/rust-ton: Cryptography-enhanced Telegram Open Network Protocol Rust Implementation) ZK proof verification instruction-enhanced TON protocol implementations.

A test protocol instance was launched using the C++ ZK proof verification instruction-enhanced implementation. Network configuration used for the contest is available at: ton-proof-verification-contest/testnet.config.json at master · NilFoundation/ton-proof-verification-contest · GitHub.

ZKP test network visualization is available at https://live.freeton.nil.foundation and at https://nil.ton.live.

Before the Free TON community will be able to patch a mainnet node-clients this ZKP clients should be tested for security and stability.

This document proposes the first in a series of “ZKP contests” aiming motivation of Free TON developer community to try prepared tools and to crowdsource simple ZKP use cases for testing purposes.

Instructions for participants

Participants are expected to create any trivial sample case which uses Groth16 proofs.

Contest repository (aka place to start) is available at: GitHub - NilFoundation/ton-proof-verification-contest: Telegram Open Network LSCS Examples

Advanced proof generation and circuit definition documentation is available at: Crypto3 Cryptography Suite.

General requirements

Solutions provided are expected:

Evaluation criteria and winning conditions

  • Apart from uploading a submission, a code should be submitted in accordance with GitHub - freeton-org/readme.
  • A participant should do a presentation of her solution at a convenient time agreed with DevEx members. A solution should include tests with clear instructions.
  • If a test does not cover some scenarios, then jurors can develop their own tests, but it should reduce such a submission score.
  • The solution should have an open source license.
  • The solution has to comply with formal requirements introduced by the instructions for jurors.

Instructions for jurors

Jurors are supposed to verify the correctness of the proof submitted by the participant to the test cluster (in case it is not possible to trust the usual verification because that is exactly what is being tested). To achieve that it is required:

  1. To reproduce the proof generation the same way as the participant did it. Participants are expected to provide a proving/verifying keypair and circuit definition for that.

Circuit definitions are accepted in:

  1. =nil; Crypto3 Blueprint library format. Usually this is a set of C++ sources defined as the manual states: Crypto3 Cryptography Suite. Jurors are expected to simply compile sources provided by participants. This is an option preferred.

  2. Formal statement. This will require for the juror to implement the circuit definition himself with some tool available for that (=nil; Crypto3 Blueprint library, Bellman library, libsnark, ZooKrates DSL, etc). This is not an option preferred.

  3. Generate the proof using participant’s proving key and make sure it is the same as the participant submitted to the test cluster. The process is the same as participants are supposed to perform: GitHub - NilFoundation/ton-proof-verification-contest: Telegram Open Network LSCS Examples

  4. Verify the proof out of the TVM using participant’s verification key and some native verification mechanism. The easiest way to do that is to use =nil; Crypto3 ZK library (GitHub - NilFoundation/crypto3-zk: Zero-Knowledge Cryptography for =nil; Crypto3 C++ Cryptography Suite) according to the instructions available in here: GitHub - NilFoundation/ton-proof-verification-contest: Telegram Open Network LSCS Examples

After each of these steps is completed successfully, the juror can consider the particular participant’s proof generation and verification formally correct.

Voting

  • Jurors whose team(s) intend to participate in this contest by providing submissions lose their right to vote in this contest.
  • A jury from other sub-governance groups could be added to this contest to provide additional technical expertise.
  • Each juror will vote by rating each submission on a scale of 1 to 10.
  • Jurors should provide feedback on each submission.
  • The jury will reject duplicate, subpar, incomplete, or inappropriate submissions.

Reward

Only submissions with an average score equal to or more than 4.0 can get a reward.

1st prize … 80,000 TONs

2nd prize … 60,000 TONs

3rd prize … 40,000 TONs

4th-10th place … 20,000 TONs

Note: If the number of winning submissions is less than the number of rewards available, any remaining rewards are not subject to distribution and are considered void.

Jury rewards

An amount equal to 15% of all total tokens actually awarded will be distributed equally between all jurors who vote and provide feedback. Both voting and feedback are mandatory in order to collect the reward.

Governance rewards

An amount equal to 2 % of the prize fund will be allocated to members who participated in organizing the contest, to be distributed equally among them:

  • @nemothenoone
  • @prigolovko
  • @Futurizt

Procedural remarks

  • Participants must upload their work correctly so it can be viewed and accessible in the formats described. If work is inaccessible or does not fit the criteria described, the submission may be rejected by jurors.
  • Participants must submit their work before the closing of the filing of applications. If not submitted on time, the submission will not count.
4 Likes
#3

This is amended proposal with taken into the account results of DevEx meetup discussions.

#4

Two clauses were added:

  • Participants are free to ask/resolve any questions and propose any suggestions at the AMA event planned to be held no later than May 20, 2021.
  • Initial contest manual and documentation version is supposed to be done no later than May 10, 2021. It is supposed to enhance, fix and enrich those manuals and documentation during the contest according to participants’ needs and confusions.
#5

There is a big difference between 4-th and 10-th place so I would recommend to assign the different rewards for every place. For example,
4th place … 35,000 TONs
5th place … 30,000 TONs
6th place … 25,000 TONs
7th place … 20,000 TONs
8th place … 15,000 TONs
9th place … 10,000 TONs
10th place … 5,000 TONs

#6

I would replace the words “test cluster” with the “test network” because the meaning of the “cluster” is overloaded: load balancing cluster, fail tolerance cluster. I don’t think we are talking about such things here.

