In this episode, Anna explores the concept of Ultrasound Money with Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation . They kick off with updates on his work in VDFs, MEV and censorship resistance, alongside his particular interests in ZK and how the progress VRFs have made can be applied in Ethereum’s POS architecture. They then dive into the original concept of Ultrasound Money and where Justin sees it progressing to in the future, including the current status around issuance. Here are some additiona...
Dec 14, 2022•1 hr 5 min
This week, Anna explores the topic of proof of solvency with Kostas Chalkias , co-founder and chief of Cryptography at MystenLabs . They cover Kostas’ background in Cryptography and explore his work on Proof of Reserves, otherwise known as Proof of Solvency. They review past Proof of Solvency models using ZKPs and look at the protocols that major centralized exchanges are currently using. Then they dive into the security vulnerabilities, privacy issues, and general bugs that Kostas and his colla...
Dec 07, 2022•1 hr 13 min
On this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi Gurkan chat with Dan Boneh , Professor of Computer Science at Stanford and Director of the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research. They cover an expanse of topics: from how strides have been made within the development of zkEVMs to how trusted set ups could be integrated into the blockchain itself. This episode covers open problems in ZK such as how to generate ZK proofs on large amounts of data such as video and what solutions could be implemented when att...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr 11 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun speak with Succinct Labs . Guests Uma Roy and John Guibas discuss their interest in ZK, their work with 0xparc and the goals of Succinct Labs - that is to provide proof of consensus through SNARK-based light clients. Acting similar to IBC, but in the Ethereum context, we discuss the challenge of building ZK-based light clients on Ethereum, their first implementation linking Gnosis Chain to Ethereum, and how they imagine interacting with the larger blockchai...
Nov 23, 2022•1 hr 6 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Josh Cincinnati chat with Matt Green , a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University . They explore Matt’s background in security, blockchain and privacy technologies. He shares his thoughts on early ZK blockchain research, the founding of Zcash, growth in the ZK space, how the industry is ready for tangible use-cases and navigating anonymity and regulatory bodies. This episode closes with a review of Matt’s perspective on the Tornado Cash sanctions a...
Nov 16, 2022•1 hr 8 min
In this week's episode, Anna speaks with Awa Sun Yin , co-founder of Anoma & Namada . They discuss her background in crypto analytics, her shift to working on infrastructure and privacy tech, and how the Anoma project came to be. Awa introduces us to the soon to launch Namada network and then describes the various cryptographic pieces that the Anoma team has been developing. They discuss how these fit into Namada and into the future of the Anoma Protocol. Here are some additional links for t...
Nov 09, 2022•1 hr 8 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Pramod Viswanath , Professor of Engineering at Princeton and co-founder of Witness Chain . They discuss Pramod’s early work on wireless networks and how this type of research was brought to market at the time. They also cover topics such as the introduction of adversarial thinking into his research, his move over to blockchain, how the incentives of blockchain could be used within the wireless industry, and Pramod’s new project Witness Chain , whi...
Nov 02, 2022•1 hr 17 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with Brian Retford and Jeremy Bruestle from RISC Zero . They discuss their previous work in cloud infrastructure and how ZK offered unique solutions to long standing scaling problems. They cover topics like RISC-V, building VMs, and how RISC Zero aims to build a system which could support a decentralized public cloud. Here are some additional links for this episode: RISC Zero: General Purpose Zero-Knowledge Computation by Brian Retford and Jeremy B...
Oct 26, 2022•1 hr 6 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi Gurkan speak with Dmitry Khovratovich , researcher at the Ethereum Foundation , Dusk Network , and ABDK Consulting and JP Aumasson CSO at Taurus . This episode compares symmetric and asymmetric cryptography as well as a deep dive into hash functions. They explore what hash functions are used for, the process of developing and improving hash functions, and what it means for a hash function to be zk friendly. Here are some additional links for this episode: Dm...
Oct 19, 2022•1 hr 17 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Martin Köppelmann , Co-Founder of Gnosis discuss the OFAC sanctions against Tornado Cash and the impact this has had on builders in the community. They specifically focus on how the Tornado action helped reveal centralizing forces in Ethereum as well as the need for decentralization. Here are some additional links for this episode: Gnosis Linktree Gnosis Discord Episode 183: CowSwap & DAO Tech with Gnosis’s Martin Köppelmann Episode 65: Bridges, xDai and Burn...
