Zero Knowledge

In this episode, we invite Howard Wu back to the show to share more about his new project Aleo - a privacy-focused blockchain that enables fully private applications. Howard's previous ZKPodcast episode, Introduction to zkSNARKs , remains one of our most popular episodes to date! We chat about why you need programming languages for SNARKs, what it is like to switch from VC/Academia to being a foun...

In this episode we chat with Josh Cincinnati , the former executive director of Zcash Foundation . We cover Josh's career before Zcash, his work at the foundation, the important role privacy plays in crypto and the challenges of decentralised governance. We also discuss his decision to leave the foundation, Zcash Foundation's philosophy of transparency, his hopes for the future of the Zcash commun...

In this episode, Anna and guest host Georgios chat with Hasu , an independent crypto researcher focused on economics and security, about elastic block size proposals in both Bitcoin and Ethereum. They cover how Hasu found his way into research as well as the history of the block size BIPs that shaped the ecosystem as well as Ethereum’s EIP 1559 Here are some additional links: Research paper: A mod...

In this week's episode, we chat with Brian Gu , a student at MIT and creator of the Dark Forest game. We chat about education, blockchain based games and what inspired his work on the Dark Forest game. We then dig into how this game creates an incomplete information game space by using zkSNARKs to create a “cryptographic fog of war” and more! As described on their blog, Dark Forest is an MMO space...

** Be sure to visit our ZKPodcast subreddit and leave us some questions for the upcoming AMA!** In this week’s episode, Anna and guest-host / frequent guest Tarun Chitra catch up with Alex Evans , researcher at Placeholder Capital . They dive into the latest in DeFi, a topic that we don't cover too often, but has become hard to ignore. Specifically they discuss the emergence of liquidity farming,...

** Check out the ZKPodcast subreddit and share some comments/questions for our upcoming AMA ** This week, we catch up with Benedikt Bunz and Ben Fisch , PhD students at Stanford, once again. In this episode, we dive deeper into Findora , a project that was co-founded by Ben (who is also the CTO) and where Benedikt works as the Head of Research. We look at what the Findora project is, discuss the "...

In this episode, we will be exploring StarkWare and DeversiFi’s collaboration - a Layer 2 STARK-powered exchange for Ethereum assets. Guests Tom Brand , product manager at Starkware , and Will Harborne , co-founder of DeversiFi , discuss the project, how it works under the hood and give us a glimpse into what they have planned for the future. We also look at how Validium, that is Layer-2 scaling s...

In this week's episode, Anna follows up on the trusted setup survey she did in her previous episode on the topic with this bonus interview with Roman Semanov & Roman Storm from Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash's trusted setup, held in May 2020, was the largest to date with over 1000 participants. Be sure to listen to the full ZKPodcast Trusted Setup episode first Find out more about Tornado Cash's t...

This week, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Yan X Zhang , professor at SJSU, about math competitions, math education, how crypto is like alchemy and the Gasper paper - work Yan and his students collaborated on with the Ethereum Foundation. “Gasper” is a proof-of-stake-based consensus protocol, which is an idealized version of the proposed Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. The protocol combines...

This week, Anna and guest host Georgios Konstantopoulos chat with Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana network. They learn about this system and discuss the innovations that allow them to achieve high performance without sharding. For more on Solana check out their website - https://solana.com/ We also mention this episode on VDF's with Joseph Bonneau. Here is a further explanation of the differences. Wa...

In this episode, we chat with Matt Luongo , CEO of Thesis , founder of Keep Network , and project lead of tBTC. We cover the need for BTC to ETH bridges, what the challenges are in building bridges with BTC, tBTC and how it is setup, what went down with the initial tBTC release - an event the team now refers to as "release candidate 0", and where we might be seeing tBTC go next. Here are some usef...

In this week's episode, Anna explores the state of trusted setups with 4 of the people who have recently coordinated and run trusted setups for different SNARK systems. She interviews Koh Wei Jie from the Ethereum Foundation , Thomas Walton-Pocock from Aztec Protocol , Brecht Devos from Loopring and Kobi Gurkan from the EF and cLabs . This episode covers the new generation of trusted setups and ho...

