Announcing Cohort 2 of the Axiom ZK Intensive

Our recent release of Axiom V2 on mainnet provides developers with new ZK-powered tools to integrate the entire history of Ethereum into their smart contract applications. Using these tools in new on-chain applications can require some understanding of ZK and changes in on-chain architecture. However, we’ve found that developers can have a difficult time finding good resources to learn about ZK and how to use it in practical smart contract applications.

Today, we are opening applications for the second cohort of the Axiom ZK Intensive, a 5-week program to help the next generation of ZK-powered smart contract engineers learn about ZK and how to apply it to their applications. By the end of the program, participants will have learned the fundamentals of building with ZK and shipped a smart contract application integrating their own custom circuit.

Apply here by February 7. The program is free and will start the week of February 20. It will be conducted remotely over Zoom and Telegram.

The Ideal Participant

We’re looking for participants who are comfortable with Solidity or another smart contract language and have experience building on-chain applications end to end. Ideally, you’ve deployed production smart contracts before. We also ask that you can dedicate 10-15 hours a week to the program over the 5-week period to leave sufficient time to grasp the concepts and apply them in a substantial project by the end of the program.

What the Program Covers

The program will bring smart contract developers from being interested in ZK to being able to independently develop ZK-powered on-chain applications. Topics will include:

• An introduction to ZK and the basic theory behind it.
• How ZK proofs actually work under the hood.
• How to architect a ZK-powered on-chain application.
• How to develop a custom ZK circuit tailored for your application.
• How to make sure your ZK app is secure.
• How to access on-chain data in your app and deploy it using Axiom.

We will mentor participants on projects to build new ZK-powered on-chain applications of their choosing. Examples of possible projects that we’re excited to mentor are:

• Autonomous airdrops to reward protocol users for on-chain activity via smart contracts without a centralized authority.
• An on-chain "status match" that gives top users of your competitors preferential fees.
• On-chain loyalty systems based on trustless engagement scores.
• NFT transacted floor price oracles to underwrite NFT lending and derivatives.
• Applications which distribute rewards based on the provable placement of transactions within a block.
• Settling on-chain structured products based on permissionless custom oracles.
• Custom governance applications which assign users votes based on criteria other than past token balances.

If you have your own idea, or your idea involves Axiom, that’s even better!

About Axiom

Axiom allows smart contracts to compute over the entire history of Ethereum. As part of our mission to allow developers to build more data-rich on-chain experiences with ZK, we are building some of the most performant and flexible zero-knowledge proof libraries. Axiom V2 is live on mainnet as of January 2024. More information about Axiom is available at axiom.xyz, our dev docs are available at docs.axiom.xyz, and our ZK circuit code is open-source at github.com/axiom-crypto.