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Nethermind

$10,000

nethermind.io
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About

At Nethermind, we love pushing the boundaries of what's possible within the blockchain ecosystem. We invite you to leverage our tools, expertise and partnerships to bring your best ideas to life. Our work spans many areas of blockchain development, including staking innovations, the integration of AI with blockchain, advancements in ZK proofs, MEV innovations, institutional solutions, security-driven development, transaction preconfirmations, large-scale computational applications, and the development of Starknet tooling and infrastructure.

Prizes

🏆 Best zkML project ⸺ $1,750

Build a project that combines zk technology and machine learning. You might consider designing a protocol or a piece of a protocol for one of the following:

  • Proving correct inference of a machine learning model.
  • Proving correct training of a model.
  • Federated learning.
  • Others: surprise us with your creativity!

The list of references below is not exhaustive by any means, we also encourage you to look for your own references.

Qualification Requirements

  • The project must be centered around the topics of machine learning and zero-knowledge proofs.
  • The project will be judged based on:
    • The quality and originality of the cryptography underlying the project. That is, we will value projects that propose cryptographic protocols that are effective and creative in tackling the project’s goals.
    • The quality of the implementation.
    • Amount of work done during the event.
🏆 Best Security Driven Development ⸺ $2,750

Considering security from the beginning of your project is the best way to ensure your code is secure. Your project should demonstrate that security was a forethought during development, featuring high-quality test suites and use of security tooling.

Qualification Requirements

  • Utilize one or more of the following (ordered from highest to lowest in weighting)
    • Forta network (onchain monitoring)
    • Stateful fuzzing
    • Symbolic execution
    • Stateless fuzzing
  • We will consider how comprehensive the coverage of your codebase is
  • Other security focused tooling, methodologies, or ideas are welcome too!
🏆 Preconfirmations Innovation ⸺ $4,500
   ㉧ $3,000       ㉧ $1,500   

This prize spotlights innovations that aim to address, optimise or innovate in the realm of Preconfirmations on Ethereum. We encourage diverse projects, from theoretical explorations to practical applications, with a particular emphasis on Preconfirmations. We invite participants to draw inspiration from the pioneering work of Flashbots, SUAVE, and ongoing Ethereum community research. Suggested areas of focus include:

  • Inclusion Preconfirmations: Solutions that enhance Ethereum's transaction ordering process, with a focus on inclusion preconfirmation mechanisms.
  • Pricing Preconfirmations: Develop solutions for efficient and transparent pricing in preconfirmation processes.
  • Data Dashboards: Development of tools and dashboards that provide insights into preconfirmation activities across existing infrastructure.
  • Research Applications: Theoretical or applied research projects that contribute to the understanding and effective use of preconfirmations.

Qualification Requirements

Pricing of preconfirmations and block space options. Infrastructure to enable execution preconfirmations Infrastructure to enable shared sequencing using based preconfirmations.

🏆 Large Scale Compute ⸺ $1,000

Starknet provides developers with really low fees. Another way to look at low fees is “more compute”. Create a Starknet-based protocol that uses significantly more gas than Ethereum applications to achieve something previously impossible on Ethereum.

There are two obvious ways to think about this problem:

  1. Now that fees are cheap, will protocol participants be willing to pay fractions of a cent more to do the ‘housekeeping’ for a protocol:
    1. Rebalance other users’ positions in your protocol
    2. Reduce back-running arbitrage by solving for it onchain
    3. Trigger abstract cron jobs with left over gas
  2. Some problems have high-complexity classes that may now be executable on the chain at a reasonable price.
    1. Some intractable problems have reasonable heuristic or stochastic solutions that may now be possible.
    2. Large-scale Monte Carlo simulation may be possible (randomness is available from the Pragma oracle)
    3. Problems in NP may be achievable for a small number of elements. For example:
      1. Closing back-running arbitrage may be quite expensive to compute, but it may still be worth doing a naive strategy on-chain up to a certain level of gas consumption.
      2. Traveling salesman for a tiny number of accounts may be possible.

Qualification Requirements

  1. A working, on-chain, Starknet-based smart contract deployed on Sepolia that clearly uses an order of magnitude higher compute than current L1-based applications.
  2. The increased compute must differentiate the protocol or be the protocol's sole reason for existence.

Resources

Nethermind GitHub
https://github.com/NethermindEth
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Nethermind website
https://www.nethermind.io/
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Workshop

Blockchain Innovations with Nethermind:Explor...

We cover many aspects of blockchain, including core engineering, security services, formal verification, smart cont...

This workshop is happening in-person

03:00 PM CEST — Friday, Jul 12, 2024 in Workshop Room 4

Jobs