Altcoins News
By Dan Saada
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How the Contest Actually Works. The better.codes competition runs two parallel tracks, and they push in opposite directions.
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What Researchers Are Still Fighting Over. An academic paper from researchers Gal Arnon, Dan Boneh, and Giacomo Fenzi sits in the background…
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What Still Needs to Happen. Closing the gap isn't just about submitting more theorems.
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Ethereum has a problem it can't ignore. A live cryptographic contest called better.codes has put a number on it: a 52.
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The gap comes from two competing certificates for the koalaIRS12 parameter profile. The lower certificate sits at 63.99 bits. The upper one sits at 116.13 bits.
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Every theorem submitted gets verified inside a fixed, pinned environment. That's deliberate.
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The leaderboard updates live. That means the 52.14-bit figure isn't static — it shifts as teams submit new work. But as of August 21, it's where things stand.
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Related: GnosisDAO Votes Yes on GIP-153, Paving Way for Ethereum ZK Rollup Transition
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Reed-Solomon proximity testing is a core building block in how modern zero-knowledge proof systems verify that a prover isn't cheating.
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The Foundation's progress page, as of August 20, mentions zkVM readiness and ISA compliance. But it doesn't say the December package is done. It's not.
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Closing the gap isn't just about submitting more theorems. The Foundation's roadmap asks for something harder: full system-level accounting.
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That's a high bar. And the koalaIRS12 profile is just one part of a broader research push to get the zkEVM framework to production-grade security.
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Related: Key Technical Levels for Bitcoin and Ethereum Set for Weekend Trading Surge
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Worth noting: the leaderboard scores don't touch Ethereum's current consensus-critical validation. Whatever's happening in the contest doesn't change how the network runs today.
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The challenge repository is still open for submissions. Soundness teams keep pushing the lower bound up. Attack teams keep trying to pull the upper bound down.
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