In this episode we chat with Josh Cincinnati , the former executive director of Zcash Foundation . We cover Josh's career before Zcash, his work at the foundation, the important role privacy plays in crypto and the challenges of decentralised governance. We also discuss his decision to leave the foundation, Zcash Foundation's philosophy of transparency, his hopes for the future of the Zcash community, his next steps and why he thinks people in crypto may wanna take themselves a bit less serious ...
Aug 19, 2020•1 hr 19 min
In this episode, Anna and guest host Georgios chat with Hasu , an independent crypto researcher focused on economics and security, about elastic block size proposals in both Bitcoin and Ethereum. They cover how Hasu found his way into research as well as the history of the block size BIPs that shaped the ecosystem as well as Ethereum’s EIP 1559 Here are some additional links: Research paper: A model for Bitcoin’s security and the declining block subsidy Analysis of EIP-2593 (Escalator) Analysis ...
Aug 12, 2020•1 hr 4 min
In this week's episode, we chat with Brian Gu , a student at MIT and creator of the Dark Forest game. We chat about education, blockchain based games and what inspired his work on the Dark Forest game. We then dig into how this game creates an incomplete information game space by using zkSNARKs to create a “cryptographic fog of war” and more! As described on their blog, Dark Forest is an MMO space-conquest game where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cr...
Aug 05, 2020•1 hr 3 min
** Be sure to visit our ZKPodcast subreddit and leave us some questions for the upcoming AMA!** In this week’s episode, Anna and guest-host / frequent guest Tarun Chitra catch up with Alex Evans , researcher at Placeholder Capital . They dive into the latest in DeFi, a topic that we don't cover too often, but has become hard to ignore. Specifically they discuss the emergence of liquidity farming, the difference between the zkresearch space and the DeFi space, some emerging concepts like AMM and ...
Jul 29, 2020•1 hr 14 min
** Check out the ZKPodcast subreddit and share some comments/questions for our upcoming AMA ** This week, we catch up with Benedikt Bunz and Ben Fisch , PhD students at Stanford, once again. In this episode, we dive deeper into Findora , a project that was co-founded by Ben (who is also the CTO) and where Benedikt works as the Head of Research. We look at what the Findora project is, discuss the "selective disclosure" concept at the heart of their constructions, explore the balance between trans...
Jul 22, 2020•57 min
In this episode, we will be exploring StarkWare and DeversiFi’s collaboration - a Layer 2 STARK-powered exchange for Ethereum assets. Guests Tom Brand , product manager at Starkware , and Will Harborne , co-founder of DeversiFi , discuss the project, how it works under the hood and give us a glimpse into what they have planned for the future. We also look at how Validium, that is Layer-2 scaling solutions in which the validity of all transactions is enforced using zero-knowledge proofs, while da...
Jul 15, 2020•58 min
In this week's episode, Anna follows up on the trusted setup survey she did in her previous episode on the topic with this bonus interview with Roman Semanov & Roman Storm from Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash's trusted setup, held in May 2020, was the largest to date with over 1000 participants. Be sure to listen to the full ZKPodcast Trusted Setup episode first Find out more about Tornado Cash's trusted setup here There are a number of zkPodcast related channels and groups to explore. Here they ...
Jul 08, 2020•29 min
This week, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Yan X Zhang , professor at SJSU, about math competitions, math education, how crypto is like alchemy and the Gasper paper - work Yan and his students collaborated on with the Ethereum Foundation. “Gasper” is a proof-of-stake-based consensus protocol, which is an idealized version of the proposed Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. The protocol combines Casper FFG, a finality tool, with LMD GHOST, a fork-choice rule. Here are a few episodes and papers ...
Jul 01, 2020•57 min
This week, Anna and guest host Georgios Konstantopoulos chat with Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana network. They learn about this system and discuss the innovations that allow them to achieve high performance without sharding. For more on Solana check out their website - https://solana.com/ We also mention this episode on VDF's with Joseph Bonneau. Here is a further explanation of the differences. Want to help support the show? Check out our grant on Gitcoin and please donate today! CLR Matching is...
Jun 24, 2020•59 min
In this episode, we chat with Matt Luongo , CEO of Thesis , founder of Keep Network , and project lead of tBTC. We cover the need for BTC to ETH bridges, what the challenges are in building bridges with BTC, tBTC and how it is setup, what went down with the initial tBTC release - an event the team now refers to as "release candidate 0", and where we might be seeing tBTC go next. Here are some useful links: Introduction to tBTC Details of the tBTC Deposit Pause on May 18, 2020 Want to help suppor...
