Quick setup and test

After cloning locally, run forge install and npm install to install dependencies. Be sure to already have circom installed.

To quickly run tests:

• npm run build: which compiles the circuits, downloads phase 1 and 2 of the trusted setup, generate the r1cs and zkey files and generates the solidity verifier contracts.
• npm run test: Same as forge test -vvv --gas-report.
• forge test -vvv --gas-report: Runs all tests (Solidity, Inline assembly and Huff implementation tests).
  • --mc ZycloneSolidityTest: Test solidity implementation.
  • --mc ZycloneInlineAssemblyTest: Test Inline assembly implementataion.
  • --mc ZycloneHuffTest: Test the Huff implementation.

Each of the implementation's test inherit a base test Zyclone.t.sol which holds all the tests. The individual test files for each implementation only updates the zyclone instance to be used for testing.

Zyclone 🌀

Zyclone is a Mixer similar to Tornado Cash but with some extra modifications to its approach in order to achieve the significant gas savings listed below. In comparison it is 500% cheaper than Tornado cash to use.

General Benchmarks

Version	Creation code size	Creation gas cost	Runtime code size
Tornado Cash	5,438 bytes	3,449,416	4128 bytes
Zyclone Huff impl	1,932 bytes	400,082	1888 bytes

Runtime (Function call) benchmarks

Version	Deposit	Withdraw
Tornado Cash	1088354	301233
Zyclone Huff impl	229016	249780

Differences

• Different and more efficient hash function and hash generation patterns:

  Tornado cash uses pedersonHash(secret, nullifier) and pedersonHash(nullifier) for generation of valid commitment and nullifer hashes respectively. Zyclone on the other hand uses poseidonHash(nullifier, 0) and poseidonHash(nullifier, 1, leafIndex) instead.

  An advantage of this approach is that it supports nullifer reuse as no leafIndex can be owned by 2 commitmentHashes in the tree (even if it's the same commitmentHash, the tree is append-only), their nullifierHash would never be the same. The current version of Tornado Cash does not stop you from using the same nullifier, but if done, the user won't be able to withdraw their tokens the second time. This approach greatly reduces chance of loss of money. Though current Tornado cash stops you from reusing the same commitment hash, if the user changes the secret but forget to change the nullifier, this still holds.

• Depositing with reduced onchain computation:

  To deposit into Tornado cash, the user's commitment hash is added to the tree onchain and MiMCSponge is used to hash nodes, this can be very expensive as it involves a lot of loops and 20 external calls to the MiMCSponge contract, then it also updates more than 22 storage variables. This can be very expensive to use.

  Zyclone uses a different approach, rather than performing all these computation onchain, why not let the user do it themselves and prove to the contract that they did it correctly using zkSNARKs. Basically, the user would reconstruct the current state of the merkle tree, add their commitment hash to it, then parse in the necessary signals to generate a proof which can be verified onchain, if this verification checks out, the root is updated to be the new root they parsed in. This way the only data needed to be stored onchain and updated is 1 storage slot per deposit.

Huff Code Methodology and Setup

This codebase was implemented from ground up starting with a solidity version, then an intermediate representation using inline assembly for complex functions before implementing in huff. This also means there's a solidity and yul reference for quick scanning of the codebase.

Each relevant external function is heavily documented with a well defined calldata layout.

The code also follows the pattern of 1 opcode per line and stack comments for easier readability

In the huff folder, it is separated into 6 files

• Utils.huff: Which holds all the utilities (slot getters, internal and private functions) used across the rest of the huff codebase
• Getters.huff: Holds the macro implementation of the external getter functions for relevant storage and immutable variables
• Deposit.huff: Holds the macro implementation of commit, clear and deposit external functions
• Withdraw.huff: Holds the macro implementation of withdraw function.
• Zyclone.huff: Holds the interface definitions, events, constants and function dispatcher used by the rest of the huff codebase.
  • It imports the files listed above and acts as an abstract contract that can be used in a modular way for ETH mixers and ERC20 mixers alike
• ETHZyclone.huff: Inherits Zyclone.huff abstract huff file and implements processDeposit and processWithdraw to make it work as an ETH mixer. Also, it holds the constructor code.

Circuits ⚡️

• Withdraw circuit:

  The withdraw circuit works exactly the same as that of Tornado cash except that Zyclone checks for pederson(nullifier, 0) and pederson(nullifier, 1, base10(pathIndices)) to constrain correct commitmentHashes and nullifierHashes.

• Deposit circuit: This is the interesting bit,

  • Firstly, the user needs to reconstruct the merkle tree locally by getting all past commitment hashes (this is available via events or an open source data base).
  • Next, they add their commitment hash to the tree and store the pathElements, pathIndices used to add it to the current root, they also store this root.
  • Next, they also store the top node pair that hash up to the current root. This is required and one of it must be equal to the top pathElement. This is important to ensure that the root the user inserted their commitment hash into is actually the current root as provided by the contract when verifying onchain. If not added, a malicious user can create their own merkle tree which they know the nullifiers to and update the onchain root and sweep the contract.
  • The circuit then verifies the above checks. In summary:
    • pederson(topNodes[0], topNodes[1]) == currentRoot
    • topNodes[0] == pathElements[levels - 1] || topNodes[1] == pathElements[levels - 1]
    • currentRoot.insert(commitmentHash) == newRoot, when insert() returns the new merkle root

Team 🐴

• Tanim0la
• Michael Amadi
• Jesserc