iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Recently thinking that maybe game engines should ship default terminal multiplexer configs Lots of times running the engine requires setting up multiple terminal window and it would be nice to have some pre-configured Experimenting with this idea for our engine

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

These projects continue to evolve over time Mina working to solve the data issue in very clever ways (future thread/video) Midnight has some interesting R&D on function composition So I'm excited to see both continue to grow!

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

So both Mina and Midnight provide similar functionality But they implement it very different ways, both with trade-offs! They're both cleverly engineered, which is why we've followed both of them closely 👍

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Midnight, by thinking of data & variables as the primitive (instead of function composition), makes it easy to write data-heavy apps! You can build - games (secret information) - RWAs (only reveal regulatory-relevant info) - DeFi (don't reveal your position right away) and more

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

When a user wants to update the public state, they ✖ don't reveal their private state ✅do prove something happened in their private state to allow them to update the public state ex: prove you did something to earn 50 points (not revealing it's because you built a building)

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

For example, you can represent a strategy game as some small amount of public information (ex: points, etc.) And players have some private state (their position in the map, how much gold they have, etc.)

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

(3) Midnight Midnight, instead, keeps track of a public chain (a bit more similar to Bitcoin) However, each user in Midnight has their own private state that is never shared with the rest of the blockchain

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Need data? You need to fetch it from elsewhere (ex: somebody whose node kept a backup) You can still prove the data somebody gives you is correct (since you know the latest block, aka what the end result should be) but it makes data-heavy dApps on Mina bit hard to build

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

However, I skipped an important part: what happens to the data of smart contracts? Unlike public blockchains, the data is not kept around in the blocks! Everything just gets compressed into a proof

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

So in Mina, by just a very simple concept of modelling ZK proofs of "functions" that you can "compose" we automatically are able to build this super succinct blockchain like we wanted!

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Transactions are combining proofs of multiple functions Blocks are just combining proofs of multiple txs A blockchain is just combining proofs of multiple blocks!

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Note that functions can call other functions (function "composition") In our example, to prove "foo", we need to prove "bar" first but remember: we know how to combine proofs together! So combining the proof of "bar" into a proof of "foo" is easy!

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

But how do we generate ZK proofs of smart contracts? Well, you can think of smart contracts as a list of functions So all we really need is a way to generate "proofs" of a function (which, fortunately, is a very well studied problem with known solutions)

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

As we saw earlier, we can combine proofs So this means we can now combine everything into just a single proof of the genesis block to the latest block!

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

(2) Mina Similar to how we "proved Waldo exists", what if we instead "prove" there exists a block transitions AKA, given block A, prove there exists some set of transactions that give you block B as a result Now, ever transition is a ZK proof

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

(1) Regular chains If you want to know the state of Bitcoin, you often need to sync the full Bitcoin blockchain to get full security However, this takes a lot of space on your device which isn't ideal. It's worse on chains like Ethereum, and even worse on Solana

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

We'll explain how Mina & Midnight use these in three steps: 1. How do regular chains work 2. How does Mina work 3. How does Midnight work

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Mina & Midnight both use a technique called "recursive SNARKs" that allows you to combine proofs together Conceptually, you can think of revealing you know the location of multiple Waldos across different pages at the same time

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

This gives you a way to show two things: 1. Privacy: you know where Waldo is (without revealing to your friend, as they can't see the rest of the book other than your small hole) 2. Compression: You've proven Waldo exists by only showing a small amount of info (a small hole)

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

To show both are possible, imagine a "Where's Waldo" game How to prove to your friend you found Waldo without spoiling the game for them? Answer: Cover the entire book with a big sheet of paper, and cut a small hole exactly where Waldo is

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

"ZK" stands for "Zero Knowledge Cryptography". It's a technique that gives you at least one of two things: - Private computation (required for RWA, gaming, some DeFi apps) - Massive compression (useful for L2s, bridges, data-heavy use-cases) Midnight & Mina give both

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

You've probably heard about Midnight and Mina multiple times But what are they? How do they give privacy? How can they connect to other chains? Why are they exciting? I cover it all in my latest video + thread ↓ www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vW-...

youtube.com

Midnight & Mina: what makes them interesting ZK chains?

