Ethereum Foundation launches better.codes challenge to advance hash-based SNARK security benchmarks

The Ethereum Foundation, in collaboration with Yukon and zkSecurity, launched better.codes, an open autoresearch challenge, to raise the machine-checked soundness bound of koalaIRS12, a Reed–Solomon proximity problem, toward a 128-bit target. This is crucial because most production hash-based SNARKs, used in zkrollups, zkVMs, and Ethereum's post-quantum roadmap, rely on proximity gaps and correlated agreement conjectures, which need to be proven to guarantee the targeted 128-bit security.