The Ethereum Foundation and members of the Ethereum community interested in zk-SNARKs will soon perform a trusted setup much like Zcash's Powers of Tau ceremony. The point of the ceremony is to distribute the generation of zk-SNARK cryptographic parameters among many participants in a way such that only 1 participant needs to be honest (i.e. dispose of the toxic waste) for the resulting parameters to be secure and trustworthy.

The results of the ceremony will be a public good as they can benefit all zk-SNARK circuits. (To be precise, this ceremony will be the first phase of a trusted setup, which can be common to any circuit; the second phase has to be circuit-specific.)

The coordinator is Koh Wei Jie (weijie.koh@ethereum.org), who works with Kobi Gurkan (https://kobigurk.com) and Barry WhiteHat (barrywhitehat@protonmail.com).

Please read: https://medium.com/@weijiek/announcing-the-perpetual-powers-of-tau-ceremony-to-benefit-all-zk-snark-projects-c3da86af8377

Technical instructions and the ceremony transcript: https://github.com/weijiekoh/perpetualpowersoftau

Some best practices:

- Use a download accelerator to speed up the download of the challenge file

- Use a large-file sharing service like https://www.massive.io if you run into issues with the SFTP upload

- Publish your GPG key to a keyserver or Keybase so that anyone can verify your attestation

This mailing list is the central location where this ceremony will be coordinated, at least until Devcon 2019. Due to time constraints, Wei Jie will manually coordinate the ceremony. Post-Devcon, we will look into automating this process.

Please use the New Topic button to post to this group. For some reason, sending an email to the group's email address doesn't seem to make it show up on this web interface.

Also, please attach your attestation and signature in a .zip or .tar file. This is because Google Groups may convert .txt files to use Windows line endings and thereby prevent signature verification.

Perpetual Powers of Tau Ceremony