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This blog post is intended to give a primer on the concept of arithmetic circuits that is gaining a lot of attention lately with the rise in the popularity of zero-knowledge proofs. We will take a look at what arithmetic circuits are, what they are used for, what tools are there for working with them, including the tools we develop here at Anoma, and what we can do with the circuits using these tools.

The future of coordination relies heavily on the successful verification of information — and zero-knowledge proofs have a significant role to play here. This article explores what zero-knowledge proofs are, how they work, and why they are so important to privacy-preserving technology.

Anoma incorporates many different concepts, components, and mechanisms in its protocol. Learn about Anoma’s architecture on a high level and understand how it all works together to deliver an innovative universal coordination mechanism.

Fractals are a phenomenon that occurs naturally, describing patterns that nature repeats at different scales. Based on fractals in nature, like snowflakes, Anoma's approach to scaling follows how human commercial activities are mostly local, both geographically and socially. Learn the basics of how Anoma plans to withstand a rapidly growing user base, alongside offering customizability and flexibility.

Coordination happens everyday, all around us. But what is coordination as a concept, and why would our world cease to function without it? Learn about coordination, and how it enables mutually beneficial actions, which is foundational to Anoma's architecture.

As a consolidation of the Plonk and Plookup proving schemes, Plonkup represents an evolved zk-SNARK that provides a more efficient and scalable zero-knowledge solution.

Plonkup's combination of arithmetic and lookup gates allows hash functions to be written with much smaller circuits.

The matchmaker is the second component of the intent gossip network, facilitating the matching of user intents from any number of parties to execute a mutually beneficial trade. Learn about what the matchmaker is, how the matchmaking process works, and what it takes to operate a matchmaking node.

As an integral part of the intent gossip network, intent gossip nodes are responsible for propagating intents and enabling the required mechanism of counterparty discovery for bartering. Learn about the role, how it works, and what it takes to become an intent gossip node operator on Anoma.

This series, ‘agents of anoma,’ focuses on the different roles you can take on in the growing community. Follow the series to learn more about what each role entails, and why it is important to Anoma. This first component of the series, ‘Validators,’ explains the concepts that define the role, what it takes to be a validator, its importance, and how this relates to the security of the network.

Under some conditions, Heterogeneous Paxos allows for atomic cross-domain transactions, where learners do not necessarily share the same failure assumptions. Building on Heterogeneous Paxos, we hope to exploit the high intersection between validator sets of different blockchain to create a heterogeneous consensus protocol for atomic multi-chain transactions. This will extend the capabilities of IBC to allow for arbitrary communication between chains within an atomic transaction.

Anoma implements the inter-blockchain communication protocol (IBC) to communicate with other blockchains. By implementing IBC, Anoma gets closer to its goal of facilitating private payments using arbitrary assets regardless of how or by whom those assets were created.

Anoma’s state machine allows the bartering of arbitrary assets among multiple parties efficiently. With the use of a range of validity predicates, users are able to utilize Anoma to its fullest extent, expressing their desires and capabilities on intents for their transactional needs.

Recursive zero-knowledge proofs are new cryptographic primitives relevant to the Anoma blockchain use case. In this article, we investigate the possible alternatives for verifying blockchain circuits efficiently. Our main interest is in estimating the efficiency of pairing-based constructions.

Fractal scaling is Anoma’s approach to scaling throughput, in which transactions are split across local instances that any user is allowed to create to fit their needs. These local instances are all interoperable with each other, and users can move their assets to whichever instance is most convenient for their transactions.

ZEXE is a ledger-based system that allows for the running of multiple applications atop the same ledger in a way that transactions reveal no information about the particular computations which are performed. This post describes the main components ZEXE is built upon, and explains the way privacy is achieved.

Anoma uses a threshold BLS digital signature to generate an unpredictable, bias-resistant and publicly verifiable on-chain pseudorandom number. This process will be implemented so that a pseudorandom number will be produced with every new block.

In this post we provide an introduction to the topic of side-channel attacks and discuss them in the context of blockchains.

The multi-asset shielded pool allows multiple assets to share the same shielded pool. By implementing it, Anoma enables its users to have access to zero-knowledge privacy for multiple assets.

Fractal upgrades is an approach to protocol upgrades unique to Anoma, allowing multiple proposed versions to be tested in parallel with value at stake. A canonical switch happens after extensive testing and stakeholders stating their preference through intents.

In order to conduct a trade on Anoma, parties first need to locate suitable trading partners. The intent gossip and matchmaking system is the subprotocol of Anoma responsible for enabling users to broadcast what kind of barter they are looking for and find parties whose needs match their own.

Used to determine the validity of state transitions, validity predicates are a unique feature of Anoma that offers improved ergonomics to handle state changes compared to stateful smart contracts.

HybridDKG is one of the latest distributed key generation schemes and can operate in an asynchronous environment, making it the most viable DKG scheme to use over the internet.

Built upon ground-breaking academic research in cryptography, Ferveo is a component of the Anoma protocol that implements a distributed key generation scheme (DKG) to enable protection from front running.

A novel component of Anoma is a Distributed Key Generation (DKG) scheme. George Gkitsas describes the concepts in DKG, starting with simple constructions, building up to the aggregatable DKG.