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Whitepaper Reading [Stanford] - Institutional Privacy + Cryptography Acceleration
💡About
Suffer together (in a round-table discussion), so we can also find the truth together.
4:30 - 5:30 PM: Privately Inferred Credentials - Dani (Cornell)
5:30 - 6:30 PM: Why Cryptographic Computation Needs a Compiler - Ryan (Fractalyze)
6:30 - 7:30 PM: Institutional Privacy - Brian (Miden)
📝 Papers
1. Crossroads: A Smart Contract Layer for Chain-Abstracted Assets
Crossroads turns (nearly) every cryptocurrency into an ERC-20 token on a unified platform. Applications of this framework include private payments, cross-chain DEXes, and a universal faucet (useful for AI agents developing crypto applications). Blockchain integration is permissionless, extending reach across the full ecosystem, and the requirements for integration are minimal, enabling blockchains without smart contracts such as Bitcoin or XRPL to be easily integrated.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.06525 | Summary (Coming)
🧠 Session Lead
Dani Vilardell (X): A second-year PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University, advised by Ari Juels. He studies the inherent tensions between privacy and transparency in AI, blockchain, and governance systems. Dani completed his undergraduate degree at UPC (Barcelona), where he double majored in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering.
2. Why Cryptographic Computation Needs a Compiler
Cryptographic engineering is where machine learning was before XLA: fragmented libraries, hand-written kernels, and repeated rewrites for every new proof system and hardware target. This session explores whether a domain-specific MLIR compiler can separate cryptographic logic from hardware optimization—allowing researchers to compose proving systems from reusable primitives and compile one Python implementation across different GPUs without sacrificing performance.
🧠 Session Lead: Ryan Kim (Co-founder of Fractalyze)
Bringing a background in ZK compilers, zkEVM/zkRollup systems, robotics, and ML infrastructure from A41, Lightscale, NAVER Labs, and Samsung Research.
3. Institutional Privacy - Miden
Institutional adoption of crypto is driving a new class of privacy architectures—each built on fundamentally different trust assumptions. This session breaks down three emerging approaches: permissioned networks like Canton Network, TEE-based execution frameworks like Tempo, and zk-native systems like Miden.
We’ll explore how each stack balances confidentiality, verifiability, compliance, and performance—and what it means for real-world institutional use cases.
Links: Summary
🧠 Session Lead:
Brian Seong (X): Product Manager & DevRel lead at Miden (Privacy focused network). Co-founder at Whitepaper Reading Club. He was a research engineer at Polygon Labs and co-foudned EduDAO. He's lead multiple discussions for Whitepaper Reading and built the SF Chapter!
🟢 Format
Short introduction and context setting to start.
Silent reading of the summary before discussion begins.
5-10 minute presentation to frame the key ideas.
Moderator-led discussion with no promotions.
📍Shriram Center (04-060) - Room 262
Arrillaga Alumni Center - 15 mins walk (Map)
🫶 Thank you
Prof Ruizhe Jia (Stanford)
He is an Assistant Professor in Stanford University’s Department of Management Science & Engineering. His research focuses on market microstructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), and mechanism design, studying how blockchain and financial markets can be made more efficient, secure, and fair. He earned his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Columbia University and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Mathematics from UCLA. Link
Frontier Tower (Thomas)
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📝 About Whitepaper Reading Club
We are a community of founders, researchers, and builders across Singapore, Malaysia, San Francisco, Bangkok, New York, Lagos, Taipei, and Hong Kong. We meet in person every month to read, discuss, and pressure-test the latest blockchain papers, protocols, and technical ideas.
Learn more: Website · Summaries · Calendar
We create detailed, easy-to-understand summaries for each paper and have held 80+ sessions since June 2023, covering Account Abstraction, Parallel Chains, EIPs, the Bitcoin ecosystem, and AI x Crypto. We are ecosystem-agnostic, not for profit, and focused on projects with technical, product, or social innovation.