In this week’s episode, Anna has a one-on-one chat with Alex Ozdemir, a PhD student at Stanford researching formal methods, cryptography and distributed systems. Alex’s work is closely tied to the world of generalized computations within zero knowledge systems. He is one of the main developers of CirC, an infrastructure framework for building zero knowledge languages. In their conversation, Alex and Anna take a bird’s eye view of the current landscape of zk languages and libraries. Alex explains...
Mar 17, 2021•1 hr
In this week’s episode, Anna goes on a grand tour of the Polkadot ecosystem ahead of the launch of Parachains. In this multi-interview episode, she explores the Polkadot ecosystem, how teams are interacting with the existing tech stacks, what they are looking forward to, and how these networks may evolve in the future once Parachains go live. The first speaker is Fabian Gompf , VP at Parity, who explains what’s going on with parachain auctions, how Parity views its role in the Polkadot ecosystem...
Mar 10, 2021•1 hr 31 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun talk with Simon Peffers and Kelly Olson from Supranational , a startup focused on building specialised software and hardware for advanced cryptographic computation. Simon and Kelly talk about their recent work helping out the Ethereum Foundation with VDFs, as well as building a better SNARK algorithm for Protocol Labs’ Filecoin. They cover how specialised chips can push the boundaries of computation in a post-Moore’s law world, how hardware specialised for ...
Mar 03, 2021•1 hr 1 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Robert Habermeier chat with Pratyush Mishra , co-author of the Arkworks toolkit. Arkworks is a collection of Rust libraries designed to simplify development with SNARKs, both for developing high-level application circuits and building custom SNARK implementations. Pratyush lays out what possibilities and trade-offs Arkworks offers, diving into the details of the Rust implementation and why it is the best language for developing cryptographic primitives. Anna, Rob...
Feb 24, 2021•58 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and James Prestwich chat with Phil Daian and Stephane Gosselin from the Flashbots project. Flashbots is a research and development organization formed to mitigate the negative externalities and existential risks posed by miner-extractable value (MEV) to smart-contract blockchains They talk about the Flashbots organization and mission as well as the evolving opportunities and dangers lurking in the mempool. Miner extractable value (MEV) is a measure devised to study c...
Feb 17, 2021•1 hr 8 min
In this week’s episode, Anna & Tarun take a step further into the NFT/Art space and chat with 2 content creators/entrepreneurs Andre Anjos (RAC) and Trevor McFedries (Brud) who are both making work that intersects with NFTs, crypto & other novel blockchain concepts. They discuss their respective works, and explore the new ways in which creators & influencers can engage with Blockchain tech and NFTs. They also try to imagine what living a digital reality actually means for the creatio...
Feb 10, 2021•1 hr 10 min
In this week’s episode, Anna & Josh Cincinnati chat with Peter Van Valkenburgh , Director of Research at Coin Center . Coin Center is a non-profit research and advocacy group focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency and decentralized computing technologies. In this conversation, they cover the various branches in the US system, how these interact with the crypto/blockchain community, what the process is for making regulation and how coincenter gets involved. Here are a few o...
Feb 03, 2021•1 hr 20 min
This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Stani Kulechov , co-founder of Aave , about the origin and evolution of the project, the changing DeFi landscape, collateralized debt in crypto, Flash Loans, Flash Minting, Credit Delegation and the future of DeFi. Quick recap: A Flashloan is an uncollatoralised loan which must be issued and repaid in the same transaction before the blockchain updates the user’s account balances. If it isn’t repaid in this time, the transaction will fail. We have discussed Fla...
Jan 26, 2021•1 hr 2 min
This week, Anna and guest co-host James Prestwich chat with David Vorick from Skynet Labs about the scope and goals of the Skynet project. They discuss the journey from earlier work on Sia & distributed data to Skynet, SkyDB, and their idea for Recursive Content Monetization - a new model to pay online creators and content owners. They also chat about the SkyFeed project - a decentralised Twitter like project. In this part of the conversation, they explore how the decentralised community cou...
Jan 20, 2021•55 min
This week, Anna chats with guests Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet & Robot Ventures), James Prestwich (cLabs) and Josh Cincinnati (previously Zcash Foundation). Throughout this conversation, they touch on topics like the state of zero knowledge applications, blockchain technology, privacy and DeFi. They also explore what we can expect in the near future. Here are a few of the papers and links we mention in the show: Mina’s Testworld Barry’s Post Why you can’t build a private uniswap with ZKPs Flash Bo...
Jan 13, 2021•1 hr 12 min
This week, Anna and Fredrik do a look back at 2020 and chat about some of their favourite ZKPodcast episodes and themes from this past year. This is also a notable episode, as it will be Fredrik's last as a regular co-host. And so they also take this time to reminisce and look back over 3 years of the Zero Knowledge Podcast and share some thoughts on how the space has developed. Some of the 2020 episodes discussed: ZK & Games: Dark Forest with Brian Gu Isogenies with Luca De Feo ZKPs in Ethe...
