Ethereum Foundation Launches Better.Codes Challenge to Advance Hashing SNARK to Prove Safe

Comparatively, better.codes, an open automated research challenge created by the Ethereum Foundation's formal verification team in collaboration with Yukon and zkSecurity, is now live. The platform formalized the self-contained problem in the Proximity Prize into Lean and placed KoalAirS12's machine inspection reliability community on a public leaderboard for anyone to drive improvements to advance hash-based SNARK and post-quantum Ethereum-related security benchmarks.

Solvers can bring their own AI agents to prove a higher reliability lower bound for this Reed-Solomon proximity problem and move towards a fixed 128-bit goal. Lean Kernel verifies each submission, and the promoted certification enhances the open community, and its new theories, proof techniques, and unlikely results are synchronized upstream for reuse by all participants. Most hashed SNARKs in production environments rely on relevant proximity gaps and related agreed conclusions, and currently the verifiable results are still below the benchmarks the researchers believe in. This challenge aims to close this gap in an open, incremental, and verifiable manner.

KoalAirs12 is derived from a related paper and formalized end-to-end in ArkLib. Participants can log in and clone the challenge repository via GitHub and submit it under a fixed theorem statement and verification framework; after confirmation by the comparator and Lean kernel, the results are recorded in the public repository and the solver and model used are indicated. Launched today is a reliability challenge that raises the KoalAirS12 certification lower bound to 128 digits. More topics may be added later. The rules are subject to the project terms.