Jun 17, 2020•58 min
In this week's episode, Anna explores the state of trusted setups with 4 of the people who have recently coordinated and run trusted setups for different SNARK systems. She interviews Koh Wei Jie from the Ethereum Foundation , Thomas Walton-Pocock from Aztec Protocol , Brecht Devos from Loopring and Kobi Gurkan from the EF and cLabs . This episode covers the new generation of trusted setups and how the teams working on these are learning from each other and at times, even sharing parts of the tr...
Jun 10, 2020•1 hr 14 min
In this episode, we chat with Mark Tyneway who is a contributor on the Handshake project - an experimental peer-to-peer root naming system. We learn about this decentralised, foundation-free project, the issues of DNS, how Handshake plans on fixing this, how it differs from ENS, their unique airdrop process, what an Urkel Trie is, and more. Here are a few useful links: Handshake Whitepaper An airdrop that preserves recipient privacy - https://fc20.ifca.ai/preproceedings/54.pdf ReadyLayerOne Pres...
Jun 03, 2020•55 min
In this week's episode, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Akis Kattis, a PhD student at NYU & the co-author of Proof of Necessary Work: Succinct State Verification with Fairness Guarantees - a paper he co-wrote with Joseph Bonneau. They discuss the challenge of Proof of Useful Work, the unique properties that SNARKs have, such as puzzle hardness, that allow for PoNW to overcome these challenges, PoS SNARK systems, elastic block construction, and more. Here are a few of the articles ...
May 27, 2020•59 min
In this week's episode, Anna interviews three people from the Tezos community: Jacob Arluck (co-founders TQ ), Marc Beunardeau and Marco Stronati (both from Nomadic Labs ). They chat about the Tezos origin story, the development of the PoS system, the governance of Tezos, and how they are incorporating zk proofs - and specifically Sapling from Zcash - into their system. Here is some additional info related to the interview: Nomadic blog post about the Sapling integration Tezos implementation of ...
May 20, 2020•1 hr 5 min
In this episode, we chat with Molly Mackinlay, Project Lead for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) at Protocol Labs. We talk about her journey to Protocol Labs, as well as take a deeper view into IPFS, LibP2P, Bitswap, Testground, the use cases and projects working with these tools, and the specific upgrades they have made with the recent 0.5 IPFS release. We cover: the importance of distributed testing infra to facilitate enterprise adoption how UX and simple tooling plays into the developer...
May 13, 2020•58 min
In this week's episode, Anna catches up with Kenny Paterson , Professor of Computer Science and Lead of Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich . The goal of the episode is to take a deeper look at DP-3T and privacy preserving contact tracing research in Europe generally. They cover his work at ETH Zurich, discuss how the DP-3T project came to be, look at risks facing contact tracing protocols generally, and discuss why putting privacy and decentralisation at the heart of these types of protoco...
May 06, 2020•1 hr 2 min
In this week's episode, we go deep into Consensus Algorithms and HotStuff with Ittai Abraham from VMware Research . We chat about the evolution of consensus algorithms, BFT, and how these early ideas have become the backbone of blockchain tech. We cover PBFT, Tendermint and Ittai's research into SBFT, HotStuff, and the improvements he has been working on since HotStuff's incorporation into Facebook's Libra protocol. The papers and references we mention: Early zkpodcast episode on consensus with ...
Apr 29, 2020•1 hr 3 min
In this week's episode, we chat with Henry de Valence from the Zcash Foundation . We discuss what makes for a strong crypto library, some of the work he has been doing at the ZF and he shares an update about the Zebra Zcash client. We also learn about the TCN Coalition , a group he is working with that aims to build and evaluate privacy-preserving contact tracing protocols - an important tool in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Here are some useful links about things we discussed: The...
Apr 22, 2020•1 hr 7 min
In this episode, Anna catches up with Claudia Diaz, professor at KU Leuven and the Chief Science Officer at Nym Technology to learn about mixnets, the history of privacy technology and how there may be some opportunities for new privacy tech to emerge in this post-pandemic world. Here is the contact tracing project that Claudia highlights in the episode: Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing Analysis of DP3T A big thank you to this week's sponsor Aztec ! Aztec makes private transacti...
Apr 15, 2020•1 hr 5 min
In this episode, we chat with Flavio Bergamaschi from IBM research about Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). FHE allows for computation on encrypted data. First developed in 2009 at IBM, this tech has long been the considered only theoretically possible. However, as we learn in the interview, there have been strides made in the last few years and we are starting to see FHE technology being used in some real world applications. In this interview, we discuss the origin of the technology, what it i...