Dec 30, 2020•53 min
This week, Anna chats with Matthew Finestone and Brecht Devos from Loopring about their zkrollup protocol, DEX and wallet. We explored the evolution of Loopring, how their zkrollup works, how they are bringing AMMs to L2 and what’s next for the project. We mention Brecht’s previous episode as well the talk by Barry Whitehat at Devcon4 Thanks to this week’s sponsor Parity Technologies Parity is a company building the core infrastructure to power Web 3.0. They strive to write the fastest, lightest...
Dec 23, 2020•1 hr 6 min
This week, Anna chats with Eduardo Antuñia Díez - co-founder / project lead of DAppNode - about the importance of running your own node, the roll out of ETH2 and the role DAppNode aims to play in the future. Here are some useful links: STABLE Act Jordi episode DAppNode Discord DAppNode Gaurdians of Ethereum DAO proposal Zero Knowledge Gitcoin grant is eligible for Gitcoin's CLR matching - on now! Last chance to donate before the new year. Thanks to this week’s sponsor O(1) Labs , the team incuba...
Dec 16, 2020•1 hr 1 min
This week, Anna chats with Koh Wei Jie from the Ethereum Foundation about the MACI or M inimum A nti- C ollusion I nfrastructure. They chat about the challenges in voting digitally and in decentralised networks, how MACI uses zkps to solve this, and how it could be used in the context of quadratic voting. They also do a step by step walkthrough of how a vote is cast and counted in MACI Here are some helpful links: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/133 https://kohweijie.com/ https://www.youtube.com/wa...
Dec 09, 2020•45 min
In this week’s episode, we chat with Omer Shlomovits from ZenGo Wallet about MPC, threshold cryptography and how the research around this topic can be used in a blockchain context. We reference the Zero Knowledge Podcast Episode 90 with Nigel Smart . Here are some additional links to check out: ZenGo X Flaws Could Have Exposed Cryptocurrency Exchanges to Hackers presented at Blackhat USA Omer’s work on Diogenes Survey of threshold ECDSA MPC Alliance JugglingSwap: Scriptless Atomic Cross-Chain Sw...
Dec 02, 2020•54 min
This week, Anna catches up with Illia Polosukhin , CTO and co-founder of NEAR , to talk about what's new in the network since last year. They go deeper on some of the topics they discussed last time - such as sharded vs non-sharded blockchains and data availability as well as discuss the long and rocky road to launching a new PoS network, building a validator community and where we might see privacy and zkp tech in Near. Some episodes we reference in our chat. Ep 91: Near Protocol's focus on UX ...
Nov 25, 2020•1 hr 2 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Fredrik chat with Alin Tomescu , a post-doc researcher at VMWare Research Group , about the concept of stateless systems. Specifically, they explore his work on stateless validation, why this would be desirable and what is the state of the research around this topic. Have a look at Alin’s previous zkStudy Club episodes: zkStudyClub: Alin Tomescu on authenticated dictionaries and cross-incremental proof (dis)aggregation & zkStudyClub: Aggregatable Subvector Co...
Nov 18, 2020•1 hr 6 min
In this week’s episode, we revisit the topic of consensus algorithms with Ren Zhang , a researchers at Nervos and previously at imec-COSIC (KU Leuven). We chat about an earlier work he did on evaluating PoW consensus protocols security and explore his more recent work on NC-Max - a consensus protocol that breaks the throughput limit and enables the full utilization of the nodes’ bandwidth in confirming transactions Here are a few of the links we mention in the interview: Consensus Algorithms &am...
Nov 11, 2020•56 min
In this week’s episode, Anna spoke with Nolan Smith and Locke Brown , co-founders at NuID - a zero knowledge authentication solution. They explore the use-case of zk-powered password management and how this relates to Identity. Here are a few of the articles mentioned in the episode: - Universally Composable Direct Anonymous Attestation by Jan Camenisch , Manu Drijvers , and Anja Lehmann - Practical UC-Secure Delegatable Credentials with Attributes and Their Application to Blockchain by Jan Came...
Nov 04, 2020•53 min
In this week’s episode, we chat with Dan Robinson, a Research Partner at Paradigm . We talk about the world of crypto VC and revisit of the topic of the Ethereum mempool. We then hear Dan's story about how he and some colleagues tried to save a transaction from the monsters that lurk in the mempool as told in his blog post entitled “Ethereum is a Dark Forest”. For some background, here are some links: Ep 44: Blockchain 101: Transaction lifecycle & the mempool Ethereum is a Dark Forest By Dan...
