The month of September was a busy one. Many important milestones in the area of zk-SNARKs were published. In honor of all this snarky innovation, this edition of the HashCloak Monthly newsletter is called SNARKtember.

Interesting Research Papers

Fractacl: Transparent and Post Quantum Recursive Proofs from Holography

Transparent Polynomial Commitment Scheme with Polylogarithmic Communication Complexity

Halo: Recursive Proof Composition without Trusted Setup

Mixicles: Privacy Preseriving Oracles for Blockchains

Marlin: Preprocessing zkSNARKs with Universal and Updateable SRS

Talks from Notable Events

Ben Fisch from Standford University’s talk on the recent progress in zero-knowledge proving systems at Scaling Bitcoin

Janine’s slides on privacy in Bitcoin for BTC2019

Yuval Kogman’s talk on Sudoku ZeroLink and analyzing the practical anonymity guarantees of Wasabi Wallet at Scaling Bitcoin

Presentations from the Simons Institute’s workshop on Probabilistic Checkable and Proof Systems

Interesting Articles

Vitalik’s explanation of PLONK

Mary Maller’s explanation of Marlin

Introduction to the problem of blockchain privacy and to MimbleWimble

To mixers and beyond: Presenting Semaphore, a privacy gadget built on Ethereum

Send ERC20s privately using MimbleWimble and zk-SNARKs

Perpetual Towers of Tau for all zk-SNARKs projects

Tools

Matter Labs’ open source implementation of a STARK prover in Rust

Salad: Coin-mixing on Ethereum using Enigma’s technology

Privacy-related Podcasts

Nopara from Wasabi Wallet on Total Connector Podcast

Eli Ben-Sasson on the Zero-Knowledge podcast discussing the recent innovations in STARKs

Noteworthy Tweets

Leigh Cuen’s summary of Yuval Kogman’s ZeroLink Analysis talk

Tutorials

Iden3’s introduction to Circom and SNARKjs

That’s it for September, folks. If I missed anything, feel free to hit me up on Twitter @badcryptobitch. Again, I’m experimenting with the format of these newsletters. You’ll noticed that I didn’t summarize the articles in this edition. If you have any feedback about what you’d like to see, just tell me.