Apr 08, 2020•1 hr 5 min
In this episode, we catch up with Sean Bowe and Daira Hopwood from the Electric Coin Company to chat about Halo, a recursive proof composition that doesn't require a trusted setup. We cover the efficiency techniques used in Halo such as "nested amortization", how the protocol was developed, what some of the key findings are, and how it fits in with the other recent SNARK-based protocols. We touch on the following material: Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups & Elliptic Curve Cryptography htt...
Apr 01, 2020•1 hr 8 min
In this week's episode, we chat with Benjamin Perez from Trail of Bits about zero knowledge proof systems and security. We touch on the evolution of the crypto tech auditing business, the new challenges that emerge in zero knowledge proof systems regarding security, some of the recent bugs and vulnerabilities found in zkp systems and more! Here is our previous episode on this topic with JP of Trail of Bits Here is some background on the zkp vulnerabilities mentioned. An Empirical Analysis of Ano...
Mar 25, 2020•54 min
In this episode, we meet with Galen Wolf-Pauly from the Tlon Corporation to discuss the project Urbit. Urbit is an encrypted peer-to-peer network comprised of a deterministic operating system ( Urbit OS / Arvo) and a secure, global identity layer ( Urbit ID / Azimuth). The Urbit contributors have created new stack, built from the ground up as an integrated system with a focus on user experience. It also describes itself as a personal server built from scratch. For some additional links about the...
Mar 18, 2020•1 hr 17 min
In this episode, we catch up with Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin from the Ethereum Foundation to chat about how zero knowledge proof systems are being used throughout the Eth1x and Eth2.0 stacks. We look at their applications for privacy and scalability throughout layer 1, layer 1.5 and layer 2, as well as explore some other emerging applications. Here were some of the articles and ideas discussed: 5 ways to optimise zkps: Remove the need for FFTs Sparseness Recursion Custom gates Hardware Jac...
Mar 11, 2020•1 hr 13 min
In this week’s episode, we sit down with Alistair Stewart and Jeff Burges, researchers at the Web3 Foundation , to dig into what they are working on, what they are thinking about at the moment, and how zero knowledge proofs can be used throughout the Polkadot ecosystem. Here are some links and ressources to check out: Gavin Wood episode Rob Habermeier episode The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work Daniel Bernstein on Twitter Isogenies VDF Axolotl Ratchet Thank you to this week's sponsor Trail...
Mar 04, 2020•1 hr 1 min
In this week's episode, we catch up with our friends Tarun Chitra and James Prestwich at the Stanford Blockchain Conference. We chat about the Flashloan phenomenon & the recent arbitrage 'exploit'. We also catch up about the known challenges facing PoS systems, what EVM support means on other chains & more! Catch our previous episodes with Tarun and James here: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/99 https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/61 https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/34 The tweet that Anna quotes in th...
Feb 26, 2020•1 hr 10 min
In this week’s episode, we take the podcast in a slightly different direction and dive into Isogenies - a topic at the cutting edge of cryptography. We look at how they are related to VDFs and randomness generation. Our guest, Luca de Feo , one of the co-inventor of SIDH, helps us get an understanding for what Isogenies - or morphisms of algebraic groups - really are. Here are some useful links to check out: https://sike.org/ https://isogeny.org/ https://vdfresearch.org/ Some visualizations: htt...
Feb 19, 2020•1 hr
In this week's episode of the podcast, we catch up with Alex Glukowski of Matter Labs to hear about zkSync , the latest iteration of their zkRollup implementation built to be a scaling and privacy engine for Ethereum. We also touch on the Redshift protocol, a new transparent zkSNARK system that emerged as a result of work on this system. Here are a few links that we mention: Previous episode on Matter Labs ZkSync and Redshift REDSHIFT: Transparent SNARKs from List Polynomial Commitment IOPs Hots...
Feb 12, 2020•56 min
In this week’s episode, we catch up with Christopher Goes, IBC Lead at Tendermint . We learn a bit more about the Cosmos Network ecosystem and his work on IBC. We then focus in on how he is thinking about zero knowledge proofs in the context of IBC like-interoperability constructions. We explore some of the ways in which zkps could be incorporated into different schemes for interoperability - including bridging, lightclient constructions, validity proofs and more. We mention the following episod...
Feb 05, 2020•1 hr 2 min
This week, we explore the Fractal transparent SNARK construction with its authors Dev Ojha and Nick Spooner - both students of Alessandro Chiesa at UC Berkeley. We explore how Fractal works, how it improves on some of the earlier work on Sonic and Marlin, how it borrows from but differentiates itself from STARKs, as well as what they discovered while working on this paper about recursive SNARKs and what makes that property possible. Here is some of the material we touch on: Fractal Paper Ariel G...
Jan 29, 2020•51 min
