In this week’s episode, Anna dives back into the Polkadot world with friend and occasional co-host Rob Habermeier from Parity. They cover XCM - the Cross-Consensus Messaging format - and how XCM allows parachains to speak to one another, passing messages through the validators on the relay chain via XCMP Cross-Chain Message Passing. Here are some links for this episode: @paritytech | Github @Polkadot | Twitter @rphmeier | Twitter @paritytech/polkadot | Github Ep 83: From Warp Sync to SPREE with ...
May 11, 2022•1 hr 10 min
In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Tarun , Guillermo and Brendan at DevConnect Amsterdam to cover a range of interesting and random topics like how blockchain and AI thinking differs, where it could intersect and how ZK tech could be implemented, how science could benefit from more adversarial testing, why peer review is broken, math theory, takeaways from DevConnect and more! Here are some links for this episode: DevConnet AMS 2022 zkSummit 7 in Amsterdam zkSummit 7 Talk Videos | YouT...
May 04, 2022•1 hr 18 min
In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Sam Blackshear , co-founder and CTO at Mysten Labs. Sam has a background in programming language research and is one of the authors of the Move language, a language that can be used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. They chat about Mysten’s concept of programmable objects and what properties are necessary to make this functional for a blockchain context. They also cover Sui, a smart contracts platform which is a generalized L1 with a ne...
Apr 27, 2022•58 min
This week, Anna catches up with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar and revisits the topic of bridges. They chat about what led Sergey to work on interoperability, the problems these solutions try to solve, how it compares to existing solutions, and what's next for the project. They also chat about some of the challenges of a multi bridge landscape and the fragmentation of liquidity. Links for the episode: Episode 223: Connecting Cosmos and Ethereum with Gravity Bridge Axelar Network Github @axelarnetwo...
Apr 20, 2022•1 hr 6 min
This week, Anna catches up with Gubsheep from 0xPARC. They chat about Dark Forest – a decentralized zk-based RTS game, built on Ethereum. They cover how it has evolved in the past 2 years and what’s upcoming in the Dark Forest’s community, governance and experiments. They recap the recent Gitcoin GR13 ZK Tech side round, review some moonshot ideas for ZK projects of the future and discuss potential avenues of funding in the ZK space. Lastly, they dive deeper into the 0xPARC ecosystem by explorin...
Apr 13, 2022•1 hr 23 min
No full episode this week! ZKV presents Privacy in Cosmos - April 15 - is here: https://www.events.zkvalidator.com/ Zk Summit - April 21 - is here: https://www.zksummit.com/ _Note: Both are sold out, if you can't make it, let us know and keep an eye on our Youtube Channel , we will be streaming both events there! _ And do check out our linktree to see all the links many of our ZK Channels https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge...
Apr 07, 2022•1 min
This week, Anna & Tarun catch up with Georgios Konstantopoulos from Paradigm - a well-known OG crypto VC. They chat about his move to CTO at the firm, the team he has built and what they are working on. Then they dive into Foundry - a fast, portable, modular testing toolkit for Ethereum app dev written in Rust. They discuss the tooling landscape, why Foundry is making a bet on solidity, the different types of testing that developers are doing and other open questions in the field. Here are s...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr 9 min
This week, Anna chats with Deborah Simpier and Justin Kilpatrick , co-founders of Althea and the team working on Gravity Bridge. They start with the history of the Althea project and how they aim to build an open marketplace for independent entities to create their own ISPs, providing bandwidth to users in under-connected areas. They then dive into the larger topic of bridges and the work being done on Gravity Bridge – a bridge that links Ethereum with IBC and the Cosmos ecosystem. They touch on...
Mar 23, 2022•58 min
This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Jill Gunter and Ben Fisch from Espresso Systems . Espresso recently went public with their Proof-of-Stake Layer 1 blockchain, developed with flexible private applications and ZK rollups in mind. In this conversation, they explore the founding and development of the project, the Espresso chain and CAPE - a wrapped privacy smart contract application that is designed to be deployed on Espresso. They also discuss the programming model, the evolution of privacy tec...
Mar 16, 2022•1 hr 11 min
This week Anna dives into the topic of funding in the ZK space. She chats with a number of different groups who are all funding zero knowledge technology from different angles. She kicks off the conversation with her colleague from ZKValidator Susannah Evans and Gubsheep from 0xPARC about the Gitcoin side round they are leading which is focused on funding the next wave of ZK tech projects. She then chats with Arjun Karlsy , VP of Growth at Polygon about their massive commitment of 1 billion into...
