Zero Knowledge

This week, Anna chats with Brian Fabian Crain , a fellow podcaster from Epicenter , founder of Chorus One and an early member of the Berlin crypto community. The conversation starts from Brian’s early involvement in Bitcoin in 2013 and his role in the local Berlin community, leading him to launch the Epicenter podcast. Brian then tells his story of founding Chorus One, a validator whose history is...

This week, Anna and Tarun host Tracheopteryx and Facu , two core devs at Yearn.finance, to take an introductory dive into the past and present of Yearn. Starting from Yearn’s spontaneous assembly in the Summer of DeFi (2020), Trach & Facu tell their personal stories of how they joined the project and where it got to since. The conversation then moves into the yDAO and its current “Constrained...

This week, Anna and Josh chat with Jill Gunter (nèe Carlson), a well-known investor and crypto advocate, to dive deep into the eternal dilemma of privacy vs. transparency and how ZKPs can finally give us the tools to be more nuanced about our society’s approach to privacy. Starting from Jill’s background as a bond trader on Wall Street, the conversation quickly shifts into how the need for transpa...

This week, Anna chats with John Light and Samuel JJ Gosling , two passionate privacy advocates and DAO thinkers. This topic was brought up in a recent zkSessions focused on Privacy in NFTs and DAOs spurring a deeper dive into the subject. John brings his past experience at Aragon, and now Sovryn, to discuss what is a DAO and what are its needs in privacy and collusion protection. Samuel brings the...

This week, Anna chats with Kristy-Leigh Minehan , a crypto and mining veteran primarily known for developing the ProgPow hashing algorithm. She offers a unique and in-depth perspective into the world of Proof of Work mining, starting from the early days of Bitcoin and moving into the first Bitcoin ASICs, the Ethereum GPU mining era, all the way to the present day of staking dominance. Some of thes...

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Sunny Aggarwal and Dev Ojha about their new project Osmosis, an AMM built into the Cosmos ecosystem using the IBC interoperability protocol. Osmosis brings some interesting innovations to the AMM table, starting from the seamless IBC integration to customizable bonding curves and per-pool governance to promote experimentation. Sunny and Dev are also very passion...

This week James and Anna chat with Ben Edgington , Lead Product Manager for Teku, an Eth2 client developed by ConsenSys. Ben recounts his story of the involvement with Ethereum 2.0 from the very early months of Serenity and Shasper, and how those were completely replaced by the Beacon Chain concept that resulted in Ethereum 2.0 as we know it. Ben then highlights what changed after Phase 0 launch:...

This week, Anna chats with Oskar Thoren and Sanaz Taheri-Boshrooyeh from Status to learn about their work on Waku, a decentralized messaging protocol incorporating zk-SNARKs for spam protection. Waku is the successor of Whisper, a messaging protocol that turned out to be too resource-heavy and vulnerable to spamming. Oskar and Sanaz explain how Waku V2 changes things, from ZKP-based spam protectio...

This week Anna and Tarun host Noah Zinsmeister and Moody Salem to learn all about Uniswap and the recent Uniswap V3 deployment. Noah and Moody go through the history of Uniswap from its EF grant days to Unisocks, Uniswap V2 and now Uniswap V3 and its ranged liquidity model. They explain all the benefits as well as the potential drawbacks, and how the project plans to fix them in a likely indirect...

This week Anna chats with Adrian Brink , co-founder of the Anoma Network and long-time crypto builder. Adrian explains all there is to know about the new privacy-centric network, diving into concepts like fractal scaling, the validity predicate-based account model, the solution against front-running in Ferveo & much more. Here are some links for the episode: CowSwap & DAO Tech with Gnosis’...

This week Anna and Tarun chat with Martin Köppelmann , CEO of Gnosis. The company was known for championing prediction markets, but Gnosis has now shifted to making key infrastructure products. Martin chats about this transition and explains Gnosis’s current products, which include a unique DEX called CowSwap and a number of products for managing DAO treasuries and governance. Here are some links...

This week Anna and James chat with Elena Nadolinski , founder of Iron Fish, about the new privacy network and what led her to this point. Elena recounts her journey into crypto, starting from AirBnB and falling into the rabbit hole of Ethereum hackathons, Solidity, and NFTs, eventually leading her to exploration of zero knowledge proofs for honest computation. This deep dive into SNARKs and Saplin...

