Zero Knowledge

This week, Anna Rose chats with Stefan George from Gnosis . They start with an update on the projects that have spun out of Gnosis - Safe, Zodiac, CoW Swap - as well as older experiments that the team had incubated. They then cover the evolution of Gnosis Chain from its origin as xDai, discuss the new aggregate bridge architecture Hashi and explore Gnosis Pay - an on-chain p2p payments product tha...

This week, host Anna Rose and guests Uma Roy , Zaki Manian and Tarun Chitra recap all things EthCC Paris . This impromptu chat takes a look back at the topics, talks, parties and goings-on of the Paris week and what really caught their attention. Expect some spicy takes, offtopic rambles, inside scoops and more. Here’s some additional links for this episode: EthCC Links EthCC Website EthCC Side Ev...

This week, host Anna Rose and co-host Tarun Chitra catch up with Chris Goes from Heliax , the team behind Anoma and Namada . They start with a quick retrospective about IBC, a project he formerly worked on, and how the protocol has evolved since it launched. They dive into the concept of 'intents', exploring their origin, evolution, and discuss the intent-based systems that exist today. As well, t...

This week Anna Rose chats with Jon Stephens , Computer Science Ph. D. student in the UToPiA group at UT Austin and co-founder of Veridise . Veridise is a blockchain auditing firm that audits smart contracts and ZK systems. They discuss what led Jon to work on system security, what tools are available to test the security of ZK systems and the process of performing formal verification on ZK systems...

This week, host Anna Rose and co-host Kobi Gurkan chat with Yohei Nakajima , General Partner at Untapped Capital and creator of BabyAGI . They cover a wide variety of topics from the world of AGIs and agents to building no-code software in public. They kick-off with a chat about how Yohei’s interest in NFTs led him down the AI ‘rabbit hole’ and how he started to build out experiments in public tha...

This week, host Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt chat with Ron Rothblum , Professor of Computer Science at Technion. They explore information theory and ZK, diving into the weeds on multiple topics including error correcting codes, FRI, FFTs, Reed-Solomon encoding, Fiat-Shamir and more. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Fiat-Shamir via List-Recoverable Codes (or: Parallel Repetition of GM...

In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose chats with Chhi'mèd Künzang and François Garillot from Lurk Labs about all things Lurk, Lisp and zk languages. They discuss the history of the Lurk project, from its beginnings with Protocol Labs (the team that built Filecoin), to its emergence as a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zkSNARKs. They discuss Lurk’s relationship with Lisp, what L...

In this week’s episode, Anna Rose dives back into accumulation schemes with Benedikt Bünz and Binyi Chen from Espresso Systems . They discuss ProtoStar and how it compares to works such as Nova and HyperNova, as well as explore some definitions for commonly used terms in the accumulation literature. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Espresso Systems CAPE Espresso Sequencer Bulletproof...

In this bonus episode, Anna jumps back on the mic for a quick follow-up to Episode 279: Intro to zkpod.ai . Guest Daniel Kang describes a joint project he is doing with zkpod.ai - the Attested Audio Experiment. The objective is to prove that some piece of audio originates from a "real" (non-ai-generated) recording, even if this audio has been altered through edits or modifications. The g...

This week, Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan continue their conversation with a full episode dedicated to their new side project zkpod.ai - the voice ai trained on transcripts from this show which uses both Anna and Kobi’s voices to share insights and answer questions about zk topics. They cover the origin of the project and discuss their motivations and concerns around its uses as well as how they could...

In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan check in on the state of ZK today. They discuss recent ZK applications and tooling as well as developments from the last 6 months. They review new use cases such as ZK for off-chain computations and dive into research breakthroughs, trends, security and much more. Finally, they introduce the concept of zkpod.ai which will be covered fully in n...

