We are running the second phase of the Hermez zero-knowledge circuits trusted setup ceremony. This is a crucial milestone before the launch of the Hermez Network in early 2021.
If you don't know what a trusted setup ceremony is or why are we conducting one, you should first read this guide to our cryptographic setup.
TL;DR:
ZK-SNARKs allow for:
Creating a validity proof for all transactions within the Hermez Network so only valid transactions can be included. This makes it mathematically impossible to include a non-valid transaction.
Anyone to validate this proof with minimal effort.
Instead of including signatures on-chain, we send a ZK-SNARK which proves that 1000’s of signature verifications and other transaction validation checks have been correctly done off-chain.
Since signatures make up a large percentage of transaction costs (gas), the Hermez ZK-Rollup has the effect of significantly reducing the average cost per transaction. This allows us to fit more transactions per block, which results in greater overall throughput.
Hermez Trusted Setup Phase 2 Ceremony
After setting up successfully Phase 1 and having compiled our circuits, we're preparing the required ZK-SNARKs cryptographic setup for the Hermez protocol.
We're currently running a second Multi-Party Computation (MPC) following the same principles of the Perpetual Powers of Tau Ceremony. The first contributor to the ceremony is our Technical Lead and creator of Circom, Jordi Baylina, you can verify the progress on our GitHub.
A group of contributors will apply different toxic values sequentially, generated randomly by the participants, that must be destroyed and forgotten. As long as one participant is honest and destroys the toxic values, the whole ceremony is valid.
Once the MPC is over, we'll apply a second random beacon following a process similar to what we did in Phase 1. This beacon is not strictly necessary but makes the last participant unable to decide in any property of the final key. The resulting keys will be ready to be used in the Hermez Network.
Join the Ceremony
Hermez is inviting you to participate in our Trusted Setup Phase 2 Ceremony. You can register your interest by filling up this form:
If you want to delve deeper into the tech behind Hermez, check out the recent publication of our smart contracts. We’ve also released our Circom circuits on Github, read more on that in this blog post.
Stay on top of Hermez-related news by following us on Twitter at @Hermez_network and joining our new Discord server.
