Team Novi is a three-month exploratory effort by 0xPARC Research and PSE to establish research and infrastructure priorities in the Nova ecosystem, in preparation for major resource investments in Nova infrastructure projects later this year. Team Novi connects contributors from across the stack: researchers, infrastructure developers, tooling specialists, application developers, and educators and communicators.

Tentatively, Team Novi will run from May 1st through July (end date TBD). We’ll kick off initial discussions at ZK Week at Zuzalu in Montenegro, meet virtually throughout this period, and aim to conclude with an in-person meetup in Europe in Summer 2023.

For a few examples, previous 0xPARC working groups have included:

• PARC Squad, which has led to our efforts around Nova.
  • Though the scope of Team Novi is more tightly focused and managed than PARC Squad, which was even more exploratory in nature!
• ZK Identity Working Group, which has led to Attestations Exploration Group and PCD Team.
• Ember / On-Chain Gaming Grants Pool, which has led to Lattice.

Through these working groups, we create “Schelling Points” for collaboration between multiple teams and multiple efforts across the stack. We bring together a broad community of collaborating orgs and individuals who work together to advance an ecosystem-wide research agenda. With team Novi, we’ll build surface to collaborate and seed the new Nova ecosystem on all layers: from experimental research to production applications in tight feedback loops with one another.

Goals

We believe that Nova may be the next PLONK: a set of tools and techniques that the applied zero-knowledge community can rally and find synergies around, due to the simplicity, modularity, and performance of the core ideas. For more on this, see the document below.

Why Nova?

In the long run, we aim to accelerate Nova-ish technology and bring it to production, and to structure the ecosystem such that critical infrastructure is built by ecosystem-aligned actors—rather than a single team that is beholden to a single application or narrow mandate.

In light of this, Team Novi as an exploratory effort has three primary goals:

• Produce tools, infrastructure, research, and documentation to accelerate our understanding of Nova and ZK recursion ecosystem priorities in the near term.
• Connect efforts at multiple levels of the stack to create feedback loops, to ensure that these research, infrastructure, and tooling efforts are grounded in real end-developer and end-user impact.
• Ultimately: pave the way for a set of focused and committed Nova ecosystem efforts, beginning this summer. This may include an effort to build a robust proving system library or a substantial application.

Achieving the final goal means building both conviction in, as well as sufficient expertise to take on, a well-specified set of critical Nova ecosystem priorities.

Scope, Projects, and Deliverables

Team Novi aims to progress on four (very overlapping) categories. In summary, these are:

• Research. This includes projects that introduce new potential capabilities for Nova-ish systems: Paranova, folding-friendly lookups, Nova on-chain, Supernova extensions, and similar.
• Tooling. This includes three sub-layers. A first layer is the development of a more robust proving library, approaching production-grade. A second layer is explorations on DSL or languages. A final layer is language tooling—IDEs, REPLs, package management.