# Entering the Infinite Garden – Raphaël Deknop | Onchain Soirée [1] @ KU Leuven

- Channel: [ETHBelgium](https://streameth.org/ethbelgium)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 11:33
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-7KB8iPeiApk
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KB8iPeiApk

## Description

Onchain Soirée [1] was hosted by ETHBelgium at KU Leuven on April 28, 2025; an intimate evening of lightning talks, meaningful conversations, and high-signal energy with researchers, founders, students, open source builders, lawyers, and the Web3-curious.

ETHBelgium is building Belgium’s most vibrant community of Web3 builders — one conversation, event, and hack at a time.

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## Transcript

Awesome Rafael. Thank you. Okay, so this talk will be in two small parts. I'll try to keep it uh quite short. Um so it's about entering the infinite garden. So uh also said how anyone can cultivate contribution. So without going into too much philanthropic details and all that um this was infinite garden was a term that was maybe not coined but popularized by the Ethereum Foundation and Ayam Yaguchi in several of her talks. Um but I'd like to just focus on digital gardens instead of infinite garden before. So digital gardens as uh said by Maggie Appleton in a very good blog post is a way of rethinking the way that we publish uh personal websites or blogs. So instead of having a really linear and a really timeline type of blog, it's more about having open thoughts uh notes that are just in progress learning in public. Uh so those like two concepts uh have something in common which is nurturing and in the case of the infinite garden that and the EF talk about they what do they want to nurture actually um and it started with Ethereum but I think it's applicable to many other systems but it's basically the fact that we build permissionless systems we build opensource systems Um and we encourage anyone to contribute in their own way. Not just devs, not just backend devs, but anyone at at uh many conferences. There are uh like famously DevCon and other ones. There are people from all kinds of backgrounds who are just uh working and and doing experimenting with all of this. So we talk about open systems, open source permissionless which is kind of open access and this uh is it really open in general when we see that events like this have tickets that are hundreds of dollars to enter. Um and that you you have many events that are very selective. uh and for example there was this Zuzadu event that was uh basically a pop-up city but because uh there is limited space there was uh invites only and so in that regard I think openness is a bit uh sometimes forgotten about but hopefully we have other things such as for example this event which is really open to anyone to come we have also uh open hardware we and write code that is open source of course and also academic research is famously open. We have we want to publish everything have open data open access is things that we see more and more. So this uh is kind of a way to describe the the uh openness of the infinite garden as they call it. And for anyone to enter is just trying to combine something they're good at or they love and with some contribution spirit and some community spirits. So in this second part I will try to focus on uh what I want to bring and this is a new kind of idea I've had which is called measurement inte integrity. So a bit about me before I'm currently studying uh physics in the edge I'm finishing my bachelor's this year and actually I applied to KU for the masters next year so hopefully my application will be accepted. Um and there I was I could experiment with a few systems and just learning stuff but also on the side I've been learning about programming um more about ZK apps. So I've done um one app with uh PSC so privacy and scaling explosions team of the Ethereum Foundation which was basically scanning a European ID card on the back of the phone and using uh ZK proof to generate uh parts proof of part of the data. So the data that you have on your card is signed by the government but then we added selective disclosure to some of that data. But anyway, I wanted to try to combine those two interests of mine, those two concepts. And this would be my way of contributing to that infinite garden as we call it. So one question that has been on my mind for the past few months is the following. Is it possible to prove the result of a measurement? And if so, how? What do I mean by that? So for now in academic research the way it's done is that some researchers do some experiments measure it put the results in a paper describe everything describe the methodology and then put the results. So how can we confirm this? For now the way it's done is that we just can replicate the experiment and hopefully have the same results. But this is something that is um sometimes lengthy and sometimes hard to do. There was this famous semiconductor experiment that uh was all over the place at some point that researchers claimed that they had uh I don't remember uh which which properties it has but it took some time to replicate it. So how could we do this? How it would be nice to try to have a way to publish an experiment and then attach a proof that the measurement results are correct which is seems impossible for now it's done with uh digital documents. So I as I said we have uh initiatives like uh proving zik proving having selective disclosure of data that was on an ID card but we have other initiatives for example we have zk email that can generate zika proof selective disclosure on parts of an email. We also had an effort of Dapiccom which was an emulator for uh I think it was an NES console uh which basically allowed you to prove that uh the you run a computation correctly. So you could prove that you play the game in a specific way. uh we have zero spark that also did zkdsa but all of those I mean maybe apart from dappiccom uh start with inputs that are digital that are created digitally email an email is created in the digital word for example ECDSA a digital signature is also so what different differentiates physical from numerical systems so how could we make sure For example, if I measure uh the temperature at this point in space, how could I try to prove that the result I got was correct? So, as I said, the problem stems from digitizing the the data. So, trying to convert that physical data, that measurement into some digital one because we know that with digital data, we can already have ZK uh properties. So the difference is I think this is an idea and just thoughts I want to to share but uh it stems it the the difference might be the ability to solve it. So when we measure something uh what prevents us from just generating mock data and generating fake inputs. Uh so for example at some point we had Face ID which was spoofable by using just a picture uh and then we had 3D uh data with I think this was a face ID by Apple and then I think in some cases is still spoofable as well. Um but how could we make sure that something is really physically there and what's the difference? So if you find a system where we cannot simulate it but that we can measure it, the only way that we could uh there would be no way to actually create fake inputs that uh solve like are solutions to a system of equations because nature solves equation all the time whether we want it or not. we're just trying to discover it. And so one thing I I thought about is maybe using systems where we cannot uh actually simulate it but we can measure it in a more precise way and then check if it obeys a nature equations. So if that is is is that some criteria that's um like satisfied, we could basically have some data, some measurement data that says, "Oh, the only way I could have gotten this data is by measuring it because there was no way with the current computer uh power in the world, there is no way that I could have generated it and it still obeys some physical equations. uh that exist now. So that's uh sometimes a bit hard to to go into to think about but it's at least some some some topic I wanted to to talk about uh and why is also because it's my kind of an example uh and also by introducing me to say how I can contribute to that in fin garden and uh this may be very niche but at least I try to bring some two things together and my passion for physics, my passion for programming and ZK proofs and trying to blend them together and I think that's famously one way of doing innovation is by bringing topics together. Um, so I think that might be my contribution and the way you might contribute or anyone might contribute is by just taking some topics you're passionate about, knowledgeable about ideally and then just try to combine them. Um, so yeah, that was my yeah that was my last slide. So if anyone has question after or just wants to talk about that topic, I'm I'm just free to talk about it. Thanks. Yep.