zkMesh: April 2026 recap

Welcome to ZK Mesh, a monthly human-curated newsletter covering the latest in advanced privacy-enhancing cryptography, distributed protocol development, and zero-knowledge systems research. Below we share recent research, useful articles, videos, podcasts, tweets, tools, project updates, and events in the ZK space and beyond!

• VEIL: Lightweight Zero-Knowledge for Hash-Based Multilinear Proof Systems | Rahul Dalal, Tamir Hemo, Eugene Rabinovich and Ron Rothblum

• Proximity Signatures | Guillermo Angeris and Kobi Gurkan

• Open Problems In List Decoding and Correlated Agreement | Gal Arnon, Dan Boneh and Giacomo Fenzi

• ZK-VSA: Zero-Knowledge Verifiable Speaker Anonymization Leveraging Phase Vocoder with Time-Scale Modification | Shuang Liang, Yang Hua, Peishen Yan, Linshan Jiang, Tao Song, and Bin Yao

• The Sum-Check Protocol Over the Monomial Basis, and Other Optimizations | Quang Dao, Ari Biswas, Liam Eagen, Andrew Milson, Shahar Papini and Justin Thaler

• Efficient Batch Threshold Encryption Using Partial Fraction Techniques | Dan Boneh, Rohit Nema, Arnab Roy and Ertem Nusret Tas

• HyperVerITAS: Verifying Image Transformations at Scale On Boolean Hypercubes | Garrett Greiner, Toshi Mowery and Pratik Soni

• VeriRAG: Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Verifiable Retrieval-Augmented Generation | Chenqi Lin, Yubo Cui, Zhelei Zhou, Cheng Hong, Yufei Wang, Zhaohui Chen and Meng Li

• PlasmaBlind: A Private Layer 2 With Instant Client-Side Proving | Pierre Daix-Moreux and Chengru Zhang

• Verifiable Divide-and-Conquer | Omer Paneth and Rafael Pass

• PipeSC: A Resource-efficient and Pipelined Hardware Accelerator for Sumcheck Protocol | Kaixuan Wang, Yifan Yanggong, Xiaoyu Yang, Chenti Baixiao and Lei Wang

• Secure MSM Outsourcing Computation for Zero-knowledge Proof Generation | Wujie Xiong, Arefeh Rahaei, Sangwon Shin, Xinxin Fan, Taeweon Suh, Veronika Kuchta, Sica Francesco, Weidong Shi and Lei Xu

• Failure of Proximity Gaps Close to Capacity | Dmitry Krachun, Stepan Kazanin and Ulrich Habök

• zkRAG: Efficiently Proving RAG Retrieval In Zero Knowledge | Yanze Jiang, Xinyang Yang, Xuanming Liu, Yanpei Guo and Jiaheng Zhang

• Zero-Knowledge Proof of Progress: Secure Multi-Phase CTF Competitions | Salam Khanji, Behzad Abdolmaleki, John Clark and Aryan Pasikhani

• Code-based Scalable Collaborative SNARKs | Christodoulos Pappas, Dimitrios Papadopoulos and Charalampos Papamanthou

• ACTS: Attestations of Contents In TLS Sessions | Pierpaolo Della Monica, Ivan Visconti, Andrea Vitaletti and Marco Zecchini

• Secret-Carrying Puzzles and Garbled Circuits Optimized for Zero-knowledge Proofs | Debasish Ray Chawdhuri and Manoj Prabhakaran

• Sum-Check as an Algebraic Tensor Reduction: Part I | ZK Security

• ZK on Bitcoin — Proof is in the Pudding #9 | ZK Security

• Frame Transactions and the Three Gates to Privacy | Nero_eth

• Insights for Shielded CSV from Tachyon | Gus Gutoski

• Verifiability in the Coordination Trilemma | The Interfold

• Scott Aaronson: On the Google Quantum Computing Paper | Scott Aaronson

• We beat Google’s zero-knowledge proof of quantum cryptanalysis | Trail of Bits

• A Mathematical Introduction to Lattice Cryptography: The Quantum Security Solution | CalBlockchain

• ERC: FHE Computation Verification Standard — Trustless verification of encrypted computation via recursive ZK proofs | Valisthea

• Understanding the Ultrahonk Verifier | HashCloak

• Proof is in the Pudding #9 — ZK on Bitcoin (with Archetype) | zksecurityXYZ

• Verifiable Databases with Shyam & Emanuele from Provably | ZK Podcast

• Is ZK dead? Or has it just begun? with the ZK Pod co-hosts | ZK Podcast

• Dev Ojha on the Osmosis Story and his Return to Privacy | ZK Podcast

• Fireside Chat with Jordi on EEZ I Jordi Baylina & Kartik Talwar | EthGlobal

• How to Build Private Smart Contracts on Aztec for Solidity Developers | Aztec

• Guardian Live: Present & Future Use Cases | Miden

• The Inverse Number Theoretic Transform | RareSkills

• A tutorial on building a merkle tree AIR script in Plonky3 | HashCloak

• The Grand Comparison: Every ZKP System, Every Dimension — ZKP Systems Series | Ümit Aygül

• Protocol Study Series: 12-session guided reading of the Zcash Protocol Specification | Mark H

• Dropping a new testnet for post-quantum signatures — Falcon + ephemeral PQ scheme | asanso

• Introducing Spawned: Erlang-Style Actors for Rust | Lambda Class

• Building an open-source Zcash hardware wallet SDK for constrained embedded systems | ZecVault

• ZecVault: goal-based savings wallet on Zcash shielded transactions | Gorusys

• zk-autoresearch — autonomous LLM agent optimizing a production ZK prover | Barnadrot

• EU ZK ID project picked Noir | eu-digital-identity-wallet

• UltrafastSecp256k1: a multi-backend secp256k1 execution engine for wallets, ZK, and high-throughput Ethereum tooling | Vano Chkheidze

• Zebra 4.3.1: Critical Security Fixes, Dockerized Mining and CI Hardening | Zcash Foundation

• Critical soundness bug from Jolt zkVM | Minsun Kim

• Proximity Gaps Conjecture Fails Near Capacity over Prime Fields | Antonio Kambiré

• Soundness Failures in LaBRADOR Implementations from NTT -Friendly Rings | zkSecurity

• New Circom Bugs | Stefanos Chaliasos

• All blockchains should have a clear path toward post-quantum security | Starknet

• People don’t understand the sheer volume of what is shipping in Zcash 2026 | Zcash

• Zcash roadmap to becoming Post-Quantum | Zcash

• Introducing Guardian: The Missing Piece for Institutional Privacy | Miden

• Private State Management on Miden | OpenZeppelin

• SP1 Verifier: WASM-compatible PLONK & GROTH16 verification | Succinct

• Zcam: an iPhone camera app to Prove What’s Real | Succinct

• Google Uses SP1 to Prove Quantum Security Threat | Succinct

• Post-Quantum Citrea | Citrea

• Finality In Leanconsensus: How Ethlambda Implements 3SF-mini | Lambda Class

• Audit of Aptos Confidential Assets | Aptos & zkSecurity

• Just write ‘if’: Why Payy left Halo2 for Noir | Aztec / Payy

• zkSummit14 | Rome, Italy — May 7

• Zcash Dev Summit | Rome, Italy — May 8

• Zkproof 8 | Rome, Italy — May 9 - 10

• ETHDam | Amsterdam, Netherlands — May 9 - 10

• Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium | Calgary, Canada — July 20 - 25

• Common S3nse | Amsterdam, Netherlands — Sept 4

• Devcon India | Mumbai, India — Q4 2026 ​​

There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of ZK Mesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!