Oct 12, 2022•44 min
In this week’s episode, Anna revisits the topic of FHE with Rand Hindi , CEO at Zama . FHE stands for Fully Homomorphic Encryption, a cryptosystem that allows for computation to occur on encrypted inputs. They discuss the FHE landscape, what specific use cases it is ideal for, where the technology is at and how FHE differs from MPC and ZK. They also explore some of the nuances of the different types of approaches to FHE to achieve this cryptographic environment where one can do computation in a ...
Oct 05, 2022•49 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo catch up with Henry de Valence from Penumbra . They discuss his thoughts on requirements for adoption of privacy systems and how these led to him to develop Penumbra. They explore how Penumbra aims to use privacy features not as ‘nice to haves' within the system, but rather as essential components that offer a new paradigm for how to think about DeFi in a Multichain Ecosystem. Here are some additional links for this episode: Episode 126: Crypto librarie...
Sep 28, 2022•1 hr 24 min
This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Florian Tramèr , Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich . They discuss his earlier work on side channel attacks on privacy blockchains, as well as his academic focus on Machine Learning (ML) and adversarial research. They define some key ML terms, tease out some of the nuances of ML training and models, chat zkML and other privacy environments where ML can be trained, and look at why the security around ML will be important as these models become increasingly used ...
Sep 21, 2022•1 hr 7 min
In this episode, Anna explores the topic of the recent OFAC sanctions against Tornado Cash with 2 interviews: One is with TuongVy Le , Head of Regulatory and Policy at Bain Capital Crypto , who previously worked at the SEC and the other is with Michael Mosier , General Council at Espresso Systems , who used to work at the Treasury, within FinCen and at OFAC itself. For some context: On August 8th 2022, OFAC, a US government department issued sanctions against Tornado Cash, a privacy protocol tha...
Sep 14, 2022•1 hr 24 min
In this episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with David Tse about his career and research spanning from early Networking, Mobile Networking, P2P, all the way up to his work on formalizing Blockchain systems. Along the way, they touch on topics like 'The Price of Anarchy', David’s Prism work, his work with the Ethereum Foundation and his new project Babylon. Here are some links for this episode: Episode 217: Information Theory & Blockchain with Sreeram Kannan The Price of Anarchy Babylon Prism Br...
Sep 07, 2022•1 hr 23 min
In this week's episode, Anna and Tarun revisit the topic of MEV with Chris Hager from Flashbots & Alex Stokes from the Ethereum Foundation. In this episode, they tease out more of the nuances around MEV and how the field around it has evolved in the last year or so. The team explores what the MEV space could look like after the Merge, the PBS (Proposer Builder Separation) concept, what each role in the MEV landscape will do and the MEV-Boost architecture. They also chat about using cryptogra...
Aug 31, 2022•1 hr 17 min
In this week’s episode, Anna explores Halo 2 with Daira Hopwood and Str4d , cryptographic engineers at Electric Coin Company. They explored what new ideas Halo introduced and how Halo 2 built on these ideas, adding optimisations such as adding Plonk-ish arithmetization to take what was a breakthrough to a production ready proving system. This episode was recorded at Zcon3 in Vegas. Here are some links for this episode: Episode on Halo Episode recorded at Zcon0 ZK Whiteboard Sessions Episode with...
Aug 24, 2022•1 hr 15 min
In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Vaibhav Chellani , a bridge builder and the co-founder of Socket . They explore what makes up the components of a bridge, the types of bridges, and then look at their framework for analysing the security trade-offs of different bridge architectures. This is an important topic, since at present, there are more and more bridges coming online to connect all the different chains together. And with these come a number of new bugs, hacks and exploits. This episo...
Aug 17, 2022•1 hr 8 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with Shumo Chu , co-founder of Manta Network . They discuss the origin story of the project and how they aim to bring privacy to web3. They explore the unique accessibility that Polkadot parachains enable, the work they do on building ZK tooling and libraries for the general ZK community. They then take a look at their plans for a multi-asset shielded pool and the future they have planned for Manta projects and more. Here are some links for this episode...
Aug 10, 2022•57 min
In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Zaki Manian from Sommelier and Dean Tribble from Agoric . They check-in with the latest project news, recap about the UST collapse, and look into IST - Inter Stable Token - a project by the Agoric team that aims to become the Cosmos native multi collateral stablecoin. Here are some links for this episode: Ep 218: Hardened JS and the Architecture of Agoric with Dean Tribble Ep 201: DeFi’s Multichain Future with Zaki Manian from Sommelier Ep 174: Throug...
