In this episode, Anna chats with Robert Habermeier , one of the co-founders of Polkadot and an engineer at Parity Technology, about his early experience with Rust and cryptography, as well as the work he did at Parity on Warp Sync and Lightclients. We then discuss how this helped inspire some of the concepts and design of the Polkadot protocol. We also chat about some of the exciting concepts that he is discovering along the way - such as new architectures to promote interchain security, Trust W...
Jun 26, 2019•1 hr 8 min
In this week's episode we chat with two of the people behind the Graphene project , Chia-Che Tsai of Texas A&M University and Golem developer Lukasz Glen, about TEEs, Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX), and the way the Graphene project aims to make it easier for devs to interact with these hardware enclaves. Graphene started as a research project at Stony Brook University, led by Chia-Che Tsai and Don Porter, about emerging hardware platforms. In 2015, Intel Labs recognized the po...
Jun 19, 2019•54 min
In this week’s episode, we meet with Dominic Tarr , a protocol designer and security auditor at Least Authority who works on Scuttlebutt - a decentralized secure gossip platform. We discuss P2P messaging and the challenges of sending messages within a p2p network in a truly decentralised manner. Here are some links we mention: https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf For more on Scuttlebutt, please have a look at these resources. ht...
Jun 12, 2019•48 min
In this week's episode, Anna sits down with Joe Lallouz and Aaron Henshaw from Bison Trails - a validator infrastructure company based in NYC. Recorded during the NYC blockchain week, we chatted about the latest PoS systems to launch, what it means to be a validator, how the incentive structures can impact the ecosystem development and potential futures for this uncharted validator landscape. Thank you to this week's sponsor - Event Horizon Event Horizon is a Energy Blockchain event happening in...
Jun 05, 2019•1 hr 3 min
In this week's episode, we sit down with Liz Steininger and Chris Wood from Least Authority to discuss the state of privacy today, the case for private crypto subscription payments and their P4 proposal. The Private Periodic Payment Protocol, P4, uses the shielded account feature of Zcash to provide a fully decentralised method for recurring end-to-end private cryptocurrency payments. Links mentioned: Article about Tim Berners Lee wanting a decentralized web The P4 Paper If you like what we do: ...
May 29, 2019•1 hr 1 min
In this week's episode, Anna sits down with Sunny Aggarwal to talk about his journey into blockchain, the beginnings of Blockchain at Berkeley, how he discovered Cosmos, his role as a validator and as a podcast co-host. We discuss: Coursera course that Sunny mentions https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking Blockchain at Berkeley https://blockchain.berkeley.edu/ Cosmos https://cosmos.network/ Sikka https://www.sikka.tech/ Epicenter Podcast https://epicenter.tv/ If you like what we do: Follow...
May 22, 2019•1 hr 7 min
In this week, we sit down with Kevin Owocki, co-founder of gitcoin, to have a look at how open source blockchain development is funded. We cover the different methods for funding open source work, what has worked in the past, what hasn’t, how funding blockchain projects can be quite different and what people are experimenting with today. We discuss: EIP1337 Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure A handy guide to financial support for open source Funding through fou...
May 15, 2019•1 hr 12 min
In this week’s episode, we welcome special guest Sean Bowe. Sean is an engineer at the Electric Coin Company and the author of the Sprout and Sapling Zcash trusted set ups and much of the underlying cryptography of the protocol. We had a chance to chat about his history, what got him into the topic, some of the joys & challenges to working with SNARKs, and what ideas are inspiring him. We also covered the story of Zcash and the Powers of Tau trusted set up, MPCs, the story of the bug, SONICs...
May 08, 2019•1 hr 31 min
In this week’s episode, we sit down with Zac Williamson of the Aztec Protocol to discuss zero knowledge tools, range proofs, the Aztec Protocol, the different approaches to bringing privacy to ethereum, and how standards in the space are emerging. Check out Zac's talk at the ZK Summit for more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIg2aJQqNNc&feature=youtu.be Here was our episode with Benedikt Bunz talking about Bulletproofs As well as Zokrates and Matter Labs Thanks again to this week's sponsor ...
May 01, 2019•45 min
In this week's episode, we sit down with Justin Drake , researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, to discuss randomness in blockchain, how it can be created and what adversarial models exist. We also discuss the random beacon and how that concept has evolved in the development of ETH2.0 Our initial definition of randomness in cryptography comes largely from this article by cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-production/ Check out Justin Drake's DevCon 4 talk https://w...
