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tags: EF&PSE
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# Folding-Schemes Project Plan 2024
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# Credits
This document is a conjunt work between CPerezz, arnaucube and dmpierre. (hyperlinks to be added).

# Project description

Folding-schemes team is a project within PSE that aims to do 2 major things:
1. Perform research, implement and optimize the most significant Folding Schemes published so far.
2. Implement use cases that showcase the power and leaverage that you can get while using folding schemes.

# Where do you think your project is in the product life cycle?

The project is defintely in an incubation mode.
The team is still small. But so far has achieved things that no other team, company or research group has been able to do.

Now that the core library that we develop has started to shape out and examples on how to use it and what is possible to do with it have been published. We plan to start expanding it. Covering more folding schemes and trying to upgrade performance.

# Q1-Q2 2024 in review

Within the last 6 months these have been the highlights:
- A Nova+Cyclefold final proof has been verified in the EVM: [PR#49](https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/sonobe/pull/49), [PR#66](https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/sonobe/pull/66), [PR#87](https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/sonobe/pull/87)
- Add support for Circom Frontend to define Folding circuits. [PR1](https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/sonobe/pull/71), [PR2](https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/sonobe/pull/91), [PR3](https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/sonobe/pull/101)
- The constraint cost for the decider is dramatically decreased. Allowing for a lot more use cases and possible users. https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/sonobe/pull/86
- Increase support for HyperNova scheme. https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/sonobe/pull/99
- An awesome use case example where 100k BTC blocks are verified inside Optimism. https://github.com/dmpierre/sonobe-btc
- A CLI tool is added such that all the deciders can create their own smart contracts. https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/sonobe/pull/74

# Project vision

The goal of the project is not only to help pushing the research and state of the art within the folding-schemes and IVC-based proving. But also to develop the most promising ones such that they can be compared and used by third parties in order to build their stack on the top/with it.

The work of this team should both help folding-schemes/IVC researchers to measure, and see how their ideas are brought up to real world implementations, their performance, limitations and desired improbements.
Also, should help projects that are looking forward to use these cryptographic techniques to be able to do so through our lib and implementations.

# Roadmap overview
Largely speaking, the plan is to ship a couple of well-known folding shcemes. Explore the new variants based on small-field folding and finally develop new projects as example for the community on how to use our work.

# Goals and KPI for the project

## Goals
The time bound for all these goals is half-a-year. As the team is small and it's likely that we parallelize the work between the members.
- Working IVC folding (including circuit) for `HyperNova` and `ProtoGalaxy`.
- Working decider for `HyperNova` and `ProtoGalaxy`.
- Working decider verifier contract for `HyperNova`.
- Working Plonkish -> CCS + Lookups implementation within Sonobe + formal docs/notes on CCS+Lookups.
- Working AIR -> CCS (+ Lookups) implementation within Sonobe + formal docs on the translation.
- A PoC of `Mangrove` or `LatticeFold` and some writeup with performance and other important/interesting topics of the exploration.
- One or two projects that the community can see as examples on how to use the lib and caught attention.

## Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

- More than 50% assistance (of a full room) to the one or two workshops that we plan to do for Sonobe.
- At least a couple of projects using Sonobe for their projects that want to deploy.
- Obtain benchmarks analyzing what is each scheme good/bad at to enable better comparisons.

# Items to ship in the rest of 2024

## Ordering of priorities for 2024

*List all of your team’s roadmap items, sorted from high priority to low priority.*

## High Priority
- Full implementation of `HyperNova` proof system with onchain decider verifier.
- Explore Plonkish (Zcash Halo2 version) -> CCS transfromation viability and go for a possible implementation with lookup tables included in case it seems viable and performant enough.
- Full implementation of `ProtoGalaxy` proof system with onchain decider verifier.
- AIR (AIRScript (Maiden) version) -> CCS transformation implement and good docs for it.

## Medium Priority/Long term work
- Explore other folding scheme variants (Lattices [LatticeFold] or Fri/Binius-based [Mangrove])
- Do more example projects such like `sonobe-btc`.

## Nice-to-have
- Start investing into benchmarking.
- Do some workshops or attend to events to let the community know about this efforts.
- Lookup table support for CCS comming from AIR.

# Decision points that would influence your priorities

The only major thing that could make varying these plans is that a new scheme appears that basically "kills" any other ones in a way that it doesn't make sense to continue the development of the others.

# Risks

The main risks are that some of the members can't be 100% dedicated to this project (like CPerezz, Arnau) since they have other responsibilities within PSE. Also we need the grant proposals for `winderica` and `chokkermax` to work and happen to make sure we have enough capacity to achive the aformentioned goals.

# Resource requirements

We just need the grants to go through. And with that we're good