RFP Proposal: 0xPARC x Halo2 Community Development

[gubsheep]

RFP Proposal: 0xPARC x Halo2 Community Development

Name of Project: Halo2 Community Development: Education, Grants, Community Infrastructure

Link to RFP: https://github.com/filecoin-project/devgrants/blob/master/rfps/zcash-and-filecoin.md#zcash-and-filecoin-rfp

RFP Category: devtools-libraries

Proposer: gubsheep

Do you agree to open source all work you do on behalf of this RFP and dual-license under MIT and APACHE2 licenses?: Yes, for software output produced directly by 0xPARC (of which there would be very little). However, this proposal primarily involves a grant program administered by 0xPARC for third-party contributors whose licensing decisions are made independently of the 0xPARC team that is applying for this grant, and we will not enforce specific licensing requirements on these downstream third-party grantees.

Project Description

Many of us in the 0xPARC ecosystem believe that the future is PLONKish. We are interested in developing expertise in and supporting third-party development efforts within the Halo2 ecosystem.

We spent the last two months running the Halo2 Learning Group as a collaboration with developers from the Halo2 team, Scroll, and Ethereum Foundation Privacy/Scaling Explorations. This program onboarded 20 ZK developers from our community and others onto Halo2; these developers worked on self-contained circuit implementations for various cryptographic primitives (MiMC, accumulators, non-native field arithmetic), support for dynamic lookup tables, browser-friendly tooling for Halo2 (including a WASM port for in-browser proof generation), a design for a new PLONKish IR, documentation, and proof-of-concept end-to-end demonstrations such as Zordle.

We are interested in continuing to support these and other third-party Halo2 developers through several community initiatives over the next three months (from now until mid-October): educational resources, a small grants program for third-party developers, and community infrastructure (both online community management, physical events). These initiatives are described below.

Development Roadmap

• Halo2 Learning Resources: We would like to develop a public-facing set of educational resources on Halo2 (lecture recordings, slides, notes, repositories), collated from resources (video recordings, example repositories, etc.) produced during the Learning Group. The deliverable here would be a webpage similar to 0xPARC’s open ZK learning resources focused around the circom/snarkjs proving stack.
• Halo2 Working Group: See this document for a complete description of operation of the Halo2 Working Group and its deliverables. The Halo2 Working Group involves management of lightweight community infrastructure for continued discourse and support of grantees and other contributors, via Discord, regular community calls, and conference activations (i.e. ZK Workshop, Devcon VI). This is paired with a small 0xPARC-managed grants pool for Learning Group alumni and other community members who are interested in continuing to work on their projects, or other work in the Halo2 ecosystem. This grants pool would be co-sponsored by 0xPARC, and likely Scroll and Ethereum Foundation PSE.

Documentation, Education, and Community

See the section above—the deliverables of this proposal include educational resources for Halo2 developers, community activations, and documentation of projects supported.

Other Deliverables

See the section above.

Milestone Summary

Milestone No.	Milestone Summary & Staffing	Funding	Estimated Timeframe
0	Upfront contribution for collectively-funded grant pool: The 0xPARC Halo2 Working Group supports and connects individuals and teams in the 0xPARC community who are interested in working on Halo2 infrastructure, circuits, documentation, and applications. We are establishing a small community grant pool to award grants to developers in the Working Group, with contributions from 0xPARC, and potentially EF and Scroll. 100% of the award for this “upfront milestone” will go to the grant pool. If the grant pool is not used fully by mid-October, it will be rolled forward for future PLONKish grants.	$5000	0 weeks
1	Public Halo2 Open Learning Resources: A public-facing collection of educational resources for ZK developers who are looking to onboard to Halo2, based on the materials produced during the Halo2 Learning Group, in the style of https://learn.0xparc.org. The process of aggregating and putting contributions online will be managed by Michael Chu.	$5000	4 weeks
2	Completion of the first season of the Halo2 Working Group: The 0xPARC Halo2 Working Group supports and connects individuals and teams in the 0xPARC community who are interested in working on Halo2 infrastructure, circuits, documentation, and applications. Projects within the Halo2 Working Group may include implementation of specific cryptographic primitives in ZK circuits, proof-of-concept applications, developer tools and infrastructure, or education/documentation projects. Projects may range from proof-of-concept explorations that are far from production but effectively demonstrate a potential technique, to prototypes for tools, products, or protocols that could be live within a few months. See the document listed above for a full description of deliverables. The Working Group will primarily be administered by gubsheep, Michael Chu, and the 0xPARC operations team (for in-person community activations). While we can’t give a precise answer to the size of the Halo2 Working Group, as we haven’t yet built the cohort, past 0xPARC Working Groups have generally involved around a dozen grantees working part-time on various open-source projects.	$20000	11 weeks

Total Budget Requested

$30000

Maintenance and Upgrade Plans

This is a time-scoped project to produce a set of open educational resources and to run a set of community activations at a specific point in time. No maintenance is necessary other than ensuring that the website hosting the learning resources stays online.

Team

Contact Info

hello@0xparc.org

Team Members

• Michael Chu
• Ying Tong Lai
• gubsheep

Note: Ying Tong is a part of the Halo2 core team, but has been volunteering her time to help with third-party ecosystem initiatives such as the Learning Group and Working Group.

Team Website

https://0xparc.org

Relevant Experience

0xPARC is a research-focused organization supporting applied crypto R&D. Our primary mandate is to accelerate the development of next-generation crypto/blockchain applications and the technologies that make them possible. Zero-knowledge cryptography is one of our core areas of focus. We support maintenance and development of circom/snarkjs, circuit libraries including implementation of key cryptographic primitives (ECDSA, EC pairings), developer tooling, proof-of-concept applications, education and community initiatives, and more. We are fully funded by grants and donations from organizations like the Ethereum Foundation and others.

Team code repositories

See https://github.com/0xPARC and https://github.com/darkforest-eth for a sample of technical projects that 0xPARC operates or supports. See https://github.com/0xPARC/learn.0xparc.org and https://github.com/EthSpring/EthSpring for a sample of educational resources we produce.

Additional Information

Community activations and learning programs described above are run in collaboration with contributors from Scroll, Ethereum Foundation Privacy & Scaling Explorations, and Ying Tong Lai.

[r3ld3v]

Thanks @gubsheep! @realChainLife this is the first grant application under the Filecoin-ECC grant program. I'll be following up on this one with the right folks at ECC and Filecoin directly. Let me know if you have any questions in the meantime. Thx!

[ErinOCon]

Hi @gubsheep, thank you for your patience as we continue our review. We will be in touch with an update or with any questions as soon as the review complete.

[r3ld3v]

Hello everyone! We have this currently in review and should have some feedback shortly. Thanks for your patience!

[r3ld3v]

@gubsheep This is approved! I'll reach out directly to discuss next steps.