In this episode, we chat with Mark Tyneway who is a contributor on the Handshake project - an experimental peer-to-peer root naming system. We learn about this decentralised, foundation-free project, the issues of DNS, how Handshake plans on fixing this, how it differs from ENS, their unique airdrop process, what an Urkel Trie is, and more. Here are a few useful links: Handshake Whitepaper An aird...

In this week's episode, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Akis Kattis, a PhD student at NYU & the co-author of Proof of Necessary Work: Succinct State Verification with Fairness Guarantees - a paper he co-wrote with Joseph Bonneau. They discuss the challenge of Proof of Useful Work, the unique properties that SNARKs have, such as puzzle hardness, that allow for PoNW to overcome these...

 In this week's episode, Anna interviews three people from the Tezos community: Jacob Arluck (co-founders TQ ), Marc Beunardeau and Marco Stronati (both from Nomadic Labs ). They chat about the Tezos origin story, the development of the PoS system, the governance of Tezos, and how they are incorporating zk proofs - and specifically Sapling from Zcash - into their system. Here is some additional i...

In this episode, we chat with Molly Mackinlay, Project Lead for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) at Protocol Labs. We talk about her journey to Protocol Labs, as well as take a deeper view into IPFS, LibP2P, Bitswap, Testground, the use cases and projects working with these tools, and the specific upgrades they have made with the recent 0.5 IPFS release. We cover: the importance of distribute...

In this week's episode, Anna catches up with Kenny Paterson , Professor of Computer Science and Lead of Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich . The goal of the episode is to take a deeper look at DP-3T and privacy preserving contact tracing research in Europe generally. They cover his work at ETH Zurich, discuss how the DP-3T project came to be, look at risks facing contact tracing protocols ge...

In this week's episode, we go deep into Consensus Algorithms and HotStuff with Ittai Abraham from VMware Research . We chat about the evolution of consensus algorithms, BFT, and how these early ideas have become the backbone of blockchain tech. We cover PBFT, Tendermint and Ittai's research into SBFT, HotStuff, and the improvements he has been working on since HotStuff's incorporation into Faceboo...

In this week's episode, we chat with Henry de Valence from the Zcash Foundation . We discuss what makes for a strong crypto library, some of the work he has been doing at the ZF and he shares an update about the Zebra Zcash client. We also learn about the TCN Coalition , a group he is working with that aims to build and evaluate privacy-preserving contact tracing protocols - an important tool in t...

In this episode, Anna catches up with Claudia Diaz, professor at KU Leuven and the Chief Science Officer at Nym Technology to learn about mixnets, the history of privacy technology and how there may be some opportunities for new privacy tech to emerge in this post-pandemic world. Here is the contact tracing project that Claudia highlights in the episode: Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity T...

In this episode, we chat with Flavio Bergamaschi from IBM research about Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). FHE allows for computation on encrypted data. First developed in 2009 at IBM, this tech has long been the considered only theoretically possible. However, as we learn in the interview, there have been strides made in the last few years and we are starting to see FHE technology being used in...

In this episode, we catch up with Sean Bowe and Daira Hopwood from the Electric Coin Company to chat about Halo, a recursive proof composition that doesn't require a trusted setup. We cover the efficiency techniques used in Halo such as "nested amortization", how the protocol was developed, what some of the key findings are, and how it fits in with the other recent SNARK-based protocols. We touch...

In this week's episode, we chat with Benjamin Perez from Trail of Bits about zero knowledge proof systems and security. We touch on the evolution of the crypto tech auditing business, the new challenges that emerge in zero knowledge proof systems regarding security, some of the recent bugs and vulnerabilities found in zkp systems and more! Here is our previous episode on this topic with JP of Trai...

In this episode, we meet with Galen Wolf-Pauly from the Tlon Corporation to discuss the project Urbit. Urbit is an encrypted peer-to-peer network comprised of a deterministic operating system ( Urbit OS / Arvo) and a secure, global identity layer ( Urbit ID / Azimuth). The Urbit contributors have created new stack, built from the ground up as an integrated system with a focus on user experience. I...

In this episode, we catch up with Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin from the Ethereum Foundation to chat about how zero knowledge proof systems are being used throughout the Eth1x and Eth2.0 stacks. We look at their applications for privacy and scalability throughout layer 1, layer 1.5 and layer 2, as well as explore some other emerging applications. Here were some of the articles and ideas discuss...