Monthly Update

Reads Update, April 2026

Ali Atiia, Keewoo Lee & Andrew Morris

Highlights:

  • Published the Roadmap & Q2 agenda: Q2 is focused on double-stateless schemes for the small but highly mutable slices of the Ethereum state, network-agnostic architecture and reference impl for anonymity networks access, integrations of TorJS, auditing of Arti and early exploration of formal verification (Lean).
  • Highlights of Q1 deliverables
  • Spec and reference implementation of VIA finished via grant, an issue in its parameterization was discovered in the process, communicated to the authors.
  • Started drafting an architecture for network-agnostic access, the goal being: the edge (wallets, frontends, ..) connect to any anonymity network and validate their client-side binaries in the same way, eliminating integration overhead and switching costs at the edge.
  • Ongoing 2x integrations of TorJS 1 2 into light clients
  • Invited talks at Stateless Summit 1 2

Details

PIR

  • Submission to peer-reviewed Eurocrypt CTB accepted
  • Explored ideas on PIR for Merkle roots with Divyá but none were compelling to pursue further. STARKifying away these roots seems to be the most promising approach long-term.
  • Considered and rejected a grant proposal on GPU acceleration of insPIRe scheme.
  • Current focus double-stateless schemes:
    • One lesson from exploring new double-stateless schemes is that the required vRAM for a preprocessed DB is an important performance dimension for deployment. For instance, OnionPIRv2 can only fit a 4GB DB on an RTX-5090 (32GB vRAM), since the memory blow-up is 4x and working memory is also needed.
    • Switched focus to working on speccing and GPU-acceleration of InsPIRe PIR scheme, with some algorithmic optimizations.
    • Discussions and scope definition for a grant with 2x GPU specialists.
    • The O(N) server overhead of double-stateless schemes is significant, but (a) batching queries in a single sweep of N records on the GPU amortizes the cost; (b) these schemes handle DB updates cheaply and without involving clients, which is essential for highly mutable data slices (e.g., contracts of popular tokens); and (c) the server does not manage client-specific key material, which makes deployment easier and supports unlinkability between queries.
    • Ongoing discussions with 2x collaborators in academia on the design and GPU acceleration of double-stateless PIR schemes.
  • Attended EthCC: invited talk on PIR

Network-level

  • TorJS published to npm
  • Working towards tor-js merge with TorProject
  • Arti-lite prototype
    • reduced source code by 40%
    • static config replaces consensus for easy testnet and future replacement
    • enable relay mode
  • Research into prior art then started drafting an architecture for network-agnostic access, the goal being: the edge (wallets, frontends, ..) connect to any anonymity network and validate their client-side binaries in the same way, eliminating integration overhead and switching costs at the edge.
  • Testnet planning, low-priority in Q2 in favor of the network-agnostic arch
  • Investigated webrtc bridge design for decentralized RPC
  • Investigated+prototyped browser->server without domain+TLS
  • Arti LLM audit (EF Internal) planned for May in collab with EF Security
  • Early discussions with a prospective grantee on PQS Arti and the formal verification of rustls-rustcrypto
  • Invited talk on TorJS at EthCC Stateless Summit
  • Colibri grant to integrate TorJS: multiple rounds of feedback/revisions.

UBT

  • Meetup and alignment with Lambda team on UBT-enabled Ethrex client during EthCC
  • Ethrex team have a sync’ing UBT node against Hoodi testnet, yet to share branch
  • Early discussions with a prospective grantee on best approach to zkVM proving of UBT-MPT equivalence.

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