In this episode Fredrik sits down with Péter Szilágyi , lead developer of go-ethereum to talk about his background, what it means to be a Core Dev and some of the struggles of maintaining an open source project. Special thanks to the sponsor of this episode Trail of Bits . If you're interested in hardware wallet security, check out their article 10 Rules for the Secure Use of Cryptocurrency Hardware Wallets ....
In this week's episode, we are joined by a couple greats in the space, Gavin Wood and Vlad Zamfir , to debate the merits of on-chain vs off-chain governance. If you want more, catch their governance panel at Web3Summit (which happened right before our interview). Thanks to our sponsor Trail of Bits - find out more about their upcoming event on their blog: https://blog.trailofbits.com/ And support Zero Knowledge on Patreon - https://patreon.com/zeroknowledge...
In this episode, we sit down with Julian Loss, a researcher at Spacemesh, to explore DAGs, the Proof-of-Spacetime idea and the Spacemesh project. Links: Spacemesh on twitter SoK: A Consensus Taxonomy in the Blockchain Era Thanks to our Sponsor POA Network! Check out their blog to find out more about their new blockchain consensus protocol, HoneyBadger BFT...
In this special 50th episode, we invite our friend Zooko to the podcast to chat about his background and explore the history of Zerocoin and Zcash. We dig into the inner workings of Zcash, the trusted setup, the sapling upgrade, and what the future of the project might look like! The Sapling upgrade promises to reduce the proving times of the zk-SNARKs from 37 seconds to 2.3 seconds by replacing the SHA256 hash function with an improved performance Pedersen hash function called Bowe-Hopwood Pede...
In this Blockchain 101 episode, we sit down with Axel Ericsson of Vest (previously 1Protocol) to talk about Cryptoeconomic Primitives, incentive models, designing smart equilibria, and staking. Links: Game Theory Game Vest on Twitter Axel on Twitter Vest Website
In this episode, we sit down with Taylor Monahan of MyCrypto, to discuss how the project got started and share some customer support horror stories. We also reflect on the challenge of building UX that works for people while maintaining the spirit of decentralization, and finally, where she sees the space developing. Links: Taylor on Twitter MyCrypto Solidity Honeypots You can also find the Slither blog post from this week's sponsor Trail of Bits HERE...
In this episode, we sit down with Richard Craib from Numerai to talk about crowdsourcing the role of a quant, how Numerai developed and where it is going, Dapp adoption in Ethereum and what it's like to build a hedge fund fulled by a crypto token. He also shares the new project Erasure - a decentralized data marketplace for financial predictions. Follow Richard on Twitter Learn more about Numerai...
We finally sit down with Gavin to go through a bit of what Parity has been working on with Polkadot and Substrate. We talk about Polkadot early history and who was involved and where the idea spawned, up to coding practices and where Substrate became a thing. If you want to know more, links below. Meta-link of Polkadot Resources Substrate In A Nutshell Vitalik Tweet-storm about Sharding History...
In this week's episode, we sit down with Henri Pihkala from Streamr to talk p2p messaging and what it means. We cover topics like pubsub, compare it to whisper, talk about the needs of different messaging systems as well as dig into why one would want to decentralize something like this. Finally we take a look at the data marketplace idea that streamr is trying out and what potential use-cases that could have....
In this episode, we are joined by Tomasz Drwięga , a Core Developer at Parity Technologies, to discuss the lifecycle of a transaction on the Ethereum network and how the mempool works. We will be covering the following topics: What a mempool/transaction queue/transaction pool is. How a transaction reaches a mempool and what the mempool does with it. Looking at what causes the CPU increase and delays in the network. What happens when a transaction gets stuck. Gossip. The security properties of th...
In this episode, we chat with Hudson Jameson of the Ethereum Foundation about how he got involved in the space, the EIP process, and the challenges of decision making in the decentralised space. In decentralised communities, decision making and information gathering can be a uniquely difficult endeavor. Using some of the ideas from other open source communities as well as some new concepts emerging specifically for decentralised spaces, the Ethereum core devs are developing new tools to make the...
