I investigated how to instantiate a proving system for the minroot delay function using SnarkPack. Kelly Olson from Supranational observed that SnarkPack might also be ideally suited to Ethereum 2.0’s verifiable delay function. Proofs are relatively short and efficiently verifiable and, importantly, the prover is memory efficient. I investigated how to achieve this and the results are written up in a blog post here and the proof of concept code for this project can be found here.

SnarkPack was a joint work with Nicolas Gailly and Anca Nitulescu from Protocol Labs, which aimed to edit our work on inner pairing product arguments (recently accepted at Asiacrypt) such that it avoids using another trusted setup. Filecoin are currently using SnarkPack for their proof of space application (see the talk).