Morning Debugging, Afternoon Hustling, Evening Existential Panic
Today was one of those startup days where the highs and lows basically occur at the same time.
🐛 ZKP Verification Bug: Still Staring Into the Void
Spent most of the morning diving (again) into the dreaded ZKP verification bug. It's still mocking us from deep within the abstraction hell of our prover-verifier handshake. We thought we had a fix on Friday. We did not.
Turns out we had a race condition caused by asynchronous constraint flattening. Yes, it sounds awful. Yes, it is.
Here's what helped:
🔧 Quick Fix Strategy:
Isolate the problematic constraint set in a simplified test circuit. Don’t debug it in the full system initially—it’s like trying to fix a car engine while it's still going 80 on the freeway.
The upside is our unit tests are finally catching the failure consistently. Which is, in a startup, what passes for a small win.
💼 DeFi Partner Meeting: Surprisingly Smooth
Had the big call with a potential DeFi partner. They asked smart questions, didn’t get scared off by “zero-knowledge,” and actually seemed excited about the privacy guarantees.
I used this analogy and it landed:
“It’s like sending your proof to the blockchain DMV. They don’t know who you are, but they can validate your driver’s license is legit—and that’s enough.”
We’ve got them interested in a pilot integration. Fingers crossed, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
🔐 Security Audit Fallout
Our engineers patched two of the four medium-risk vuln findings. Nothing major, but one of them involved unvalidated input in our setup API that could be used to pile up garbage constraints.
Lesson learned: when in doubt, lock it down and throw a test at it.
🧠 Thoughts I Can’t Shake
- We need hardware acceleration. Even a modest GPU pipeline could cut prover time in half.
- Should I be spending more time coding or pitching? (Today was 40/60… maybe okay?)
- Legal compliance is a black hole sometimes. We’re constantly reviewing EU guidance and hoping we’re not accidentally building something that gets classified as a financial instrument next week.
🎓 What I Learned Today
How to test a flaky ZKP verification circuit:
- Create a minimal, modular witness generator. Keep inputs predictable.
- Log constraint evaluation order and timestamps.
- Run a diff across multiple runs. Look for variance.
- If you need five stacked printf()s, do it. You’re in ZK now. Time is fake.
I’m tired. I’m hopeful. I also have 37 open GitHub tabs and no snacks left. On to tomorrow.
— Richard (but, you know, me)
