IOP Fest

TBA

The Ethereum Foundation recently announced the Proximity Prize which aims to resolve some open questions that play an important role in the design of succinct code-based proof systems. In this talk we will define the core questions that the Proximity Prize aims to resolve. We will survey what is currently known, and why these questions are important to the design of proof systems. This is joint work with Gal Arnon and Giacomo Fenzi available at eprint.iacr.org/2026/680.

Proximity tests are the probabilistic core of many IOP constructions. In this talk I will survey some of the main ideas that underlie constructions of modern proximity tests. I will highlight how, starting from only the basic structure of a linear code, one can obtain versatile and efficient proximity tests.

Interactive Oracle Proofs (IOPs) are a central building block in modern proof and argument systems. Two important parameters of an IOP are prover efficiency and round complexity, both of which play a major role in the efficiency of the resulting argument systems. In this talk I will discuss a line of work exploring the tradeoff between these two quantities, and then delve into a recent result obtaining linear prover complexity in log star rounds.

Interactive oracle reductions (IORs), a generalization of IOPs, are emerging as the central object underlying hash-based proof systems. Besides enabling modular constructions of succinct arguments, IORs yield lightweight primitives such as accumulation and folding schemes. In this talk I will introduce IORs and discuss recent advances in their design.