The research arm of Nethermind

We introduce Zinc , a hash-based succinct argument for integer arithmetic. Zinc's goal is to provide a practically efficient scheme that bypasses the arithmetization overheads that many succinct arguments present. These overheads can be of orders of magnitude in many applications.

Latticefold, a post-quantum cryptography solution, has undergone extensive benchmarking of its core components including Linearization, Decomposition, Folding, and fundamental operations like Ajtai commitments and NTT. Testing with 128-bit security parameters across single-threaded and parallel implementations revealed that while Latticefold's prover time is greater than Hypernova, it maintains practical usability while providing robust post-quantum security.

We introduce two folding schemes for lookup instances: FLI and FLI+SOS. Both use a PIOP to check that a matrix has elementary basis vectors as rows, with FLI+SOS adding a twist based on Lasso’s SOS-decomposability.

We present Mova, a folding scheme for R1CS instances that does not require committing to error or cross terms, nor makes use of the sumcheck protocol.

We present two techniques to improve the computational and/or communication costs of STARK proofs: packing and modular split-and-pack.

Our proposals aim to (1) improve liquidity on dYdX Chain markets, (2) increase the attractiveness of the DYDX token, and (3) encourage holding and staking DYDX, all with a view to increasing the security of the dYdX Chain and driving sustainable growth in the dYdX ecosystem.

Nethermind Research has investigated the methods for efficiently pricing VTs using a fixed price mechanism. We did not research auction mechanisms, as there were concerns from Puffer that an auction-based approach could lead to protocol centralization and validators being priced out of the system.

This research article presents a comprehensive framework for quantifying security requirements and exploring restaking implementation in shared sequencers.

Rocket Pool has witnessed remarkable growth since the Shapella upgrade. However, despite the rise in Node Operators (NO), the price of RPL and the quantity of staked RPL tokens have not increased as much as expected.

The STEP committee comprising @GFXlabs , @northlakeslegal , @Nethermind , @steakhouse and @karpatkey , with the Arbitrum Treasury and Sustainability Group as nonvoting facilitating member, have come to consensus on recommended allocations between selected products

In this work, we present an architecture that enables superlight clients (i.e., clients unwilling or unable to download full transaction data) to outsource query execution to untrusted servers while still receiving trustworthy results.

This article presents a technically grounded examination of native rollups: what they are, how they aim to reshape Ethereum’s execution environment, and some of the open questions that remain.

We outline a framework for analyzing protocols that seek to enforce timely-fair exchange of preconfirmations. Within this framework, we outline clearly dominant timely-fair exchange protocol designs. We discuss the feasibility of these optimal protocols with respect to existing L1 and L2 designs, and apply our framework to existing preconfirmation protocols.

In this article, we describe how embedded rollups can be used to create a shared bridge between L2s embedding the same rollup. Such an embedded rollup enables fast and cheap interoperability between L2s, removing the need to execute transactions on L1 to send tokens from one L2’s state to another.

Rollups publish data to L1 but execute on L2. This gives them state that is independent from L1 and other L2s. While this independence is the key to their scalability, it also means that L2s only share state through L1, which is expensive to write to and execute on. This limitation makes features like cross-L2 interoperability challenging.

This post reviews two popular digital signature schemes, along with their Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) versions.

In this post, we discuss the notion of Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols.

Although staking is used in multiple proof-of-stake networks, this article focuses solely on Ethereum. We will briefly discuss other types of staking, but our main area of interest is the various flavors of liquid staking.

This article introduces Distributed Key Generation (DKG) protocols and one of its fundamental building blocks: Verifiable Secret Sharing (VSS) schemes.

In this blogpost, I will explain how to use Shamir's secret sharing to securely share mnemonic keys which are often used to secure cryptocurrency wallets.