Aug 03, 2022•1 hr 3 min
No full episode this week. Just a quick message to let you know about the upcoming zkSummit 8 - happening in Berlin Sept 15 2022. Apply here: https://www.zksummit.com/ If you like what we do: Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Head to the ZK Community Forum Support our Gitcoin Grant...
Jul 29, 2022•58 sec
In this week’s episode, Anna talks with Illia from Near and Alex from Aurora about the work they did that lead them to the Near ecosystem and what the connection is between the Aurora project and Near. They also cover what’s new at Near since the last time Illia and Anna spoke, Aurora+, the Rainbow Bridge, and future plans with Near’s sharding system. Here are some links for this episode: Ep 91: Near Protocol's focus on UX Ep 157: Illia Polosukhin on the development and launch of NEAR protocol C...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 17 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with guest Jens Groth , Director of Research at DFINITY and previously a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCL. Jens Groth is a leading ZK researcher and is behind a number of advances in the field of ZK in the last few years such as the popular proving system Groth16. The conversation covers his earlier career, the cryptographic problems he tackled in his research, how he solved these, the results of this work as well as his move from ...
Jul 06, 2022•1 hr 7 min
In this week’s episode, Anna checks in with Aztec, a ZK-based privacy L2 project. She speaks with Joe Andrews and Lead Engineer, Charles Julian. They discuss some of the team’s most important ZK research and implementations such as Plonk and how bringing privacy to Ethereum could truly change the way we do DeFi. They also discuss Aztec Connect and how it relates to zk.money , the Aztec roadmap with future projects like DSL Noir and Aztec 3, as well as a quick postmortem on the halted Aztec Conne...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 8 min
In this week’s episode, we throwback to a sake-fueled conversation between Anna and returning guest Guillermo Angeris , recorded in April during DevConnect in Amsterdam. They cover Guillermo’s personal journey into math, math history in general, how to bring more people into the space and the potential opportunities and downsides of bringing some kinds of math mainstream. It is a bit of different one, but hope you enjoy! Here are some links for this episode: Ep 173: Building Private AMMs with Gu...
Jun 22, 2022•1 hr 24 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Ye Zhang and Haichen Shen, the founders of Scroll - a native zkEVM Layer 2 Solution for Ethereum. They cover the founding of Scroll, the problems they aim to solve with their native zkEVM layer 2 solution, why scaling Ethereum is important, the philosophy of their zkEVM, and how this differs from other proposals as well as potential use cases or products that could benefit from the system. They wrap up with an exploration of how DApps and products...
Jun 15, 2022•1 hr 3 min
In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Rahul Magani , the Applied ZK Lead at Jump Crypto , and Hendrik Hofstadt , Project Lead at (Wormhole Crypto)[ https://twitter.com/wormholecrypto ]. They look at how Wormhole first came to be, the challenges of interoperability, the design decisions they made in balancing security, speed and functionality, the risks facing these types of solutions, including the famous Wormhole hack, what the future holds and how they aim to explore using zk in bridging. He...
Jun 08, 2022•1 hr 22 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and co-host Kobi Gurkan chat with Mary Maller , a ZK Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. They cover Mary’s journey into cryptography, her work on trusted setups, universal SNARKs and Plookup tables. They also discuss the work she and Kobi did on aggregatable DKGs, what working on research at the EF is like and more. Here are some links for this episode: Caulk: Lookup Arguments in Sublinear Time Aggregatable Distributed Key Generation Reaching Consensus For Asynchr...
Jun 01, 2022•1 hr 10 min
In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Julien Niset , co-founder of Argent , about crypto wallets. They explore the history of wallet landscape, the interfaces we use for the decentralized web, the importance of account abstraction, smart contract wallets and Argent’s bet on ZK rollups. Here are some links for this episode: Episode 24: Blockchain UX and the UXUnConf Argent Argent Labs | Github What is an 'EOA' account? EIP-1271: Standard Signature Validation Method for Contracts zkSync Starkwar...
May 25, 2022•1 hr 10 min
In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Anna Caroll and James Prestwich from Nomad . Together they explore the Nomad optimistic interoperability solution, how it first was developed, what lessons it takes from previous attempts at interoperability and cross-chain bridging, how the system works and more. Here are some links for this episode: Ep 118: Tarun and James talk Flash Loans & more | ZK Podcast Ep 34: Blockchain 101: What are smart contracts? | ZK Podcast The Balance Wheel | prest...
May 18, 2022•1 hr 21 min
