Aztec Labs is committed to enabling developers to build with ZK and unlock the full potential of this transformative technology. To that end, we built Noir, an open source Domain Specific Language for safe and seamless construction of privacy-preserving ZK proofs. We fund tooling, libraries, and applications that make Noir more accessible and enjoyable for developers.
Earlier this year, the Ethereum Foundation announced the first ZK Grants Round, a cofunded proactive grants round to encourage research and development for Zero-Knowledge proofs and standards for ZK L2s. Aztec Labs contributed US$150,000 to the US$900,000 prize pool alongside other projects such as Polygon, Scroll, Taiko, and zkSync. We sponsored this initiativeas a part of our commitment to support builders who are advancing ZK across dimensions including research, performance, tooling, and applications.
We were thrilled to see submissions to the ZK Grants Round from both new and existing Noir contributors. In this post, we want to highlight the ZK Grants Wave awardees for the Noir ecosystem to showcase what the community is working on and provide inspiration for how you could contribute.
Plonky2 backend for ACIR
Team: @eryxcoop, @manastech
Noir is back-end agnostic and its Arithmetic Circuit Intermediate Representation (ACIR) can be integrated with different proving backends. This project will enable Noir users to prove and verify their programs with Plonky2 technology, unlocking more possibilities to develop blockchain and ZK infrastructure with Noir. Meanwhile, it will also allow Plonky2 users to benefit from Noir’s developer-friendly abstractions, tooling, and growing sets of libraries, lowering the barrier of entry to the proving technology.
Detecting Private Information Leakage in Zero-Knowledge Applications
Team: @schaliasosvons, @theosotir
Noir abstracts away underlying cryptography so it’s accessible to a broader developer base. However, one risk of these abstractions is unintentionally leaking private variable information. This tool will apply static analysis, taint tracking, input generation, and SMT solving to detect privacy leaks in Noir program designs. Noir users can leverage this easy to use framework and debugging tool to identify, analyze and amend such leakages in their projects.
ZK Benchmarks
Team: @wz__ht
Performance benchmarking varies across different languages and proving systems. This project aims to produce benchmarking suites, articles, and a website that compares and informs developers about characteristics, performance, and tradeoffs between Noir-compatible and other proving backends in the ZK ecosystem.
ZK Treesitter
Team: @wz__ht
Noir reduces barriers for developers to use ZK with its simple and familiar Rust-like syntax. But a solid developer experience is more than just language design. It also depends on a strong ecosystem of developer tooling. This project will offer treesitter grammars that unlock features like syntax highlighting and code formatting for the language in more development environments like Helix and Neovim – providing Noir developers with more flexibility and choice.
Onboard users to verifiable KYC
Team: Neoxham, Lakonema2000, @0x18a6
Noir tooling and libraries are created to support and enable application developers who solve problems using ZK. This team will leverage Noir to create an educational end-to-end example of verifiable Know Your Customer (KYC) with compliance checks, and provide onboarding guides to increase adoption of the application.
We are grateful to the Ethereum Foundation for coordinating the ZK Grants Round and to the teams who submitted proposals. We look forward to seeing how the Noir community leverages these tools and resources to build the next wave of ZK powered applications.
If you’d like to learn more about Noir, read our docs and follow @NoirLang for more contribution opportunities coming soon.