YouTube video by Sebastien Guillemot

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

every time I find a project I'd be interested in leveraging > please don't be written in some bs language > please don't be written in some bs language > please don't be written in some bs language the project's Github page

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

It was super fun to learn about color theory, and very satisfying that it tied multiple fields of math together with delightfully surprising results Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

This means that every color generated by our tool can also be used to generate a great Material Design color scheme ! This makes it super easy to have not just one color per system in your app, But even generate colorful dashboards and subcomponents that feel color-aligned!

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Material Design has a recommendation for which color to use to create your color palette: its saturation should be above "48" and for brightness 68,69,70 no matter which color you pick, there exists a choice with saturation above 48🤯

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

In fact, brightness levels 68, 69 and 70 are the only brightness levels with a special property! Many Anrdoid apps and websites use a design system called material design created by Google It allows creating beautiful color schemes for your app on a color (ex: your brand color)

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Great! So now we know which brightness to pick! and it gives us these beautiful colors, all while having a consistent brightness!

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

So fast forwarding with some math details, it means we can use this fact to compute the entropy of every brightness level which gives the graph below, and we can see brightness=69 maximizes entropy! And remember, max entropy → closet to the uniform distribution from earlier!

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

How is this related? For a given brightness (ex: below), how likely is a color to be red? (it's probability) Well it's represented by this simple division number of red colors ---------------------- total number of colors

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

In probability, there is another concept you've probably heard of: entropy It measures the uncertainty in the state of a system Perhaps intuitively, the uniform distribution maximizes uncertainty! (every result is as likely as another, so who knows what will happen!)

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

To answer this, we'll have to pull out some math! You might remember from high school that you can map probabilities according to certain shapes (I promise this will be related) The simplest one is the uniform probability: all elements are equally likely to occur

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Fortunately (and really unexpectedly!) some brightnesses are almost perfectly distributed! This means that for these brightnesses, no matter which color you pick, you can get a really nice-looking version of it But which brightness is the most distributed?

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Great! But the animation shows us another glaring issue: some brightnesses have more colors than others! This is really bad for us, because it means if we want to pick a bright color, we basically only have the choice between yellow and green

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Fortunately, people have done the research! In fact, Google wrote a color scheme called HCT (hue, chroma, tone) that is based entirely on human-perceived brightness Using this, I generated an animation from Google's data that now groups colors by perceived brightness👍

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Well, what if you instead combine colors with how bright they are? It turns out this is hard! Colors like blue are seen by humans are "darker" than yellow This means you need to study how humans perceive brightness😅

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

One solution could be to give every chain its own color! But how do you give each chain its own random color? Picking colors at random has poor contrast (hard to read) and is jarring because of different brightnesses used (Example of a bad case attached below. Looks terrible!)

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

I often work on apps that span multiple systems It means I often have to debug apps across many systems at the same time 😔 It's not easy to find information among all the text! But what if you could add color?

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Sidequest Sunday: I wrote a library to generate beautiful colors from namespaces based on color theory I call it material-chalk because all namespaces actually get a full Material Design compliant color scheme! It turns out the math is super interesting with a really great final result! ↓

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Wake up babe a new developer productivity update just dropped Deno now supports WASM as a first class citizen! This should save a lot of headaches for Javascript devs trying to use crypto libraries

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

It didn't use to be! It slowly migrated to Rust over time

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

How it feels to work on wizardry combining multiple cryptographic techniques at once

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Did you just follow me from my post on the other app? Probably a lot of you have few followers still, so post below to find each other ↓

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

It doesn't feel particularly productive to have to redesign async/await from scratch every time you want to pull out generators to solve a problem

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I'm a bit surprised there are no good Typescript libraries for dealing with generators I does feel maybe unsolvable given generators are coupled with the custom scheduler you want, but it feels like there should be a middle ground between nothing at all and something specific like redux-saga

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

I feel like early BlueSky vibes are pretty different than early Threads vibes Threads felt like a race to be the biggest degenerate possible since the algorithm liked that BlueSky definitely has a lot more serious posts

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Merkle Search Tree are unfortunately not a great CRDT if you care either about deletions or (similarly) checking for non-existence of an element

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Sebastien Guillemot @sebastiengllmt.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

I wish tools to post on multiple platforms at once didn't cost a fortune

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