In this episode, we sit down with Mitch Kosowski, director of product at ETHPrize and Andrew Cravenho, project leader at POA Network. We cover ETHPrize's inception and activity, the way that pain points in the community are identified, and the open source block explorer project that POA Network is building with an ETHPrize bounty. ETHPrize developed out of a series of interviews with devs in the community. Unlike traditional grants, ETHPrize aims to use bounties, sub-communities and working grou...
In this episode, we had a chance to speak with Jacob Eberhardt about his work on Zokrates and the Zero Knowledge Proof Toolkit. Zokrates is a programming language & toolbox for zkSNARKS on Ethereum Note: this is a relatively advanced episode as part of our Zero Knowledge Series. For more on the Zokrates project, please explore the following material: Zokrates Github - https://github.com/JacobEberhardt/ZoKrates Devcon Presentation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSlrywb5J_0 Berlin Ethereum ...
In this episode, we speak to Benedikt Bünz , the author of Bulletproofs , about this novel zero knowledge proof system as well as about Verifiable Delay Functions . This is part of our Zero Knowledge Series, where we explore some of the new research in the space of Zero Knowledge research and the emerging concepts. Follow Bulletproof development & Benedikt on twitter Read transcript...
In this episode, we speak with Matthew Di Ferrante of the smart contract auditing firm Zero Knowledge Labs about security in the blockchain. Specifically we discuss how he first got interested in security and blockchain technology, some of the cases that have happened in the last few years and how the Ethereum security team responds to a security event. If you want to learn more from Matt you can follow him here This week's episode went long, so we are including this link to a bonus piece on gov...
In this episode, we sit down with Howard Wu to explore zkSNARKs, the challenges in the application of this awesome technology, the new ideas emerging for how to scale them and his latest work on DIZK. This is the 2nd in our ongoing series about Zero Knowledge technologies. To get a good sense of Zero Knowledge Proofs, please listen to our introduction to the topic in Episode 21 . Howard Wu is an early member of Blockchain at Berkeley , the co-author of Libsnark , and a managing partner of Dekryp...
In this episode, we sit down with Raul & Preston from Prysmatic Labs to discuss sharding, the evolution of the spec, Ethereum 2.0, what happens to a side chain during a hard fork, and whats coming up for this important scaling solution. Prysmatic Labs is building a sharding solution in Go and the Ethereum 2.0 side chain that is set to combine PoS + Sharding. Links: https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/how-to-scale-ethereum-sharding-explained-ba2e283b7fce https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/ethere...
In this episode, we speak with Eric Tang from Livepeer about the need for off-chain computation, what scenarios make sense for off-chain and which can work on-chain, how Livepeer sees its role in the ecosystem and how they aim to help more people livestream in a decentralised way. Read more about Livepeer here If you want to get involved with the project, you can do so here Check out this paper by Jacob Eberhardt about off-chain computation. http://www.ise.tu-berlin.de/fileadmin/fg308/publicatio...
In this episode, we sit down with Ethan (Bucky) Buchman, co-founder & CTO of Tendermint, to talk about testnets. We look into what they are, what purpose they serve and cover examples from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos and Polkadot. Links Testnets on Karl.tech The latest gossip on BFT consensus Bitcoin Testnet Ropsten Testnet Kovan Testnet Rinkeby Testnet Join the Cosmos testnet Join the Polkadot testnet...
In this episode, we dig into what the term smart contract means with our guest James Prestwich. First introduced in 1994 by Nick Szabo, smart contracts have inspired whole ecosystems of companies and projects to start thinking about blockchain in much bigger terms. We explore what the term 'smart contract' means, where it comes from, some use cases and some of the new challenges that come along with it. Follow James on twitter @_prestwich...
