Congratulations to @0xAlbertG (Nethermind), @nico_mnbl (zkSecurity), and Benedikt Wagner (Ethereum Foundation) on winning one of three Outstanding Paper Awards at TCC 2026, the Theory of Cryptography Conference, for "A Simplified Round-by-round Soundness Proof of FRI." FRI sits at the core of most STARK-based proof systems, including Starknet's. Its existing soundness proofs are long and hard to check. This paper gives a much simpler one, which is a step toward formally verifying the systems built on it. https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1993