Research Articles

Authored by Riley Wong, Emergent Research, July 2025. A PDF version of this report can be found here. Abstract Multi-party fully homomorphic encryption (MP-FHE) combines the strengths of multi-party computation (MPC) with fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), making it possible to collaboratively compute on encrypted data without revealing private inputs nor requiring a trusted third party. Benefits of MP-FHE […]

Authored by @grandchildrice. Special thanks to Fenbushi Capital for supporting this research, ICME Labs — the operator of Novanet — for covering our ZKProof7 travel expenses, and ClankPan and Yuki Aoki for their substantial code contributions. Code: Benchmark repository Abstract Zero‑Knowledge Virtual Machines (zkVMs) are emerging as fundamental building blocks for Ethereum scaling. However, most existing benchmarks — such as the SP1 launch post, […]

Thanks to Yuki Yuminaga, Jonathan Victor, Matthew Frehlich, Connor Ohara, and Kobby Chen for great discussions and feedback. Thanks to Terry and Wei Dai for their work on Rollups and DA Execution. Data availability (DA) is a core technology in the scaling of Ethereum, allowing a node to efficiently verify that data is available to the network without having to host the data in question. This is […]

Abstract Many modern economic services reflect the importance of the time value of money. Services from payday loans to complex cross-border supply chain financing seek to offer customers flexible solutions to optimize cash flow. Blockchain-based solutions have already begun to enable more timely, efficient, and democratic provision of these crucial services under the collective name […]

The Future of Fiat-to-Crypto: zkP2P In the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency, the need for seamless and secure on-ramping solutions has never been more critical. zkP2P introduces an innovative peer-to-peer fiat-to-crypto on-ramp that not only alleviates centralization in on-ramps, but is one of the few consumer-facing ZK applications that can be used today, no web3 indoctrination […]

Introduction Relays in MEV-Boost are doubly-trusted stakeholders within the existing PBS landscape and yet they are not properly incentivized. People have discussed and are concerned over many ways in which validators and builders game the current system, such as slot proposal delay for timing games and colocation for latency optimization, all to maximize their MEV […]

Opening remark On September 26th, 2023, Blocknative announced its decision to halt its block building and relay operations. When I heard the news ahead of the announcement, I was surprised. Even though I was well aware that companies that were operating the relays for PBS were bleeding cash, I did not expect anyone to actually […]

Key takeaways: · NFT financialization is still in the early stages, with peer-to-peer borrowing/lending appearing to be the best solution at present. · Oracle-based financialization platforms, including peer-to-pool lending and derivatives, find challenges to solve the issue of NFT floor price manipulation, which hinders business expansion. · The future trend of the NFT industry towards […]

Introduction Over the past few months, some crypto chads have openly discussed the meaning behind “trust-minimization”, a term that was slapped onto almost all of the new and flashy middleware/infra that comes with optimistic or ZKP for security. And the discussions around security assumptions behind trust-minimized bridges have spurred further discourse to reach a consensus […]

Key Takeaways: LVR is important because 1) it disincentivizes AMM LPs from providing liquidity to the pool, and 2) it leads to the centralization of block building because searcher-builders who are performing CEX-DEX arbitrages can generate far more valuable blocks than neutral builders due to their exclusive orderflow. There are broadly two design philosophies to […]