WHIR Intro

An interactive, educational guide to the WHIR protocol — the polynomial commitment scheme used inside leanMultisig for post-quantum signature aggregation on Ethereum.

A note on origin. This was made for Ream's study group session on WHIR. It is not an authoritative resource, has not been reviewed by the WHIR researchers, and may contain inaccuracies — for the precise protocol, refer to the WHIR paper and the leanMultisig source code. If you spot something wrong, please open an issue.

What is this?

This is a step-by-step visual explainer that builds up the ideas behind WHIR from scratch. No prior knowledge of cryptography or zero-knowledge proofs is assumed — just a software engineering background.

The site progresses from basic building blocks (Reed-Solomon codes, constraints, sumcheck, folding) through the full WHIR protocol loop and parameter tuning, using a running "referee scoring" example throughout. Each section includes interactive demos where you can tamper with values, fold polynomials, step through protocol iterations, and explore parameter tradeoffs.

Development

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• npm

Setup

npm install
npm run dev

The dev server runs at http://localhost:5173/.

Build

npm run build

Output goes to dist/. The production build uses base: '/whir-intro/' for GitHub Pages deployment.

Type check

npx tsc --noEmit

Lint

npx eslint src/

Tech stack

• React 19 + TypeScript
• Vite 8 (dev server + build)
• Tailwind CSS 4 (styling)
• Framer Motion (animations)
• Recharts (charts)
• KaTeX (math rendering)
• All polynomial math runs in F₁₇ (the finite field mod 17)

Project structure

src/
├── sections/       # One file per section, named S{N}_{Name}.tsx
├── components/     # Shared UI (Layout, Section, MathBlock, ui/)
├── utils/          # Math over F₁₇ (field, polynomial, sumcheck, folding)
├── data/           # Static data (verification complexity formulas)
├── sections.ts     # Navigation structure (section IDs, labels, subs)
├── App.tsx         # Page routing + section rendering
└── index.css       # Tailwind + custom theme

References

• WHIR paper: Gal Arnon, Alessandro Chiesa, Giacomo Fenzi, Eylon Yogev — ePrint 2024/1586
• STIR paper: ePrint 2024/390
• leanMultisig: github.com/leanEthereum/leanMultisig
• Giacomo Fenzi's WHIR blog: gfenzi.io/papers/whir

License

MIT