This week I have mostly read about the verkle tries, pedersen commitment and IPA. I'm trying to understand how these crypto primitives work.

Also, I have been trying to onboard few people from the fellowship into the Verkle Tries in Java, so hopefully we will see more progress over there in coming weeks/months. Chatted with people, we will probably organize a meeting next week(s).

One thing I tried to do is to get into Axioms open source program and do the Verkle Tries crypto primitives as a member of that program where I can learn from experts on cryptography and circuit implemnetation. Task was to create a program in circom so here's the implmentation:
https://gist.github.com/dragan2234/8e229506736bf5077fdd7af79a7e17f8

Not easy, spent 2-3 days trying to understand and do something, and had some output in the end (not correct still).

Also asked some questions regarding verkle-tries implementation in-circuit in verkle-trie-migration eth R&D discord channel and got the answer from one person working on the rollup. So maybe it make sense to do the verkle primitives in halo2 and get some benchmarks how it compares to MPT and how long it takes to prove it.

Although main purpose of verkle tries is to achieve weak statelessness for ethereum, it's also inline with scaling solutions for ethereum (rollups zkevms and pse zkevm).

Some reasources - this series is very good for beginners, easy to understand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TFEBuANioo&ab_channel=OpenZeppelin

Book that I'm reading on and off:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fdbb09f31d71c1227082339/t/5ff394720493bd28278889c6/1609798774687/PairingsForBeginners.pdf

Next 2 weeks i'll be on vacation so not sure won't spend much time on work, but will try to stay active and work part-time.