This week Anna and Tarun chat with Andy Chorlian . Andy recounts the many interesting moments through his crypto journey, including being at Maker during Black Thursday, living through DeFi Summer, and then jumping into NFTs with Top Shot and PleasrDAO. Taking a break from his degen career, Andy is now developing Fractional, a protocol for fractionalizing NFTs. He explains how it works under the h...

This week, Anna and James chat with Antonio Juliano , founder of dYdX, a derivatives exchange on Ethereum that recently transitioned to a StarkEx-powered L2 infrastructure. Antonio brings a product-centric perspective to using scalability tech. He explains the choice of going for StarkWare’s products and how it compares to other layer ones or rollups. The conversation delves into questions like dY...

This week, Anna and James host Ed Felten and Steven Goldfeder , co-founders of Arbitrum, an Optimistic Rollup project born before the term "Optimistic Rollup" was even coined. Ed and Steven tell Arbitrum’s story, from its beginnings as a chain-agnostic university project in 2014 to become an Ethereum-based Optimistic L2 Rollup solution based on fraud proofs. They cover Arbitrum’s interactive fraud...

This week, Anna chats with Alberto Garoffolo from Horizen Labs for their upcoming Zendoo protocol and Latus sidechain proposal. The episode centers around the world of sidechains for UTXO-based blockchains such as Horizen or Zcash. The Horizen team has developed Latus and Zendoo, a SNARK-powered mechanism for designing trustless sidechains. Alberto explains how Horizen’s Zendoo system works under...

This week, Anna and James chat with Ben Jones and Mark Tyneway from Optimism, the builders of Optimistic Ethereum. The interview continues the series of L2-focused episodes we have been airing on the Zero Knowledge Podcast and comes just as Optimism gears up for launch. Anna, James, Ben and Mark discuss the inner workings of their Optimistic Rollup, diving deep into concepts like data availability...

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Zac Williamson and Joe Andrews , respectively CTO and Head of Product at Aztec. The episode is centered on Aztec’s latest release, zk.money, the “zk-zk-rollup” that targets privacy and scalability at the same time. zk.money allows users to shield their Ethereum-based assets while achieving a higher transaction count, a result that took months of research and...

In today’s episode, Anna chats with Alex Gluchowski , CEO at Matter Labs and co-creator of zkSync, to catch up on Matter Labs’s latest developments in extending Ethereum’s capabilities with zk proofs. Alex explains the recent progress in porting Solidity to a zkRollup and how that interacts with the Zinc language and zk proof circuits. They then move on to discussing Ethereum scalability with a de...

In today’s episode, Anna and James chat with three representatives of the Cosmos ecosystem — Zaki Manian, Tess Rinearson and Shahan Khatchadourian — to learn all about its recent milestone upgrade, Stargate. First up is Zaki Manian , co-founder of Iqlusion and Sommelier Finance, who sets the stage for what Stargate achieved and why the upgrade was the most comprehensive and complex yet for Cosmos....

This week, Anna & Tarun take an in-depth look into AMMs with Guillermo Angeris , a PhD student in Stanford who co-authored a number of papers on fundamental AMM properties. They chat about how his work on Optimization Theory and Inverse Design can be applied to a DeFi context, as well as his most recent paper deals with privacy in AMMs, effectively demonstrating how superficial attempts at mak...

In this week’s episode, Anna has a one-on-one chat with Alex Ozdemir, a PhD student at Stanford researching formal methods, cryptography and distributed systems. Alex’s work is closely tied to the world of generalized computations within zero knowledge systems. He is one of the main developers of CirC, an infrastructure framework for building zero knowledge languages. In their conversation, Alex a...

In this week’s episode, Anna goes on a grand tour of the Polkadot ecosystem ahead of the launch of Parachains. In this multi-interview episode, she explores the Polkadot ecosystem, how teams are interacting with the existing tech stacks, what they are looking forward to, and how these networks may evolve in the future once Parachains go live. The first speaker is Fabian Gompf , VP at Parity, who e...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun talk with Simon Peffers and Kelly Olson from Supranational , a startup focused on building specialised software and hardware for advanced cryptographic computation. Simon and Kelly talk about their recent work helping out the Ethereum Foundation with VDFs, as well as building a better SNARK algorithm for Protocol Labs’ Filecoin. They cover how specialised chi...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Robert Habermeier chat with Pratyush Mishra , co-author of the Arkworks toolkit. Arkworks is a collection of Rust libraries designed to simplify development with SNARKs, both for developing high-level application circuits and building custom SNARK implementations. Pratyush lays out what possibilities and trade-offs Arkworks offers, diving into the details of the Ru...