Last week, Diego Kingston, Research Director at the Center for Cryptography and Distributed Systems, was in Rome to attend the three most relevant conferences in the field today: ZKSummit 14, ZKProof 8, and Eurocrypt 2026. The three ran simultaneously during the same week, concentrating in a single place a large portion of the world's research activity in cryptography and verifiable proof systems.
ZKSummit 14
At ZKSummit, the Center gave a talk on the development of our zkVM and the philosophy behind its design — an opportunity to show ongoing work and discuss it with teams building similar infrastructure.
The event had a very high technical level. Among the most notable presentations: Giacomo Fenzi spoke about ZO0K, an approach for adding the zero-knowledge property to proof systems based on interleaved codes. Ron Rothblum presented VEIL, a proposal for adding ZK to SP1's virtual machine. Antonio Sanso covered recent attacks on the Poseidon hash function and commented on the Ethereum Foundation's efforts to select a secure algebraic hash function. Aspects of non-deterministic precompiles for accelerating zkVMs were also covered.
The event closed with a panel on the threat of quantum computing — with Justin Drake, Dan Boneh, Daira-Emma Hopwood, and Jens Groth — and how Ethereum and other protocols are working to anticipate that scenario. As always, there was room to talk with teams such as 3MI Labs, Miden, and the Ethereum Foundation.
ZKProof 8
ZKProof had a more academic format, with side events that included IOPFest — dedicated to the study of hash-based IOPs — and a formal verification day. The quantum threat was once again a central topic, with a deeper discussion led by Justin Drake.
One of the most interesting moments was the presentation of the proximity prize: an Ethereum Foundation program that funds with up to USD 1,000,000 results that are crucial for the development of proof systems with sufficiently compact proofs. There were also talks on IORs and the evolution of the theoretical scaffolding to analyze the security of new constructions, hash-based accumulation schemes, and discussions on lattices. Arklib had its own day, showcasing the state of the art in formal verification.
Eurocrypt 2026
Eurocrypt was the most academic of the three: four intense days covering ZK, FHE (fully homomorphic encryption), garbled circuits, multisignatures, and multiparty computation. An opportunity to see the most recent developments in theoretical cryptography and understand how they impact digital identity systems, the response to the quantum threat, and the limits of what can be built today.
The preceding Sunday brought side events devoted to the security of symmetric cryptography primitives and, in particular, to algebraic hash functions. And among the most striking talks in the main program, Adi Shamir presented his work on deep neural cryptography and the implementation of cryptographic primitives on non-conventional architectures.
More info on the events: ZKSummit · ZKProof 8 · Eurocrypt 2026