Top of my head 2024 wishes and 2023 recap

Happy new year 2024 to all!

On this rainy, holiday evening, let’s swiftly recap 2023 and outline my aspirations for the digital sphere in 2024.

Regarding the zero-knowledge ecosytem, I feel that 2024 will be a very important year. Many projects have popped up in 2023. What I am the most excited about is the work that have been achieved around zero-knowledge virtual machines for different architectures. Many companies started working on one. And in particular, let me remind you we are building one at O(1) Labs for the OP chain by Optimism! It is, at the moment, focused on the MIPS architecture. zkVM brings us the ultimate goal of “verifiable computation”. You load your program and the input to your program, and you prove the execution. The verification of the execution trace can be done in constant time, and the proof has a constant size! That’s a very huge achievement in computer sciences. We have some ideas at O(1) Labs to continue the work on zkVMs, and I will be glad to share more with you later this year.

Also, zero-knowledge friendly cryptographic primitives have continued to be designed. 2023 gave us a lot of new permutations: Poseidon2, Griffin, Anemoi, Monolith, and so many others (sorry for missing some!). An important change in the design of these primitives has been the focus on the execution time on standard architectures which tends to get closer to standard hash functions than their predecessors. Designers have also worked on increasing the input size (which was initially around 2 field elements) to handle bigger throughput. A personal wish for 2024 would be more cryptanalysis on them. I will personally try to find time to investigate more on, I am excited by the maths behind.

2023 was also a good year regarding the research in lookup arguments, which makes possible the efficient design of zero-knowledge virtual machines. And folding schemes… Too many for me at the moment to be able to talk about it. Let’s see later this year.

I am also very excited to see more cross-chain collaborations. At O(1) Labs, we started to collaborate closely with Optimism, and I have got to say that I really enjoy it.

And last but not least, in the cybersecurity landscape, 2023 was a very good year for LeakIX. As a reminder, LeakIX has started in 2020 as a side project to find vulnerabilities out-of-scope of bug bounty programs. Our users gather, non-exclusively, bug bounty hunters, students, public CERT, insurance companies, healthcare associations, digital payment platforms and pentesters. Since inception, we have been sending daily reports for free to national CERT and cloud providers. Over the past three years, we have onboarded around 20 different CERT members and we are collaborating on a daily basis with them. Since the end of 2022 and our automatic subscription model, we succeeded in onboarding dozens of individuals and institutions. We have some community members that have been actively and daily using the platform for one or two years, and it is awesome! Let’s make 2024 even better!

To end, I will share my focus for this new year.

First, I am committed to the work we have been doing at O(1) Labs and LeakIX. The two companies are at the cutting edge of their fields, driven by passionate and talented people. Both companies bring their respective work to make the Internet better, the former building tools using cutting edge cryptography, and the latter by alerting about the security risks Internet users and companies face.

Second, I hope to spend more time on deep mathematics, the mother of sciences that create sparkles in my eyes. I have always been fascinated by them, and in particular the applications to the real world we live in. I know the next year recap of 2024 will say I won’t have accomplished it, but I wish I can read more (and go back to it, that was my initial interests before computer sciences!) about theoretical physics. We live in a wonderful world, hidden in the beauty of mathematics, and I wish I can modestly bring one day some contributions.

The article could also describe the advances in the OCaml tooling, and how the OCaml community is growing, but it would require an entire new article :). I am interested in the output of the platform roadmap.

I have many projects in mind, and I know I won’t be able to achieve all of them. Let’s try to make the most of it.

Continue to buidl. Continue to learn.