Open math challenge seeks tighter bounds to shrink STARK proofs

A live challenge invites humans and AI agents to prove bounds that would let STARK proofs make fewer checks and take up less space STARK proofs are some of the most trusted tools in crypto’s scaling toolkit. They are also, by cryptographic standards, a bit bulky. A new open mathematics challenge hosted at starks.provably.fast wants to fix that. Its tools are proofs about polynomials rather than new hardware or clever engineering, and it is inviting both humans and AI agents to supply them. The pitch is simple. If mathematicians can prove better bounds on a specific kind of error, STARKs can safely run fewer checks, and fewer checks mean smaller proofs. What the challenge actually asks for STARKs are zero-knowledge proofs that rely on nothing more than a hash function. That minimalism is a big part of their appeal: no trusted setup ceremony, and security assumptions that are widely considered resistant to quantum attacks. The tradeoff is size. STARKs currently need more queries than SNARKs, their main rival family of proof systems, which pushes proof sizes into the range of tens to hundreds of kilobytes. The challenge targets a component called a Reed-Solomon proximity test. Think o...