211: Aleph Zero with Matthew Niemerg

Matthew Niemerg, Ph.D., is the co-founder and president of Aleph Zero Foundation—a Swiss non-profit offering a new infrastructure layer with a scalable plug-and-play privacy solution leveraging zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) and Secure Multiparty Computation (sMPC). Mathew is also a Ph.D. in Mathematics in the area of numerical algebraic geometry, a Simons-Berkeley Fellow, and an IBM Center of Excellence Fellow in High-Performance Computing.

Aleph Zero is a new infrastructure PoS infrastructure layer based on an original, peer-reviewed consensus protocol. It’ll be the first privacy solution to combine zk-SNARKs and sMPC. Collectively, these tools work to cancel out the other’s drawbacks. zk-SNARKs allow for basic transfers but do not allow multi-user interactions. Whereas sMPC can be prohibitively slow on its own but allows for multiple participants. Merged, they create the basis for Liminal— a fast, secure, and highly private framework from which users can gain true privacy and where developers can stage Web 3.0 projects.