Apr 24, 2019•58 min
In this week's episode, we invite J. Ayo Akinyele to the podcast. Ayo is a co-Founder of Bolt Labs which will be focused on developing the Bolt Protocol , a privacy preserving layer 2 approach for anonymous micropayments, which is similar to Lightning Network. Bolt, which stands for Blind, Offchain, Lightweight, Transactions, could be used for both scaling zcash or providing a scalable privacy solution for other chains. Here are some additional resources: Original Bolt Paper by Matthew Green and...
Apr 17, 2019•57 min
In this week's episode, we sit down with the Alex Vlasov and Alex Gluchowski from Matter Labs to discuss their approach to using zkSNARKs for scaling the transaction processing capacity of Ethereum. We chat about the inspiration for the Roll-up project, the Matter Labs implementation, their proposed Franklin network and more. To learn about the project check out: https://matter-labs.io/ and their github If you want to find out more about the Roll-up project mentioned, it can be found here: https...
Apr 10, 2019•1 hr 3 min
In this week's episode, we speak with Julian Arni about Radicle, a decentralized alternative to Github built on IPFS. Radicle is both a programming language and a set of tools to enable decentralised open source software development. We go deep into this project, it's hope to impact open source development and also touch on the societal questions that inspired it. Here is a short tweet that summarizes it well. The project can be found on twitter and website If you like what we do: Follow us on T...
Apr 03, 2019•1 hr
In this interview, we chat with Rune Christensen from MakerDAO about stablecoins, MakerDAO’s take on this concept, the peg and how this is maintained, security, oracles and more. Here are a few of the terms that we discuss in the episode: DAI: a crypto asset-backed token pegged to the USD — it is designed to maintain a stable value. MKR: Valuebearing, tradeable token. As a governance token, MKR holders have the responsibility of making risk based decisions that will influence the future health o...
Mar 27, 2019•1 hr 12 min
In this week's episode, we sit down with Sam Williams of Arweave to chat about their novel approach to decentralised storage. We discuss incentivising data storage, the concept of the permaweb, and how to properly decentralise the internet archives. If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast Support us on Patreon - https://www.pat...
Mar 20, 2019•1 hr 3 min
In this week's special episode, Anna pops over to EthCC - the Ethereum Community Conference - to find out what's on people's minds. Speaking with Boris Mann , Maria Paula Fernandez , Hudson Jameson , Sunny Aggarwal , Yalda Mousavinia , and Peter Mauric , these conversations centre around decision making in the decentralised space, the role of transparency, the different organisations and groups that have formed in Ethereum to help make decisions, how compensation can play a role, the code of con...
Mar 13, 2019•1 hr 5 min
In this week's episode, we sit down with Martin Lundfall from Dapphub & MakerDAO to discuss formal verification - a topic request that comes directly from the Zero Knowledge audience. We cover what formal verification is, where it makes sense, where it doesn't, the k-framework, how different this approach is to the "move fast and break things" approach, and much more. Here are some of articles and videos we mention: Is a type a lifebuoy or a lamp? https://github.com/dapphub/klab https://gith...
Mar 06, 2019•1 hr 3 min
In this week's episode, Anna and Fredrik chat with Danny Ryan from the Ethereum Foundation about the ETH2.0 project. We cover how ETH2.0 came to be, how it works, the new roadmap, and where the project is headed. Useful resources: Our last episode on ETH2.0 with Prysmatic Labs ETH2.0 Specs Ethresearch Forum Barry Whitehat's Rollup Project Cosmos' Game of Stakes Our event, the Zero Knowledge Summit is happening on March 22 - if you are a dev, researcher or founder working on these topics and want...
Feb 27, 2019•1 hr 6 min
In this week’s episode, we sit down with Igor Barinov from POA Network and Austin Griffith from Gitcoin Labs to discuss bridges, xDai - the new side-chain where DAI is the native token - and Austin's super simple Burner Wallet. Bridges are a wide topic and with this conversation we try to give some insight into what they are and how they work. We look at xDai as one concrete example of such a bridged side-chain and Austin talks about his burner wallet that can provide a super snappy nice UX than...
Feb 20, 2019•1 hr 3 min
In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with Jenna Zenk , the CTO of Melonport , to discuss her background, the path to the melon protocol, the challenges of building sophisticated smart contracts and what it means to release a decentralised protocol into the wild. This was recorded soon after the M1 conference in Zug. A few resources to check out: Melonomics Blog posts The Melon Governance explained TechCrunch writes about Melon's technical council Thanks again to this week's sponsor Neufund . I...