In today’s episode, Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt interview Srinath Setty , Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of notable works such as Spartan, Nova, SuperNova, and HyperNova. This discussion covers Setty's early work and how this led to him working on SNARKs, folding schemes and sumcheck protocols, as well as his views on the future trajectory of the ZK space. Given the current...

In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with Yi Sun , co-founder of Axiom . Yi was recently on the show to discuss ZK ML’s, however this time they take a closer look at the Axiom project and what it means to be a ZK coprocessor for Ethereum. During the interview they also explore what problems Axiom are trying to solve, how ZKPs are used to help bring historic data into smart contracts and what new...

In this week's episode, Anna Rose chats with Scroll co-founders Ye Zhang and Sandy Peng , delving into updates about their zkEVM L2, the progress they have made over the past year and what it really means to build in public. They discuss the challenges and rewards of founding a fully remote organization and how the team navigates the ever changing ZK landscape. Here’s some additional links for thi...

This week, Anna and Ariel Gabizon cover the SNARK trilogy; a history of pairing-based SNARKs in 3 acts. Starting from Jens Groth’s early works on SNARKs, Ariel takes us on a journey through key moments and breakthroughs in SNARKs over the last decade. They also dive into the emerging accumulation research on folding schemes and Ariel’s latest work surrounding lookup tables! This is an episode you...

In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose sits down with Zac Williamson , the CEO of Aztec . Anna and Zac dive deep into the history of Plonk, one of the most important proving systems to emerge in the last 5 years. Zac explains how the initial ideas came to be, how it was developed with co-author Ariel Gabizon, and how the system has evolved over time, branching out into many different iterations of...

This week, Anna Rose interviews Avery Ching , Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Aptos Labs . They cover Avery’s working history, including his time working on Meta’s Blockchain project, what this experience meant to him and how this led to the creation of Aptos. They discuss Aptos as it stands today, Avery’s experience of building in the current market and the unique qualities of the Apto...

This week, Anna Rose chats with ZK Podcast regular Guillermo Angeris , Head of Research at BCC and Nicolas Mohnblatt , Researcher and Cryptographer at Geometry . This was recorded on April 3rd 2023, the day between the ZK Hack Lisbon hackathon and the zkSummit9 event. They discuss Nico's move from music to cryptography, his earlier privacy research as a Master's student, and his recent research Sa...

This week Anna Rose chats with Ravital Solomon , founder of Sunscreen . They cover her early interest in lattice-based cryptography and how this paved the way for her work on FHE, starting at NuCypher then with her startup Sunscreen. They dive into the challenges involved when building with FHE as well as exploring the power in combining ZKP and FHE. They also discuss the early emergence of lattic...

In this week's episode Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra explore the topic of auctions with guests Kshitij Kulkarni , PHD student at Berkeley’s EECS department and Matheus V. X. Ferreira , Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences . They discuss the history of auctions, both in the real world and in blockchain, and go on to cover more re...

In this week’s episode Anna Rose interviews Mustafa Al-Bassam , co-founder of Celestia . They cover where Celestia as an idea emerged from, how its rollup-centric data availability (DA) network works and what can be expected from their upcoming launch. They also chat about how Celestia aims to empower Sovereign chains - independent rollup chains that use Celestia as the DA and consensus layer - an...

In this two-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo . Throughout these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical tech...

In this 2-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo . Through these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical technique...

This week, Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra dive back into the topic of ZK ML with guests Yi Sun , co-founder of Axiom , and Daniel Kang , Assistant Professor of computer science at UIUC . They discuss Yi and Daniel’s previous academic work and what led them to get interested in ZK topics and specifically ZK ML. They then dive into a discussion about 2 recent papers which examine the use of ZK within Ma...

In this episode, Anna chats with Hadrien Charlanes from Sismo . They discuss his early experiences in blockchain development and DeFi, and how this led him to build Sismo, a decentralized identity product with privacy preserving properties. They also cover the ZK badge concept: how they're minted and what is happening under the hood as well as interesting emerging use cases using these zk-based on...