Mar 09, 2022•1 hr 10 min
This week, Anna chats with Brendan Farmer and Daniel Lubarov from Polygon Zero, formerly known as Mir, about their early experiments with different proving systems, their work combining PLONK and Halo called Plonky - as well as the more recent combination of PLONK plus FRI (a technique that is borrowed from STARKs) which makes up Plonky2. They discuss why these innovations matter, what the new paradigms enable within the Ethereum ecosystem, their goal to provide privacy and scalability for block...
Mar 02, 2022•1 hr
This week, Anna chats with Mihailo Bjelic one of the co-founders of Polygon. Mihailo takes us through the evolution of Polygon and how the promise of web3 has led them to betting big on ZK-focused technologies. We learn about their approach to the two main challenges within their mission to scaling Ethereum – security and data availability; and how their suite of products aims to tackle these. Lastly, we hear about what’s next on the Polygon roadmap to onboarding the first billion to Ethereum – ...
Feb 23, 2022•1 hr 23 min
This week, Anna chats with Dean Tribble , co-founder and CEO of Agoric. Dean walks us through the landscape of programming languages and Agoric’s philosophy behind building a blockchain that has Hardened JS as its smart contract language. We hear about the two big challenges in using JavaScript in blockchain development, malleability and non-deterministic, and how Agoric addresses these. Dean explains the security implications of many popular blockchain languages and how this led them to build A...
Feb 16, 2022•1 hr 14 min
This week, Anna and Tarun Chitra chat with Sreeram Kannan , Associate Professor at University of Washington where he runs the UW Blockchain Lab. In this episode, they look at how information theory and blockchain intersect and map the progression of Bitcoin security. They discuss Sreeram’s early work on P2P mobile networks and how this evolved to work on consensus and fair sequencing. Sreeram takes us through his philosophical reasoning of shifting from genomic research to blockchain research an...
Feb 09, 2022•1 hr 35 min
This week, Anna chats with Dean Eigenmann and Edgar Aroutiounian from Project Blanc , a team building bots and developing MEV strategies. They revisit the topic of MEV, what it is and how teams like Project Blanc work to capture it. They also dive into the concept of re-orgs, accelerationism as a philosophy and get a look at what goes on in the Dark Forest. Here are some links for the episode: Monsters in the Mempool with Dan Robinson from Paradigm Episode 168: Flashbots with Phil Daian and Step...
Feb 02, 2022•1 hr 1 min
This week Anna chats with Nathan Ginnever , an applied cryptographer and contributor to Zodiac, and Auryn Macmillan , a product manager and Solidity dev at Gnosis Guild, about the modules and components that make up Zodiac’s suite of composable DAO tooling. In the conversation, they explore the DAO landscape and the lessons they’ve gathered from earlier tools like the Gnosis Safe and SafeSnap. As well as run-through the components that make up the Zodiac standard, new upcoming innovations, the e...
Jan 26, 2022•1 hr 18 min
This week Anna chats with Emin Gün Sirer - CEO Ava Labs and Founder of Avalanche. They chat about the experiences that led him to become interested in distributed systems research and his work as a professor at Cornell that led to the development of Avalanche. They then dig into their novel consensus mechanism which uses the sub-sampling technique, the architecture of the network with the 3 distinct components: X-Chain, C-Chain and P-Chain, bridges and more. Here are some links for the episode: ...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 17 min
This week Anna chats with Wanseob Lim an Applied ZKP Developer in the Privacy & Scaling Exploration Team at the Ethereum Foundation and one of the authors of the Zkopru protocol . They explore how Zkopru uses optimistic rollups and zero knowledge proofs to create a privacy-focused Layer 2. Wanseob walks us through the transaction process and how the protocol is built to circumvent high gas fees. We also hear a little about what’s to come in the Zkopru ecosystem from merchandising to private ...
Jan 12, 2022•53 min
This week, Anna checks in with co-hosts & friends, Tarun Chitra , James Prestwich , Josh Cincinnati and Guillermo Angeris , for a retrospective look at 2021 and a look forward to 2022! Enjoy this conversation full of blasphemous hot takes, bad 2022 predictions and dad jokes. Listen to last year's recap: Episode 163: Kicking off 2021 with Anna, Tarun, James & Josh If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on Youtube Read up on the r/ZKPod...
Jan 05, 2022•1 hr 33 min
While we decided not to release a full episode this week, Anna did get a chance to catch up with Kobi Gurkan , one of the co-organizers of ZK Hack and someone who was very missed in the last episode about the event! Enjoy this special bonus New Years eve ep, one last look back at ZK Hack 2021 and a look forward as well for the project! We also mention a few links for ZK related channels to check out: ZK Jobs Board ZK Forum / Community Board ZK Telegram ZK Hack Discord...
