Summary This week, Anna and Nico take a look back at some of the ZK Events produced in 2024 by the ZK Podcast, ZK Hack and other adjacent projects. Starting with the live ZK Jargon Decoder hosted in January and spanning the 10 months since, Anna and Nico share behind-the-scenes anecdotes, highlight key talks from the events and share some insight into how the programs for the zkSummit events are created. They wrapped with a summary of some of the themes in ZK that got them talking this year and ...
Oct 16, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Summary This week Anna chats with Mikerah Quintyne-Collins from HashCloak and Stoffel Labs . They discuss how Mikerah got her start in the crypto space and then dive into the work she did at ChainSafe and eventually at HashCloak. They cover Mikerah’s work on privacy preserving tech like ZK, TEE and MPC and learn about what drives her tweet game and the wisdom she has picked up over the years as a technical founder, driven by curiosity… and memes. Here’s some additional links for this episode: ZK...
Oct 09, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Summary This week Anna catches up with Zac Williamson & Ariel Gabizon from Aztec . They cover what each has been working on over the last year, Zac shared updates about the development of Aztec and the finalization of their underlying ZK system: MegaPlonk. Ariel discussed his latest research on IVC with his publications of the ProtoGalaxy and Stackproofs works and how properties of this systems brought him and Zac to start working together again. Here’s some additional links for this episode...
Oct 02, 2024•57 min
Summary This week Anna and Nico chat with Lukas Helminger and Ais Connolly from TACEO . They discuss Lukas & Ais’ early work in cryptography and privacy preserving technologies, the founding of TACEO and their recent work on coSNARKs - or Collaborative SNARKs - that combine MPC and ZK. They explore how these coSNARKs are created, their coCircom language, the characteristics of these systems as well as how they can be applied in the real world. Here’s some additional links for this episode: T...
Sep 25, 2024•57 min
Summary This week Anna and Zaki Manian dive into the Cosmos ecosystem and ask the question: is Cosmos Dead? They explore key events, teams and players who worked on Cosmos during different eras before teasing out the strengths and structural flaws that made the project what it is today. The conversation wraps with a discussion around new initiatives aimed at reviving the ecosystem and aligning factions in Cosmos together towards a central goal. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Epis...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 24 min
Summary In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun catch up with Andrew Miller . They cover his early work on consensus, ZK and MPC before switching focus to the topic of his current work: TEEs. They map his evolving opinion on TEEs and explore why they could be seen as an optimal solution to many of the blockchain challenges. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Andrew Miller works SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies by Bonneau, Miller, Clark, Naraya...
Sep 11, 2024•1 hr 15 min
Summary This week Anna and Nico chat with Arnaud Schenk , one of the original co-founders of Aztec and creator of the Polaris Fellowship . They discuss Arnaud’s recent blog post ‘On Trust Infrastructure’, exploring the down sides of a trustless system, the need to make online community building more possible and how programmable cryptography may play a role in these solutions. They explore the history of computer culture, the rejection of institutions by mid-90s internet culture and how the seed...
Sep 04, 2024•1 hr 29 min
Summary In this week’s episode Anna and Tarun chat with Naveen Durvasula about his recent work ‘ Robust Restaking Networks ’. They discuss Naveen’s early work on matching markets and how this led him to work on mechanism design before exploring how the concepts of restaking were first presented, and how both Naveen and Tarun have been working to better model the mechanisms underpinning restaking, to understand how they work and how they can be optimized. Further Reading: Robust Restaking Network...
Aug 28, 2024•1 hr 11 min
Summary In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Connor O’Hara from Celestia . After discussing the latest ZK Hack Montréal event where Connor was a judge, they dive into his professional background, the ecosystems he has been a part of and what led him to work on Celestia. They then discuss various ZK-focused initiatives within the Celestia ecosystem. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Episode 311: The Launch of Celestia and Beyond 03:22 ZK Hack Montréal 08:08 ZK Hack Devfolio 24:33 ...
Aug 21, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Summary In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Jens Groth and Daniel Marin from Nexus . They catch up on all things Groth16 with the author himself before diving into a variety topics, such as formal verification in the context of ZKPs, the Nexus architecture, the benefits and challenges of building a system from the ground up, folding and IVC plus the properties these offer in a zkVM context and much more. Here’s some additional links for this episode: ZKProof Conference in Berlin Nova: Recurs...
