Zero Knowledge

This week, Anna catches up with Zaki Manian , co-founder of Iqlusion and Sommelier . They embark on a comprehensive recap of the history of Cosmos to-date, covering all ground since their last interview 2 years ago. They also dive into topics such as the IBC launch, Osmosis, how the ecosystem grew and accelerated up until the Luna crash and how it continues to recover in its next phase. They then...

In this week's episode, Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan chat with Carl and Trent from the Ethereum Foundation , covering many topics such as their work on the KZG Ceremony and how this is different from the previous trusted setups we have covered. The group takes a deep dive into trusted setups, discussing what they are for, how they have been run and how the setup is going so far. They also discuss Pro...

This week, Anna chats with Justin Thaler , Associate Professor at Georgetown . They cover Justin’s academic history and discuss what led him to working on interactive proofs and SNARKs. They also take a look at several other topics such as the Thaler Book Study Group, his earlier work Spartan, comparing the security of different rollups built with SNARKs and STARKs and more. Here are some addition...

In this week’s episode, Anna and guest co-hosts Guillermo , Tarun and Kobi share their thoughts about the state of Zero Knowledge tech today and what it might look like going in 2023. The group discusses some exciting ZK experiments and some of the emerging topics such as: ZK ID, ZK Bridges, ZK DeFi, and more. Here are some additional links for this episode: Epicenter:State of the ZK Ecosystem wit...

Apply for the zkSummit 9 ->> https://9lcje6jbgv1.typeform.com/to/FCoktPh9 Happening in Lisbon on April 4th Keep an eye on our twitter and telegram channel for more info!

In this week’s episode, Anna and part-time Zero Knowledge co-hosts Tarun , Guillermo , Josh and Kobi , get together for a casual catch up and have a look back at 2022. They trace Jan to today in both the zk community and the larger ecosystem, discussing the highs and the lows, focusing on the major events which stood out to them. If you think the team missed anything, let us know by replying to ou...

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...

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 the...

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 genera...

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 impleme...

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 regula...

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 t...

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...

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 f...

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...

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 Ep...

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 typ...

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...

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...

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...

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: Episod...

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 ro...

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 l...

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...

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 poo...