Zero Knowledge

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...

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 t...

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 exp...

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 an...

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 discor...

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 addi...

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...

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 f...

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 ho...

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 seaml...

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/

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...

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 conce...

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, befo...

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 eventua...

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...

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 t...

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 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 engineeri...

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 imp...

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 Mempoo...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico chat with Alin Tomescu , founding team member and Head of Cryptography at Aptos Labs . They discuss Alin’s journey to Aptos and his work on distributed on-chain randomness as well as the new Aptos Keyless project. They cover the Keyless accounts architecture, how the flow works for the user and some of the subtleties in the approach they have taken. Here’s som...

This week’s episode is a little different from the usual and is split into two parts with Anna and Kobi exploring the history of ZK Hack, its origins and how the event has evolved into what it is today, including current activity in the ZK Hack ecosystem. The second half of the show splits off into Anna and Nico chatting the top 3 hackers from ZK Hack IV Online, which wrapped back in February. Eac...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun catch up with Uma Roy , CEO and cofounder of Succinct . They dive into Succinct’s developments over the last year ranging from the work they did on the ZK bridge infrastructure to the Succinct platform, the Succinct prover network and their most recent release of SP1. They discuss connections between these products, how their development evolved, the competit...

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Omer Shlomovits and Yuval Domb from Ingonyama . They go back to the start of the project, exploring Ingonyama’s initial vision for what ZK Hardware could be, how the field has evolved and how they are accelerating ZK Hardware today. The group discuss hardware product cycles, the hardware and algorithmic components, how a ZK ASIC is developed, they review som...