#7

Ok. I agree with this approach to rewards for test cases crowdsourcing

#8

Got it. Agree with this as well

#9

Based on today discussion on DevEx meetup call the following additional evaluation criteria were proposed:

â—Ź Each submission should be rated by jurors based on its:
â—‹ Innovativeness
â—‹ Complexity
â—‹ Suitability for real use
2 Likes
#10

Contest Prolongation Proposal: Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification Use Cases

It is proposed to amend the following parameters to the following contest: 0:e6b65075478e7d412fdb0870452f30dfa8bf51272e28a3167abc5c5df6fd051d

Submission period: May 7, 2021 00:01 UTC - July 15, 2021 at 23:59 UTC

Voting period: 20 days

1 Like
Contest Proposal: Anonymous Token Design Contest Proposal
#11

Expand the Jury Members List Proposal

Contest to change: #18 Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification Use Cases
Contest address: 0:48a1dcbdd84676492b86532f0e3d1efef46afb5b895508b46fbaa95773fe9818
Proposed changes: Adding Formal Verification Subgov team to the Jury members of contest

Following the decision taken at DevEx Subgov Weekly Zoom,
in addition to the regular DevEx Subgov Jury Members,
it is proposed to add the following Formal Verification Subgov Initial Members to the contest jury list:

  • Sergey EGOROV @sergeyegorovspb 67dd20b9a760ae538a7f24ebfbaaf09a7075b4617a7ad09c19503c2551f57d81 0:d0e20274758acb651930c5b9b7dfda330583624f0e4d0b8ffc63bc287c69c5e3
  • Andrey LYASHIN @andruiman cec27f6cfdadadc5da135875d5988019bd8a760fe6e16fe1f49459cf6d18f9e7 0:0a98551dd36a5dc65f4510362f3528dd195862a054aa70fcdd7ca8925a54ece4
  • Fabrice LE FESSANT @fabrice_dune 4aca372ed9695ab42cc8ba7fd7f56d11c2401611c2d513bbc28beb5c7f4363a1 0:24a44423bc7edc2598b50ae87267bd06bc53455328e837dae32b9b7592716de7
  • Thomas SIBUT-PINOTE @ThomasSibutPinote 50384ec36bee19914526f436a0adf57d0c35389934b5aaca15db5b5e89f42aa0 0:95d0f87463175d9cfeb5fd62df6699d56de1fdecb5d823cae21de84aaba3ed12
  • Evgeniy Shishkin @unboxedtype 6ff61c1a7bb09795f7b5d5514dd710efb72e9557654d362ef208fde545ba7a33 0:ef3813861e4717bc5b34bbdc13b3498ad2b0198100f87b9fa28cd080854c4ad8
1 Like
#12

Contest Amendment Proposal: Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification Use Cases

It is proposed to amend the following parameters to the following contest: 0:aae666d58a625b5bfe674a8163e68c869e5211fed4b1ea002b8ef3e49686c20e

Special Participants Rewards

An amount equal to 10000 TON will be allocated to following participants according to their exceptional commitment to the contest infrastructure:

2 Likes
#13

As it was agreed on last DevEx meetup:

Reward Proposal: For exceptional contribution into Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification debugging

Special Participants Rewards

An amount equal to 10 000 TON will be allocated to following participants according to their exceptional commitment to the Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification contest use cases infrastructure:

2 Likes
#14

As it was agreed on last DevEx meetup:

Reward Proposal: For exceptional contribution into Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification debugging:

Special Participants Rewards

An amount equal to 10 000 TON will be allocated to following participants according to their exceptional commitment to the Groth16 zkSNARK Proof Verification contest use cases infrastructure:

The payment will be made together with the awarding of the winners of the contest.

1 Like
#15

Totally agree, @Noam did an outstanding job and help a lot to clarify details of blueprint usage in our telegram group conversations! :+1:

#16

Hi everyone,
We at OcamlPro are excited to announce that we are about to add our submission to the contest. Of course, this means that we waive participation in the jury.
Stay tuned!
@ThomasSibutPinote and @fabrice_dune

1 Like
#17

So, presenting Anonymous Vote Use Case submission!

2 Likes
#18

I made a COVID privacy tracker submission. Please see repo for a details.

2 Likes
#19

Submission #4 here. I didn’t find any instructions how to get tokens on nil network so I’ve been testing locally. Cheers.

https://devex.gov.freeton.org/submission?proposalAddress=0%3Ae6b65075478e7d412fdb0870452f30dfa8bf51272e28a3167abc5c5df6fd051d&submissionId=4

My address is 0:f582c60ead509e1d213d0924bc25068df845e7e6bc1d51c29fb2d1106af3de24
repo

2 Likes
#20

Aside from all the things, that I’ve done:
My snark still not compiling.
Sad, but I can’t go through the linker to submit my submission.

It was nice to hack with you, guys.

Good luck to all participants.