Devconnect week event recap: TrustX, Alt Layer Rollup Frontier Day, EVM Summit, and more
After a long week in Istanbul for Devconnect, our team is back home working towards a safer ecosystem for projects and users alike with the new sets of tooling we are currently developing and that we presented in various events at Devconnect. In this short blog, we are going to summarize the topics presented at different community events during the week, what those events were about, and share any resources and video recordings currently available. But before we get into it, we want to thank the Devconnect team and all the event organizers for the fantastic events they put together for the community and for giving us a space to share our work with the audience.
Pi² at Alt Layer Rollup Frontier Day
Our newest project under development is Pi², a universal proof system solution to efficiently and correctly verify the execution of any program in any programming or virtual machine (VM) language. It uses zero-knowledge (ZK) technology in a correct-by-construction and fundamentally unique way, which allows a universal and disarmingly small ZK circuit to provide verifiable compute and formal verification correctness guarantees to all languages and VMs alike, without any translation to a common language, VM or ISA. Pi² makes blockchain/language/application inter-operability seamless and completely eliminates the need for traditional, yet notoriously buggy language implementations such as compilers, transpilers, or interpreters. Pi² builds on top of recent advancements in zero-knowledge proofs, formal semantics and logic reasoning techniques. Although Pi² captures both verifiable compute and formal verification as special functional fragments, it allows unprecedented combinations of them while maintaining verifiable compute completely automatic: formal verification can improve the performance of verifiable computing, which is not possible with existing zkVMs, but it is not required.
Grigore Rosu, CEO, founder and leading the efforts on Pi², attended and gave a presentation about Pi² at the Alt Layer Rollup Frontier Day, a technical conference focusing on today’s emerging rollup space and with participants including the Ethereum Foundation, Flashbots, EigenLayer, RISC Zero, Polychain, Arbitrum, Polygon, Scroll and many more.
Symbolik Debugger at TruxtX and EVM Summit
We are currently working on a Symbolic Solidity Debugger, a pioneering tool that marries the intuitiveness of classical interactive breakpoint-style debugging with the depth of symbolic execution. The debugger offers all conventional functionalities, from setting breakpoints to stepping through code (both at the Solidity and EVM levels), inspecting variables, and navigating call stacks.
Raoul Schaffranek, who is behind the development of the debugger, had the pleasure of joining two different events during the week to present the symbolic debugger to a broader audience for the first time.
On November 14th, Raoul gave a short presentation at the second edition of TrustX, introducing the basics of the debugger. TrustX is an event organized by Secureum that covers various topics related to the Ethereum security ecosystem.
Also, on November 14th, just after his talk at TrustX, Raoul joined the EVM Summit 0 to present a 1-hour workshop about the debugger, allowing more time to dive deeper into the technical details and how it works. The EVM Summit 0 focuses on the execution environment and engine of Ethereum, also known as the EVM.
ERCx at TrustX
ERCx is a handcrafted, comprehensive, and complete test suites for the most used ERC standards, including, at the moment, ERC-20 (fungible tokens) and ERC-4626 (tokenized vaults), and with more to come soon.
Unlike our other tooling, ERCx is already live and ready to use with free plans at https://ercx.runtimeverification.com/. We developed this tool for various audiences, including developers, investors, and casual users worried about their security in the space.
Ylies Falcone, project lead of ERCx, also joined TrustX and made a presentation about ERCx and what he learned by testing ERC-20 tokens at large. If you want to learn more about ERCx, check out our blogs and talks at other events.
Participation in other events
Besides the events we mentioned, our team also attended and participated in other events. Grigore Rosu joined Nethermind Summit on a ZK — ZK-VMS and ZK-security panel discussion. Julian Sutherland from Nethermind moderated a panel with Alp Bassa from Veridise, Misha Komarov from =nil; Foundation and Grigore Rosu from Runtime Verification.
Raoul Schaffranek also had the opportunity to participate in an improvised panel with other attendees at the Formal Verification hangout to talk about different formal verification methods.
That’s all for our highlights at Devconnect 2023! We had a blast, and we are looking forward to next year’s edition! If you want to know more about what we are working on or ask our team any questions, join us on Discord.