Aug 14, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Summary In this week’s episode, Anna and Guille catch up with Joe Bonneau , Assistant Professor at NYU and Research Partner at a16z crypto research . They discuss the research Joe has been working on since he was last on the show in 2019, including Naysayer proofs , Zero-Knowledge Middleboxes , Sealed-Bid Auctions , and other ZK-related research projects to date. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Episode 103: Exploring VDFs with Joseph Bonneau Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies...
Jul 31, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Summary In this week’s episode Anna chats with Ismael Hishon-Rezaizadeh , Founder and CEO at Lagrange Labs and Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou , Head of Research at Lagrange and Co-Director of the Applied Cryptography Lab at Yale University. They revisit the concepts of zk-powered coprocessors and dive into the work that Charalampos did previous to joining Lagrange on Verifiable SQL. They then explore how this is incorporated into the Lagrange coprocessor system, the work they are doing on Reckl...
Jul 24, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Summary In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun sit down with Hart Lambur irl at EthCC week in Brussels. They start by exploring Hart’s project Across - a cross-chain interoperability solution and sister project to Uma . They explore the Across construction, the tradeoff space and how this compares to other interop solutions. Then, in ZK Podcast tradition, the group shift gears with a few drinks and explore thoughtful observations on the week in Brussels. Here’s some additional links for this epi...
Jul 18, 2024•1 hr 33 min
This week's ZK Podcast episode will be delayed to Thursday this week due to Brussels mania. In the meantime, we wanted to highlight the upcoming ZK Hack Montreal event, happening Aug 9-11 2024. This is the 4th IRL zk-focused hackathon produced by ZK Hack. Apply now to attend ZK Hack Montreal as a hacker and jump into zk. https://www.zkmontreal.com/ Find out more about ZK Hack & join the discord as well at https://zkhack.dev/...
Jul 15, 2024•2 min
Summary In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun meet with Varun Srinivasan , co-founder of Farcaster . They explore the Farcaster project, discussing the ideas that prompted its inception and what separates it from existing social media networks. The conversation explores the design space that Farcaster opens up for devs and the kinds of applications that can be built on top of it. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Farcaster Mastodon Diaspora Mastodon ActivityPub Secure Scuttlebutt S...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 23 min
Summary In this week’s episode, Anna and Guille chat with Ying Tong Lai from Geometry Research and Bryan Gillespie from Inversed Tech about their latest research and works to date. They dive into the pair’s recent work ‘ SoK: Programmable Privacy in Distributed Systems ’, exploring the classifications and frameworks being introduced. Here’s some additional links for this episode: SoK: Programmable Privacy in Distributed Systems by Benarroch, Gillespie, Lai and Miller Private Programmability in Z...
Jul 03, 2024•1 hr
Summary In this week’s episode Anna and Nico chat with Alessandro Chiesa , Associate Professor at EPFL and Eylon Yogev , Professor at Bar-Ilan University. They discuss their recent publication; Building Cryptographic Proofs from Hash Functions , which provides a comprehensive and rigorous treatment of cryptographic proofs and goes on to analyze notable constructions of SNARGs based on ideal hash functions. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Building Cryptographic Proofs from Hash Fun...
Jun 26, 2024•1 hr 11 min
Summary In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Sims Gautam and Liam Eagen from Alpen Labs . They dive into the world of Bitcoin L2s and focus on how ZK can be used to incorporate strong connections between Bitcoin and new execution environments. The group then explores BitVM, covenants, the distinction between the Bridge Operators and sequencers in this model and how this differs from how these actors work in Eth L2s. They then dive into SNARKnado, including what is happening under the...
Jun 19, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Summary In this week’s episode Anna chats with Shumo and Yi from NEBRA . They discuss how NEBRA UPA, or Universal Proof Aggregation, can mitigate the high price of putting ZKPs on-chain. They cover what it takes to incorporate proving systems into NEBRA UPA as well as the benefits that these systems will bring, how developers are meant to interact with them, and future integrations to enable seamless cross-zkRollup applications. They cover prover marketplaces, verification aggregation systems, a...