Dec 31, 2021•27 min
This week, Anna hosts a special 5-part interview with a roundup of perspectives from ZK Hack. First, she chats with puzzle hackers who share what it was like to solve these real-world cryptography bugs and learn complex concepts in real time. They discuss how they got started learning in this space and the resources and tools that helped them. Next, Anna speaks with the puzzle builders on the challenges of designing and building these novel zk puzzles. They discuss the state of the community and...
Dec 22, 2021•1 hr 14 min
This week, Anna chats with Bobbin Threadbare about his project Miden, a STARK-based roll-up which was recently purchased by Polygon. We recap the differences between STARKs and SNARKs and the increasingly blurred line between these two proving systems. We then map Bobbin’s journey to Miden VM (now Polygon Miden), how it originated from his earlier project Distaff VM and now incorporates the Winterfell prover from his days at Facebook. Here are some links for the episode: Episode 194: zkEVM with ...
Dec 15, 2021•54 min
This week Anna and Tarun chat with Vasiliy Shapovalov from [Lido]( Lido ) and Felix Lutsch of Chorus One about liquid staking on the ETH2 Proof of Stake consensus chain. Vasiliy explains Ethereum’s unique PoS validator setup and how liquid staking behaves on this network. They also talk about how liquid staking behaves on other live PoS, the inevitability of liquid staking and how to best design these systems. Lastly, they chat about navigating control and decision making in liquid staking proto...
Dec 08, 2021•1 hr 5 min
This week Anna chats with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia about how and why they’re focusing on building a data availability-first L1 blockchain. Ismail takes us through how data availability can be a problem, primarily with light clients and breaks down the components necessary to understanding the data availability problem such as state changes, the separation of consensus from execution and how Celestia aims to be a pluggable consensus layer. Here are some links for the episode: Episode 151: John...
Dec 01, 2021•57 min
This week, Anna chats with Billy Rennekamp about the Cosmos Hub ecosystem, ICF and some of the latest innovations he is watching. They discuss his early experiments with NFTs that led to the Clovers Network and his move into the Cosmos ecosystem. Through this, they cover how the space has evolved and the game changing potential of the IBC paradigm. Billy explains how the Cosmos Hub aims to support innovative modular development and shares the latest research into Interchain security, bridges, go...
Nov 24, 2021•1 hr 5 min
This week, Anna catches up with Guillermo Angeris , Alex Evans and Tarun . The conversation charts their research on CFMMs, AMMs and related primitives and explores the goals and methodology of this work. They also revisit the topic of private AMMs and specifically their recent work on using differential privacy to achieve a more private system. Here are some links for the episode: Paper: Replicating Market Makers Paper: How Liveness Separates CFMMs and Order Books Paper: Replicating Monotonic P...
Nov 17, 2021•1 hr 13 min
This week, Anna and Tarun chat with MP , Trent and Sam from JPG about this on-chain NFT curation protocol. They walk through what the JPG team wanted out of this decentralized curation protocol and how to bring in voices that aren't always heard in the traditional art world. They also explore the idea of rethinking the mechanism of curation, indexing and permissionless access in order to bring a crypto native approach to NFT art culture. Lastly, they look at JPG's focus on on-chain records can p...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 15 min
This week, Anna catches up on what has been happening in the Kusama network ecosystem with Will Pankiewicz, Raul Romanutti , and Bruno Skvorc . First up, Will, the Master of Validators at Parity, takes us through the fundamentals of Kusama, how it differs from Polkadot and some future predictions for the ecosystem and its parachains. Next, Raul, Community Manager and council member, breaks down how Kusama's governance and council functions. Last but not least, we learn about RMRK founded by Brun...
Nov 03, 2021•1 hr 12 min
This week, Anna speaks with Adam Gągol and Matthew Niemerg about Aleph Zero - an L1 project mixing ZKPs and MPCs with a DAG consensus algorithm. The aim of their project is to enable private smart contracts. In the conversation, they explore the underlying DAG structure and their privacy solutions that leverage zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) and Secure Multiparty Computation (sMPC). Here are some links for this episode: Paper - Aleph: Efficient Atomic Broadcast in Asynchronous Networks with B...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr
This week, Anna speaks with Dankrad Feist , a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. They talk about the future of the ETH client infrastructure, the merge, the difference between merkle trees and verkle tries, and more. They also explore how concepts that originated in the ZK research space have made their way into the ETH client stack. Here are some links for this episode: Episode 120: ZKPs in Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin & Justin Drake Episode 187: The Evolution of ETH 2.0 with Teku’s Be...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr 2 min
