Brought to you by:

Union’s record-breaking trusted setup ceremony is coming to a close, providing the proving keys for a new interoperability layer built entirely on zero-knowledge cryptography. With no reliance on multisigs, off-chain committees or validator whitelists, Union aims to offer fast, composable and credibly neutral cross-chain infrastructure.

— Macauley

Permissionless IV is hitting Brooklyn on June 24-26. Tix are $499 — but refer 5 friends to the 0xResearch newsletter and score a free Permissionless ticket. Scroll down to grab your code.

Plasma ICO:

$500m in deposits for the stablecoin-built Plasma chain token sale filled up this morning within seconds.

The above chart by Blockworks Research analyst Boccaccio estimates implied APR on the lucky ~1100 depositors who got in.

Assuming three months of lockup and an FDV launch of $2b, current depositors would enjoy a 120% APR.

The team, however, is likely to open further caps on deposits, which would dilute earlier depositors. Should caps be raised to $1.5b - $1.75b instead, APRs would drop to a more modest range of 25-50% instead (see circled boxes above).

— Donovan Choy

Brought to you by:

Every day, users lose money to MEV. As AI comes onchain, the MEV issue will grow exponentially.

FAIR is the first Layer 1 blockchain where MEV can’t exist. Transactions are encrypted before they hit the network and only decrypted after consensus, making manipulation impossible.

Built for the future of DeFi and AI execution, FAIR ensures every transaction is private, secure, and truly fair.

Bridging without trust

Union just set a new record for zero-knowledge infrastructure. Its Groth16 trusted setup ceremony closed with 4,664 verified contributions — surpassing Manta Network’s 2023 record — and another 4,590 are still in the queue. This establishes the cryptographic foundation for validating consensus and cross-chain messages with succinct validity proofs.

Trusted setup ceremonies are crucial to zero-knowledge proving systems. Union enables it to act as a “blockchain of blockchains,” offering verifiable message passing and asset transfers across Ethereum, Cosmos, Arbitrum, Babylon and even Bitcoin L2s — all without relying on centralized actors.

Union Chief Technology Officer Cor Pruijs emphasized the significance: “Union's circuit having the largest Groth16 trusted setup ceremony ever means that it has the smallest honesty assumption of all.”

"Honesty assumption" refers to the minimum number of participants who must act honestly (i.e. not leak or reuse their private randomness) for the resulting cryptographic parameters to remain secure.

Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony for the Proto-Danksharding upgrade used to scale rollups holds the record for most participants in any trusted setup. However, that ceremony’s computational demands were far lower, making Union’s scale even more impressive.

Despite the complexity of such cryptographic pipelines, contributors needed only to queue up and complete the computation when their turn came, with each result verified and added sequentially to the setup.

While Ethereum’s KZG setup was limited to data availability for rollups, Union’s underpins full cross-chain consensus verification. The design bears modular features:

1. CometBLS, a modified CometBFT, is a data-light consensus mechanism that aggregates validator signatures for efficient onchain verification.

2. A permissionless prover network, Galois, generates zk proofs in under seven seconds.

3. Voyager (a decentralized relayer system) moves proofs and state data between source and destination chains.

The result is trust-minimized interoperability that works across execution environments — be it EVM, CosmWasm, SVM or MoveVM. That’s a gamechanger for developers building across chains who want fast finality and unified liquidity without compromising on security.

For comparison, Wormhole relies on a multisig model governed by a fixed set of 19 “Guardians,” where messages are only valid if signed by a supermajority (13/19). Axelar uses a validator-based architecture secured by economic incentives, and requires its nodes to run full chain nodes for each connected network.

Union’s approach inherits core principles from the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol but effectively virtualizes IBC through zk proofs. This architecture removes reliance on whitelisting actors, and lets the interop layer scale horizontally across chains without replicating full node infrastructure, according to Union Labs CEO Karel Kubat.

“The key solution here is actually generating a [zero-knowledge proof] for your consensus updates instead of doing it in the contract itself...So if a network has 100 validators, 1000 or a million, it doesn't really matter because the ZKP has a constant cost associated with it,” Kubat said on the 0xResearch podcast earlier this year.

It also allows for permissionless solvers: Any participant can monitor chains, generate consensus proofs and submit them to the network.

For even faster settlement, Union supports intents, enabling solvers to front capital and fill user transactions almost instantly. Partners like Aori route these fills, with solvers taking on the finality risk. That should serve both latency-sensitive apps and more high-value, security-conscious use cases. Importantly, both are possible using one API, thus unifying general message passing and intents in a single integration.

Kubat expects Union will be about as cheap as Across Protocol, with only around 20 transfers occurring at the same time. “That's actually quite amazing with all of the cryptography happening under the hood,” he said.

After quietly supporting Babylon Genesis with a proof-of-authority testnet, next up is Union’s mainnet. For crypto natives, the potential implications are frictionless, cross-chain dapps without fragmented UX or trust in multisigs. If Union delivers on its promises, this might be the first interop layer that actually feels like using one unified chain.

— Macauley Peterson

Is CRCL a buy?

Circle opened at an IPO of $31 on Thursday and sprinted to $107.7 by Friday’s close. That’s a $24b market cap, or a ~$27.4b fully-diluted enterprise value (after deducting $1.1b in cash holdings).

Is CRCL overvalued? Some back-of-the-envelope math:

• Revenue: At today’s USDC supply of 61 billion and current fed funds rate of 4.33%, Circle makes $2.64b from its US Treasury-backed reserves. Round it up to $2.7b to include other miscellaneous fee incomes.

• Costs: Circle kicks up a hefty ~60% ($1.58b) of its total revenue to Coinbase for distribution. Call it $2.1b after accounting for operating costs of ~$500m.

• Gross profits are ~$600m. On a fully diluted basis, CRCL is currently trading at a ~46x EV/EBITDA multiple.

Coinbase makes about $1.41b (53.5% of $2.64bn) from its USDC revenue streams from Circle.

If you slap CRCL’s multiple onto that revenue stream ($1.41 * 46), the implied value comes to $65b. This already exceeds Coinbase’s total enterprise value of $60.5b, and does not yet account for the rest of Circle’s business.

All of this points to early overvaluation of CRCL, likely driven by TradFi’s appetite to gain exposure to recent bullish tailwinds around stablecoins. 

Finally, Circle’s business risks are threatened by impending rate cuts. Trump, as recently as last Friday, was urging the Fed to cut rates by 1%, Reuters reported. Unless USDC supply can outrun prospective Fed cuts, it’s hard to justify CRCL at current market prices.

— Donovan Choy

From token design and modular infra to ZK systems and economic coordination — this is where the best builders on the planet will gather. 

Names like Peter Todd, Casey Caruso, and Jeremy Rubin are already on the agenda. If you’re tracking where the space is actually going, this is the room.

📅 June 24-26 | Brooklyn