Learning about Circle STARKs and fell into a deep rabbit hole of Riemann-Roch spaces. I love crypto.

Learning about Circle STARKs and fell into a deep rabbit hole of Riemann-Roch spaces. I love crypto. 

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/278

tricks with polynomials. Computational monadologist. Prev: ML HealthCareInc 🦄 | R&D PeopleFund | AI & Stats lecturer

In Circle STARKs, the polynomials used in traditional STARKs are replaced by elements of a Riemann-Roch space. Instead of representing polynomials as evaluations over a line, Circle STARKs represent them as evaluations over a circle group (hence the name).

Current (I think) implementations of STARKs use a 256-bit field, making the protocols compatible with elliptic curve-based signatures. This design is relatively inefficient. Computing these large numbers is not practically useful and consumes a lot of computational power.

STARKs are shifting towards using smaller fields: first with Goldilocks 👧 , followed by Mersenne31 🌪️  and BabyBear 🧸

Starkware's stwo:

https://github.com/starkware-libs/stwo?tab=readme-ov-file

Polygon's Plonky3

https://github.com/Plonky3/Plonky3/tree/main

Working on building zkTLS infra/products. A ruthless empiricist and meme connoisseur.

http://opacity.network

I haven't looked into that yet. I'm focused on their use, along with covenants, to enable general computation on Bitcoin. If the soft fork to reactivate OP_CAT is done, that is.