Oct 28, 2020•55 min
In this week’s episode, guest host Tarun Chitra and Anna chat with Alex Svanevik , CEO & cofounder of Nansen . They cover crypto analytics, DeFi analytics as well as discuss the push and pull between a need for privacy and the need for blockchain transparency and data. Topics include: can DeFi and Privacy co-exist, how being aware of blockchain analytics could help people improve their opsec, the role of reputation in these systems, and, finally, how analytics in public blockchains may used ...
Oct 21, 2020•1 hr 4 min
In this episode, we chat with John Adler - co-founder of Lazy Ledger (now Celestia) and Fuel Labs. We compare Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups as well as discuss how Ethereum, specifically Eth1, could look over the next few years. We also talk about the data availability challenge in blockchains and how Lazy Ledger aims to solve this. Relevant links can be found here: James Prestwich's thread on Scalability vs Throughput myths The LazyLedger academic paper Security analysis of ORU from Fuel Wha...
Oct 14, 2020•1 hr 11 min
This week, Anna continues to dig into the topic of NFTs - That is Non-Fungible-Tokens or unique digital items - with Alex Salnikov , co-founder & chief product officer at Rarible . They talk about the project, the link between NFTs and DeFi concepts, how the NFT space is developing, novel use cases and more. Here are some of the topics we mention: The path to an ERC standard CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs and Flow with Dieter Shirley Somnium Space VR 0x Cert Centrifuge Thank you to this week’s s...
Oct 07, 2020•53 min
In this week's episode, we chat with Dieter Shirley , CTO Dapper Labs , Chief Architect of Flow Blockchain , and co-creator of CryptoKitties . We go back to look at the history of CryptoKitties, the NFT standard, what pushed Dapper Labs to build their own blockchain, how Flow works and what’s next. Here are a few useful links: The Path to an ERC standard where we look at the path to the ERC721 standard as an example. DapperLabs Coinlist sale Dieter's talk on Verifier’s Dilemma at Ready Layer One...
Sep 30, 2020•57 min
This is a short bonus chat to Episode 148 "Tale of the Sushi(swap)". Tarun , Hasu and Anna reconvene to wrap up the story of Governance Tokens, Sushiswap and the Uniswap token distribution. Be sure to first listen to "Tale of the Sushi(swap) - Part 1" "Tale of the Sushi(swap) - Part 2" on the uncommoncore podcast If you like what we do, be sure to check out the Zero Knowledge Podcast Gitcoin Grant - CLR matching is happening now! https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast...
Sep 24, 2020•9 min
In this special podcast crossover episode, Tarun , Hasu and Anna cover the emergence of governance tokens in the DeFi space and then dive deep into the Sushiswap story - what protocols came before and how it performed a vampire attack on (what was at the time) a tokenless Uniswap. This story acts as a fascinating case study as well as a cautionary tale for moat-less protocols. This episode is the 1st of 2 parts, with the 2nd part airing on Hasu's Uncommon Core podcast . In this part, we cover th...
Sep 24, 2020•59 min
In this episode, we catch up with Vishwanath Raman , Privacy Architect at Oasis Labs where he works on privacy and confidentiality technologies for Direct to Consumer and Business to Business use cases. His interest and experience span formal methods, applied machine learning, security, and privacy. Vishwa got his PhD in Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz followed by postdoctoral work at Carnegie Mellon. The Oasis Network is a privacy-enabled blockchain platform for responsible data use. Using a ...
Sep 16, 2020•54 min
In this week’s special episode, we flip the script and invite our friend Alexandra Heller to ask ZKPodcast co-hosts Anna & Fredrik some questions from the audience.. It’s a bit of a different format, so hope you will enjoy! Here are a few of the episodes we mention: - Chatting about consensus algorithms with Robert Habermeier - Zooko talks Zcash on our 50th episode - Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups & Elliptic Curve Cryptography - A fireside chat with a couple Parity peeps - Isogenies...
Sep 09, 2020•1 hr 6 min
In this week's episode, Anna and Fredrik catch up with Jordi Baylina , co-founder of Iden3 , the creator of Circom & SnarkJS. They chat about his work in the ecosystem, building zk circuits and the recently announced Hermez, a new zkrollup with a novel proof-of-donation mechanism that will redistribute 40% of earnings to Ethereum-based community projects. Jordi has an amazing story, which we got to explore in this episode, so thanks again Jordi for being on the show! Here are some relevant l...
Sep 02, 2020•1 hr 8 min
In this episode, we invite Howard Wu back to the show to share more about his new project Aleo - a privacy-focused blockchain that enables fully private applications. Howard's previous ZKPodcast episode, Introduction to zkSNARKs , remains one of our most popular episodes to date! We chat about why you need programming languages for SNARKs, what it is like to switch from VC/Academia to being a founder and the two important things missing in web services, high programmability and true user privacy...
Aug 26, 2020•58 min
