Newsletter October

Statebox Studio in VS Code

We are developing a new version of Statebox Studio in the form of a Visual Studio Code extension pack. This will allow you to develop with Statebox, both locally and in the cloud, using all of VS code's features, such as version control and live online collaboration. Statebox Studio for VS code will support the definition of typed processes (contracts), and include functionality for generating typed APIs based on our Typedefs project.

Zk-SNARKS Paper

The new paper Mapping Finite State Machines to zk-SNARKS using Category Theory provides the theoretical backbone of our work supported by an Ethereum Foundation grant. More precisely, it details a categorical procedure to turn graphs corresponding to state spaces of finite state machines into boolean circuits, leveraging on the fact that boolean circuits can be easily turned into zk-SNARKS. The paper was shortly presented at the Devcon5 in Osaka, Japan and will soon be submitted to various conferences. For an overview of our research efforts, check https://statebox.org/research/.

Documentation on Lenses

If you are interested in lenses and optics, this blogpost and the follow-up which draw on collaborations from the 3rd Statebox summit might be worthy of your attention.

Marco writes: "At the Statebox summit I was very curious to talk to other people more skilled than me about lawful generic lenses. It turned out this was a really interesting thing to do, since it seems we now have a good idea on how to solve the above issues. I really need to thank Jules Hedges, David Spivak, Brendan Fong, Christina Vasilakopoulou, Eliana Lorch, Andre Knispel and everyone else who was there for contributing to what follows."

What is a Category @ Web3Summit

Our presentation from the Web3Summit is finally online. We would like to draw your attention to the most practical definition of a category, provided by Jelle during his talk. This should serve as an insightful angle on how to transfer knowledge about category theory both for experts and beginners alike.