zkMesh: July 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!

• Catching Many Traitors In Threshold Traitor Tracing: Lower Bounds and Constructions | Dan Boneh, Aditi Partap and Mark Zhandry

• How to Define Expected Quantum Polynomial-Time Zero Knowledge Simulation | Zhengnan Lai, Nicholas Spooner and Max Tromanhauser

• ZKPoSP: Post-Quantum Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets | Vincenzo Botta, Michal Pospieszalski, Emanuele Ragnoli and Justus Ranvier

• Bob DyLean: A Framework for the Symbolic Analysis of Cryptographic Protocols in Lean | Théophile Wallez and Cas Cremers

• 88-XOR Implementation of the AES MixColumns Matrix | Jérémy Jean

• 3PaaS: Privacy-Preserving Post-Compromise Security As a Service | Cas Cremers, Abhinav Nakarmi, Aleksi Peltonen and Eyal Ronen

• On the Formal Verification of Polynomial Commitments: Two KZG Constructions and the Algebraic Group Model | Tobias Rothmann

• Formalizing Privacy of Anonymous Credentials: A Provably Secure Framework With Predicate Proofs | Yu Zhang, Zongbin Wang and Jian Hou

• The Small-Field Turn In Succinct Proofs: A Systematization of Finite-Field Choice In Modern SNARKs and STARKs | Christos Skatharoudis

• TIM: A Sensitive-Parameter-Privacy Blind Watermarking Based On Zero-Knowledge Proof | Haoran Si, Xi Lin and Huiyan Chen

• Chimera: A Hybrid GPU Backend for Sumcheck Acceleration In Zero Knowledge Provers | Kashfia Farheen and Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos

• ZK-Audit: Proving Power Side-Channel Resilience In Synthesized Hardware | Sakib Anwar Rieyan and Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos

• FiltrumVote: Scalable, Verifiable, and Coercion-Resistant Internet Voting | Leonardo Kimura, Dimitri Leskow, Diego F. Aranha, Roberto Araújo and Marcos Simplicio

• TRAPGC-DV: Trapdoor Garbled Circuit Designated Verification of Groth16 On Bitcoin | Ariel Futoransky, Fadi Barbàra, Ramses Fernandez, Gabriel Larotonda and Sergio Demian Lerner

• RainHash2.0: Hardware- and Arithmetization-friendly Hash Function | Jiamin Cui, Lorenzo Grassi, Katharina Koschatko, Florian Krieger, Shibam Mukherjee, Christian Rechberger, Sujoy Sinha Roy, Markus Schofnegger and Verena Schröppel

• Celer: A Lookup Argument for Large-Scale Queries | Wenjie Qu, Yanpei Guo, Zhen Xuan, Xuanming Liu and Jiaheng Zhang

• SwitchFold: Code-Agnostic Succinct Polynomial Commitments Via Recursive Code Switching | Mingshu Cong, Tsz Hon Yuen and Siu-Ming Yiu

• LLMs won’t break symmetric crypto | JP Aumasson | bfSwA

• Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude | Anthropic

• AI Agents Are Pulling The Post-Quantum Deadline Forward | Forbes

• ZK/SEC Quarterly | zkSecurity

• Can you build the fastest circuit? Prove it. | zkSecurity

• ZK Client-Side Proving: Myth or Imminent Reality? | Amira Bouguera

• What is Distributed Key Generation (DKG)? | Stoffel Blog

• Obfuscation (Part II): Diamond iO | Vitalik.eth

• Two Questions That Decide Whether a Payment Is Private | TACEO Core

• Your Data Is Your Property: What a Supreme Court Concurrence Reveals About the Future of Digital Privacy | Aleo

• Private Information Retrieval (PIR) with Alex Hoover | ZKPodcast

• Alex Ozdemir on where Theorem Provers and ZK meet | ZKPodcast

• Sergey Gorbunov on TEEs and the Arc Privacy Sector | ZKPodcast

• Session 10 of Proof is in the Pudding: Groth16 | Archetype

• Protecting Privacy in the AI Age, Featuring Sudo | Privacy Podcast

• I Built a Private Genomics Study with Stoffel MPC

• snark.fast

• zk.golf

• verifier.cash

• ZKPassport X LootSurvivor

• Groth16, Incrementally | mimoo

• Meet Stoffel through three builder tutorials | Stoffel

• Tutorial: Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean (Part 1) | HashCloak

• SoK: Hash-Based Polynomial Commitments and Low-Degree Tests: From FRI to Basefold, STIR, and WHIR | Christos Skatharoudis

• Longfellow ZK | Google

• Stoffel Release 0.1.1 | Stoffel

• Axiom Auditors found a soundness vulnerability in stwo-cairo | Axiom

• BLAKE3 live on zkGolf | zkSecurity

• Announcing snark.fast autoresearch competition | Succinct

• Distributed compute startup Boundless expands 4,000-GPU network from ZK to AI | The Block

• Announcing the Athena Consortium | Miden

• Formal Verification of Zcash Ironwood Completed | Tachyon

• Ironwood is live on Zcash | Zodl

• Google Wallet is helping improve users’ privacy by open sourcing Zero-Knowledge Proof libraries | Google

• 1 month in: Stoffel 0.1.0 Launch Retrospective | Stoffel

• (Re) Introducing Stoffel: Announcing Stoffel 0.1.0 | Stoffel

• USAD: A private stablecoin designed for real people | Aleo

• USDCx on Aleo: The first private, programmable stablecoin | Aleo

• How does Zorch evaluate constraints without an interpreter? | Zorch

• c8s is now public. Confidential Kubernetes. | Confidential AI

• Zero-knowledge cryptography is live on Cardano | Cardano

• Collaboration between Projecteleven and Jim Posen | Project 11

• Toward Decentralization, zkVM & Compute Markets | Nockchain

• Explaining Verona | Verona Dev

• Starknet privacy is entering Stage 2 | Starkware

• DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is now available on Venice, fully private | Venice

• Fhenix acquires Sunscreen | Fhenix

• Common S3nse | Amsterdam, Netherlands. Sept 4

• Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress | Mumbai, November 2nd

• 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__!