Halo2 and the PSE gadget library
A tour of the Halo2 circuit DSL, the cycle of curves, and the PSE stack that still powers a surprising amount of shipped ZK code.
FROM THE BROADCAST
"Good evening. Tonight we cover halo2 and the pse stack. This is the kind of topic that sits right on the seam between research and production, and we're going to walk through the construction before looking at what it means for the chains that actually ship it."
"The short version is this: Halo2 started inside Electric Coin Co as the backend for the Orchard pool and escaped into the Privacy and Scaling Explorations group at the Ethereum Foundation. We'll spend the first half of the segment on the core mechanism, and the second half on what operators are actually deploying."
"Let's start with the basics. It is a PLONKish backend with no trusted setup, using an inner-product argument and a cycle of curves to do recursion cheaply. PSE took Halo2 and built a gadget library, a zkEVM, and a general-purpose tooling stack around it. Keep that in mind as we go deeper."
Halo2 and the PSE stack
Halo2 started inside Electric Coin Co as the backend for the Orchard pool and escaped into the Privacy and Scaling Explorations group at the Ethereum Foundation. It is a PLONKish backend with no trusted setup, using an inner-product argument and a cycle of curves to do recursion cheaply.
OPEN TOPIC ->