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TACEO 2024: Coffee, Code, and CoSNARKs
As 2024 draws to a close, we're enjoying a quiet moment to reflect on our journey. As with any growing company there were some tough times and difficult decisions, but we're quite surprised and a little proud how smooth things have generally been, and how far we have come. There were two main streams of work that weave throughout the year, so sit back, have some tea, and we'll recount our favorite moments.
Q1: From Research to Reality
The year started off with celebration as Roman defended his PhD! Meanwhile, some of the team were heads down implementing Poseidon in Noir. Already at this point we were quite enamoured by the Noir zkDSL. Little did we realize then how much of a pivotal role it would play in our work later in the year.
Things already stated to heat up in February as we got accepted into the inaugural grant program of World (then still Worldcoin) to implement MPC solutions for their iris code comparisons. In the same month Roman presented the proposed solution for the first time in Denver.
In March we had more reason to celebrate as Daniel and Christian both received prestigious recognition. Daniel for his PhD work, which was presented by the president of Austria, and Christian got the Test of Time award for his work on cryptanalysis, which was presented by a T-Rex. Welcome to crypto.
Q2: Theory meets Practice
April was the month that saw Daniel presenting coSNARKs for the first time at ZK11. We had longstanding experience in MPC, but bringing it to ZK developers to address the concrete problem of private proof delegation was a key point for us. To meet developers where they are, we started by MPCifying circom.
In May, together with World we released the scientific paper describing the MPC solution for iris comparisons. That same month, World deleted the old iris codes and the uniqueness of new registrants occurred via the MPC system. This was a huge milestone for us, and for the MPC industry in general.
In June, Roman was already one step ahead of the first World MPC deployment, and presented solutions to gain efficiency by leveraging GPUs at the TPMPC conference. Meanwhile, on the coSNARK front, Lukas generated Poseidon hashes for the first time.
This was an interesting quarter as on the one had, we deployed massively optimized MPC protocols in a large real world use case, and at the same time opened up MPC + ZK tooling for all developers.
Q3: Expanding the Family
July saw the first demo of coSNARKs at ETHCC in Brussels with the Max Pick Challenge. It was a great learning experience for us to develop and deploy a coSNARK app that works on blockchain. Roman also spread the word about coSNARKs at the PSE residency in Tokyo. If you know Roman at all, you'll know how much he enjoyed the food, and made the rest of the team jealous of his new Cursive ring..
In August we welcomed three new team members. Fabian joined us on the Engineering side, Ais joined us on the privacy side, and last but not least, we got our new coffee machine. It's still not clear to us which of the three increases productivity the most, but we are very glad to have them all. Highly caffeinated, we also managed to release our first feature-complete coSNARKs library for circom. This had a great impact amongst developer friends, as they could write circom circuits, but operate in MPC for the first time.
CoSNARKs and coCircom really started to feel the love in September as Ais and Lukas joined Anna and Nico on the Zero Knowledge podcast. We cannot express enough how grateful we are to them for all they do to establishing ZK tech, and the industry. It's remarkable, and it would be great to see something similar for MPC.
You know those moments in life where you feel "that was it, that was the turning point" when you grow from one state to the next? We had one of those moments in September when Lukas and Lukas and Daniel went to NYC to join A16z's CSX Accelerator program. It was an amazing 10 weeks of learning, sharing, developing, and getting advice from all sides on every aspect.
Q4: Collaboration and Code
The last quarter saw things heating up even further. Remember just a few months ago Daniel gave the first coSNARKs talk at ZK11? Well Franco was back at ZK12 in October, but this time with more than ideas and plans, he had a full workshop for coCircom, and gave the first view of coNoir (remember the love of Noir from the start of the year too? It's all starting to come together.) We were really taken aback by the warm reception we received, and by how many people knew about coSNARKs!!
After ZK12 we also held our very first side event where Ais presented our coSNARKs, Vivek from Cursive presented his ideas around MPC for human connection, and Zac from Aztec gave us a great view of all the ways he's thought about different state models and privacy. It was a super nice first event, and we're very grateful to those who came to listen and participate!
November had another huge milestone as the CSX accelerator came to a close, we packed all our learnings in to a five minute well-received pitch that conveyed our vision at Demo day. Another defining moment for us, as it sparked a lot of the discussions and plans for how we would like to build out the infrastructure and tooling to support private shared state. We have to admit, we were also glad to have the Lukases back in the office in Graz.
Before going back to the office, we took a pitstop in Bangkok for Devcon7 to play out one of the most exciting moments of the year for us. Together with Cursive and PSE, we launched the coSNARK alphanet! This allowed Cursive to privately delegate proof generation to the MPC network, offering a much smoother UX in the Cryptographic Connections app. At Devcon we also received the best friendship bracelet. ty @cryptobuilder_.
You thought things would slow down in December? You clearly didn't meet the coffee machine yet. This month was as busy as ever. We opened up the alphanet to a few select teams to run experiments and to play around with coSNARKs in a real environment. Just a few months earlier, we wouldn't have imagined that the coolkids of ZK like ZK-Email and Reclaim would be experimenting with our coSNARKs.
We also released major updates to coNoir, and shipped a first MPC version of the Brillig VM. We have to give great thanks to the Hashcloak team who are using coNoir to the limit in their NRG project. This feedback helps us greatly to refine, prioritize, and ship better features.
The last few weeks of the year were mostly reserved for the team. In a small company like ours, with so much going on, two industry-shifting streams of work, and huge plans and ambitions, it's paramount to take some time, recenter, refocus, realign, and ensure our foundations are strong when taking the next steps.
The dev team had an internal hackathon where they had a full week to work on their 'side' projects. To induce a little healthy competition, there were deadlines and prizes for the winner. Ultimately the winner was Franco with Secret Shared Santa. Check the all the blog posts to see what we got up to - there are a nice range projects that give a great view of the spectrum of topics in MPC.
Q5: Everyone's favourite mystery quarter
In one year, we started the conversations with World, implemented and deployed MPC solutions for their iris uniqueness checks, developed optimizations, deployed them, wrote papers, gave many talks, and continue to work in new interesting directions. Now, over 9 million people's iris codes are secured by our tech.
Solving a problem for a big player is a great first step to solve the problem for everyone. In parallel to the World work, we started working on coSNARKs and developing and providing the tooling for all developers. From first ideas, to rewriting multiple provers, to full coCircom, to advancing coNoir, to generating coSNARKs in production for private proof delegation, to the leading ZK applications experimenting with the tools and network, it's been a wild ride.
Stepping into 2025 we carry forward these technical achievements, our team spirit, and our gratitude to the collaborators and community who got us here. We'll see you next year to build out the world of Private Shared State! 🥂
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