In this episode we sit down with Ele and Alexis from OSCoin to talk about what they are building and the general problem of open source incentivization. We dig into the incentivization and governance models they imagine for the Open Source world as well as some technical aspects of the platform they intend to build. Links: OScoin Social Architecture - Building On-line Communities Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure Elinor Ostrom Radical Markets Uprooting Capital...
In this week's episode, we cover the Zcon0 conference in Montreal. In our interviews with some of the participants, we explore the zcash community, projects actually implementing zero knowledge proofs, and some of the most exciting ideas to be generated at the event! See the talks here Links: Bolt Coda Dekrypt Capital Antonie Hodge Peter Van Valkenburgh Liz Steininger J Ayo Akinyele Rachel Rose O'leary Awa Sun Yin Hudson Jameson Benedikt Bünz Agoric Str4d Nicola Greco Zooko...
In this introductory episode, we discuss what makes up blocks and block headers. We also cover a bit about state vs history, what exactly makes up a transaction and do a quick intro to a Merkle Tree. For more, please check out these resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_160oMzblY8 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/268/ethereum-block-architecture https://www.coursera.org/lecture/cryptocurrency/bitcoin-blocks-I5uc7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkletree...
In this episode, we speak with Jack du Rose and Aron Fischer from Colony about governance and open organizations. Colony is building an infrastructure based on the Ethereum blockchain that aims to revamp the way projects and organizations collaborate, promising to make HR and project management more open, fair and efficient. We discuss different ways in which the ideas around colony could be used to created shared and open organisations, how reputation is built as well as discuss their thougths ...
In this episode, Griff Green shares his experience of working through The DAO hack, the white hat hacker group & Giveth. Through his telling of this story, we are given a front row seat to one of the most exciting events in ethereum and general blockchain history. These events also set the stage for a lot of the decisions, attitudes, rifts and relationships that have since taken hold - from the emergence of the white hat hacker group, the currency split, to the attitude towards governance an...
In this week's episode, we share our interviews from ETHBuenosAires, the 3rd instalment of the ETHGlobal Hackathon series. Through these conversations with the participants, sponsors and organizers, we found out more about the Buenos Aires Blockchain scene, captured the spirit of the ETHGlobal series and learned about some amazing new ideas and hackathon projects This was recorded during the event, but you can watch the winners presenting HERE More links: EthBuenosAires Website & Twitter Kim...
Coming to you from Buenos Aires, we sit down with Demi and Facu from Zeppelin Solutions to talk developer experience, upgradability and how they aim to make running software on blockchains simple, fast and error free. We discuss their products - OpenZeppelin, a framework of reusable smart contracts, and ZeppelinOS, an operating system designed specifically for smart contracts - and how these projects have emerged from their work as auditors on some of the most important projects in the space. Th...
In this episode, we sit down with Lane Rettig and Alex Beregszaszi from the eWasm team at the Ethereum Foundation to talk about WebAssembly (Wasm). We explore why Wasm was chosen as the instruction set of the future for Ethereum, what it means to switch instructions sets and why you would want to go with one over another. We also dig into Wasm specifics and tooling. If you want to learn more about Wasm, check out some of the links below: Official Wasm website eWasm design repo where there are do...
In this episode, we catch up with Phil Daian once again to dig deeper into the idea of cryptocommodities and storage rent. Cryptocommodities are defined as the resources used for blockchain transactions - for example blockchain memory or computation (such as Ethereum's gas) - and storage rent is the idea of issuing a payment for use of these resources per unit of time instead of as a one-time fee. We discuss how the storage rent idea is becoming increasingly relevant as blockchain technology bec...
In this special episode, we share a number of short interviews we did with the participants of the Web3 UX Unconference which followed Edcon last week in Toronto. Featuring Dan Finlay from Metamask, Alex van de Sande from the Ethereum Foundation, Ric Burton from Balance, Philippe Castonguay, Jonny Howle from Uport, Dan Tsui and Bryant Eisenbach, we explore the topic of UX in the blockchain space. Thanks to guest co-host Maciej Hirsz ! Find & follow the guests on Twitter: www.twitter.com/danf...