Jun 12, 2024•51 min
There is no episode this week, but wanted to highlight the upcoming ZK Hack Montreal event, happening Aug 9-11 2024. This is the 4th IRL zk-focused hackathon produced by ZK Hack. Apply now to attend ZK Hack Montreal as a hacker and jump into zk. https://www.zkmontreal.com/ Find out more about ZK Hack as well at https://zkhack.dev/
Jun 05, 2024•1 min
Summary In this week’s episode Anna and Kobi chat with Muthu Venkitasubramaniam and Carmit Hazay from Ligero . They discuss their work on MPC and ZK for the last 20 years and how the research has evolved. They then dive into a nuanced conversation on how MPC & ZK are interrelated. The discuss Ligero, what led to the project and the early phases, as well as the new Ligetron system and how they plan on getting this technology into the wild. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Ligero...
May 29, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Summary In this week’s episode Anna chats with Tracy Livengood , co-founder of Pluto ; an applied cryptography org building developer tools which add verifiable data from web data to an on-chain application, using ZK. They discuss Tracy’s move from being an engineer in Web2, what prompted his move into the decentralized web and how he eventually found his way into the ZK space. He shares the concept of ‘Web Proofs’, and how Pluto can use some of the TLSNotary stack to bring private web data into...
May 22, 2024•59 min
Summary This week, Anna and Nico catch up with Antonio Sanso , Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and Youssef El Housni , Engineer at ConsenSys and builder of Linea . They discuss Antonio and Youssef’s new work, Families of prime-order endomorphism-equipped embedded curves on pairing-friendly curves and dive into Elliptic Curve cryptography, Bandersnatch and Verkle Tries amongst much more, before dissecting what terms in the title of this paper truly mean. After getting into the weeds of cryp...
May 15, 2024•52 min
Summary This week, Anna and Tarun catch up with Georgios Konstantopoulos , CTO of Paradigm and long-standing friend of the ZK Pod! First they cover the work Georgios has been doing since he last appeared on the show , covering everything from updates on Foundry to the more recent work on Reth. They then dig into what makes it different, what inspires its design, where it is heading and the eventual end goals of the project. They also chat about the general client node landscape, from the ETH 2.0...
May 08, 2024•1 hr 23 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo catch up with Justin Thaler , Associate Professor at Georgetown and Research Partner at a16z . The group dive into a handful of points from Justin’s ‘17 Misconceptions about SNARKs’ article, discussing if his views have changed since it was published back in 2023 and whether some points have become common knowledge since the article first rippled through the ZK community. They then dive into his new zkVM Jolt, which was initially described along with La...
May 01, 2024•1 hr 24 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with Gal Arnon , Ph.D student from the Weizmann Institute of Science & Giacomo Fenzi , Ph.D. student in the COMPSEC Lab at EPFL . Gal and Giacomo are amongst the co-authors of ‘STIR: Reed–Solomon Proximity Testing with Fewer Queries’ and in this conversation, they discuss how their research led them to work on these topics and where the thesis for this particular work sparked from. They set the stage by exploring the history of FRI and discussing so...
Apr 24, 2024•1 hr 1 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Brendan Farmer catch up with Ben Fisch , CEO of Espresso Systems . They explore the inner workings of the current L2 sequencing landscape and then discuss how a shared sequencing marketplace like Espresso works. They touch on how MEV plays a part in the new system, how the role of the sequencer can be separated into subroles, how all these parts will work together in such a system and much more. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Episode 222: Somethin...
Apr 17, 2024•1 hr 3 min
In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Jordi Baylina , OG Ethereum contributor and Polygon zkEVM Technical Lead. They cover what Jordi has been working on since he was last on the show in 2021. Back then, zkEVMs were still just an idea. Now that many of these systems have launched, they have a chance to look at how these fit into the general L2 landscape. They cover Jordi’s view on engineering decentralized systems and how these are rolled out, and the recent research from Polygon, includi...
Apr 10, 2024•1 hr 1 min
In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico chat with Chelsea Komlo , Chief Scientist for the Zcash Foundation and member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy lab at the University of Waterloo . They discuss what sparked Chelsea’s interest in cryptography research, starting with her work contributing to Tor, to her move to Zcash and her PhD work on Threshold Signature Schemes. They define some important terms around different signature schemes and discuss possible optimizations that can be used ...
Apr 03, 2024•1 hr
This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Niraj Pant and Anish Agnihotri from Ritual . They kick off by revisiting the AIxCrypto intersection before diving into the Ritual product and its goals around developing open access AI infrastructure. They explore the opportunities that open up when you bring ML to smart contracts. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc Episode 246: Adversarial Machine Learning Research with Florian Tramè...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 9 min
