`halo2` Community Manager

Community Grants
9

Over the past year, I have been engaging with the halo2 community through:

  • providing support in the Halo 2 Ecosystem Discord and Office Hours;
  • understanding and documenting the forks and projects building on halo2; and
  • contributing to new features in halo2.

Having developed a better understanding of the ecosystem, I believe that the popular forks have diverged significantly enough that we can expect them to be long-lived. However, community contributions that can benefit zcash/halo2 include:

  • low-level optimisations (e.g. curve operations, lookup arguments);
  • general-purpose features (e.g. Challenge API); and
  • security analysis and formal specifications.

I will finish the year by identifying a set of features that can be realistically upstreamed, and aim to fully upstream one of these to demonstrate the community workflow.

The scope of work I have completed this year diverges from the initial milestones set out in this grant: I have focused more on community engagement, and less on upstreaming features. I have not yet claimed any part of the grant, and would be happy to adjust / reduce the grant accordingly as the ZCG decides. (Iit’s been lots of fun serving as halo2 community manager, and I plan to continue after this year regardless of the grant.)

Community resources

I help to moderate and maintain the following community resources:

New features

  • mvlookup: an implementation of a more efficient lookup argument based on the logarithmic derivative. This has been tested in Scroll’s fork and ezkl, and could be a candidate for upstreaming
  • cq: an implementation of a more efficient fixed lookup argument using cached quotients. Since this uses a trusted setup under-the-hood, it is likely not suitable for upstreaming.

Contributor workflow

I will finish the year by identifying a set of features that can be realistically upstreamed, and aim to fully upstream one of these to demonstrate the community workflow.

Further, I would like to highlight another effort to standardise contributor workflows for zcash-maintained cryptography projects: the Algebraic Improvement Proposal. I plan to contribute to discussions around this process.

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