Hey all! Looking for feedback and thoughts on our submitted proposal, for work done a few years ago on halo2 circuit development by the ZK Email team, leading to several new circuits and subsequent downstream apps using halo2.
I will note that you did not build on the Zcash halo2_proofs crate, but instead on axiom-crypto/halo2-lib which is based on the divergent PSE fork of halo2_proofs (requiring a trusted setup to use, due to it replacing Halo 2’s IPA with KZG). As such, none of the circuits would be directly usable in the Zcash ecosystem with the halo2_proofs crate without significant additional engineering work.
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I’m against using Zcash community funds to support Halo2 downstream app development. Especially when it doesn’t directly benefit Zcash, I don’t think it’s a good use of public resources.
That’s true! I guess for us, that construction was so much more efficient to program and understand, so we felt the trade off would be beneficial for maintainability, and that hopefully zcash would upstream those changes one day. We also felt it helped bring more attention and development to halo2, which we thought would indirectly help lend credence to the idea that zcash tech could be used for more than just private transactions. Do you think that our work still fits in the scope of retroactive grants? To address @tokidoki , we thought that the circuits we wrote were foundational enough (RSA, SHA) and reused by other projects in different configurations, that it felt more like infrastructure than just application.