Feb 13, 2019•59 min
In this episode, we sit down with Bogdan Opanchuk and John "Tux" Pacific from NuCypher to chat about their threshold proxy-encryption technology, how the project aims to provide privacy infrastructure, dig into their nuFHE scheme and explore far along FHE research, the cryptographic "holy grail", really is. Here are some papers we mention in the podcast: Matt Green’s blog post “Wonk post: Circular security“ BBS98 A FULLY HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION SCHEME - Gentry 2009 https://crypto.stanford.edu/cra...
Feb 06, 2019•1 hr
In this episode, we discuss tokens, token standards and the sometimes confusing ERC process. We cover some of the most popular token standards and discuss what it takes to design a standard and get this accepted by the community. We also have a chat with Matt Lockyer about his experience submitting ERC998 To see the full list of ERCs in draft and final state, check out https://eips.ethereum.org/erc Catch up with Matt Lockyer on Twitter or Medium Thank you to our sponsor Least Authority . If you ...
Jan 30, 2019•56 min
In this episode, we chat with Tarun Chitra about a broad range on topics, from his work on early non-blockchain ASICs, to making models in high frequency trading, and the nuances of statistical modeling of PoS systems in blockchain. Tarun's new company Gauntlet is building a simulation platform for crypto networks to help developers understand how decisions about security, governance and consensus mechanisms are likely to affect network activity and asset value. Here are a few of the articles th...
Jan 23, 2019•59 min
In this week's episode, Anna and Fredrik give a general introduction to MPCs, go over a few examples of MPCs in action, compare them with other cryptographic concepts, try to pronounce "fully homomorphic encryption" properly, and more! Here are some of the material that we reference: Andrew Yao's paper on Protocols for Secure Computations "How to play ANY mental game" publication - MPCs first introduced Goldreich-Micali-Wigderson (GMW) Very basic intro to Shamir Secret Sharing and MPCs Video Ser...
Jan 16, 2019•37 min
In this week's episode, we catch up with Eli Ben-Sasson and Alessandro Chiesa from StarkWare Industries . We talk about their longstanding academic work in theoretic & applied cryptography, how StarkWare came to be, the emergence of zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs, some of the differences between these different zero knowledge systems, dive into the specific features of STARKs (!) and what's coming next in the space. For some background on the topics we cover in this episode, please check out the othe...
Jan 09, 2019•1 hr 6 min
In this week's episode, we sit down with Jutta Steiner , our friend and Fredrik's CEO at Parity Technologies , to talk about her history in the space, the origin of Parity, the last year in blockchain, and what we see coming in 2019! Here is the cryptography conference Fredrik mentioned: https://cyber.stanford.edu/sbc19 If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com...
Jan 02, 2019•39 min
If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge Or directly here: ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz In this week's episode, Anna and Fredrik dig into the topic of Merkle trees. We discuss the history of the concept, explore different kinds of Merkle trees, and touch on Radix trees & Patricia Merkl...
Dec 26, 2018•46 min
In this episode, Fredrik sits down Martin, who is a Core Dev working on the Geth client and head of security for the Ethereum foundation. They chat about what got him into the space, his interest in security, his entry into blockchain development and, together, they offer some advice for devs wanting to get into this space. Special thanks to POA Network for being our sponsor on this episode. To find out more about their open source Verifiable Delay Function, or VDF, please check them out here: h...
Dec 19, 2018•37 min
In this week's episode, Anna interviews a number of participants at the ETHSingapore hackathon as part of the ETHGlobal series and tries to get a sense for how these hackers are approaching the space. In this showcase (which was recorded on the Saturday, right in the middle of the hackathon), we asked: What got you into this space? What's your take on singapore? What are you building? and What do you make of the state of Ethereum? To see our previous ETHGlobal Hackthon podcast - check out the ET...
Dec 12, 2018•49 min
In this week's episode, we sit down with Izaak Meckler & Evan Shapiro from O(1) Labs to discuss Coda, a blockchain using recursive composition of zkSNARKs to eliminate history. We discuss recursive zkSNARKs generally, what a recursive zkSNARK construction blockchain would look like, and the challenges in implementing this sophisticated scaling solution. To find out more about the project and some of the resources mentioned in the episode, please have a look at the links below: Coda on Twitte...
Dec 05, 2018•52 min
