Blackbox Podcast

In E07 — Peyman Momeni: Confidential Intents & DeFi’s Trust Layer , Dylan sits down with Peyman Momeni , CEO & Founder of Fairblock , to ask what happens if crypto doesn’t have to be an open book. Today’s stablecoins leak salaries, treasury moves, and trading strategies to anyone watching the chain. Peyman explains how Fairblock uses confidential stablecoins and confidential intents so amo...

In this episode, Dylan sat down with Jens Groth (pronounced “Yens”)—Chief Scientist at Nexus , creator of the Groth16 SNARK—to map how verifiable computation reaches internet scale. We unpack Nexus’s zkVM (RISC-V), its distributed prover network (orchestrator + workers) for low-latency proving, and why proofs-of-proofs are the practical path to tiny, fast-verifying artifacts. Jens explains the com...

In this episode of Black Box, the discussion centers on Blormmy, an AI-powered wallet system that merges artificial intelligence, crypto infrastructure, and confidential computing. The conversation explores how Blormmy enables users to perform on-chain actions simply by expressing intent—transforming the wallet from a manual interface into an autonomous agent that acts securely on behalf of the us...

This is the Blackbox Podcast — where we peel back the hidden layers of technology, society, and the human psyche to unravel the forces shaping confidential AI. In this episode, host Dylan Kawalec sits down with researcher and entrepreneur  Andrew Miller  for a deep dive into confidential computing, trusted execution environments (TEEs), and the future of private AI. Andrew has been at the forefron...

In this deep-dive episode, our host Dylan Kawalec sits down with Arman Aurobindo from zkVerify to explore the cutting-edge intersection of zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution environments (TEEs).zkVerify handles verification for all major proof types (Groth16, RISC Zero, SP1) while eliminating the expensive 20-30% proof wrapping overhead and reducing verification costs by over 90% compared...

In this episode of the Black Box Podcast, we dive into the architecture of private rails for real-world assets. Paul Mierlo, co-founder of Spout Finance, explains how corporate bond ETFs like LQD are mirrored on Ethereum as permissioned ERC-3643 tokens backed by on-chain identities. We explore the full pipeline: identity verification, eligibility minting, permissioned tokens, encrypted order flow,...

In this episode, we dive into the architecture of decentralized AI systems and what it takes to build privacy-preserving infrastructure at scale. Harish Kotra, Head of Developer Relations at Gaia Network, walks us through the technical pieces behind training safe AI—from vector databases and inference nodes to tool-calling and domain design. We explore why centralization creates risks for privacy,...