Zero Knowledge

In this episode, Anna chats with Friederike Ernst from Gnosis about their work on prediction markets, wallet security, exchanges, and the co-working space Full Node in Berlin - a hub for the blockchain community that Friederike spearheaded. Some links that were mentioned: sight.pm Phil Daian's front-running article slow.trade Full Node Berlin Thank you to this week's sponsor [Trail of Bits](trailo...

In this episode, we chat with the Marek Olszewski & Kobi Gurkan from Celo about their proof-of-stake protocol, their work on making a mobile-ready light client, how zero knowledge proofs can help to make a light client “lighter”, why this would be desirable and what potential such a construction could unlock. Some ideas and episodes: BLS signatures Coda Episode Zexe Episode Bridges and xDai wi...

In this episode, Anna catches up with Jorge Izquierdo from Aragon One to talk about the beginning of the Aragon project, the history of DAOs, as well as the challenges and potential in these new organisational entities. Here are some links we mentioned: What is a DAO The ZK ep with Griff Green on The DAO Vermont Legal DAO Framework on Open Law Thank you to this week's sponsor Apograf! Apograf has...

In this episode, we sit down with Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin from Near Protocol to find out about their work. We discuss what brought them to develop Near Protocol, how they used their whiteboard sessions to learn from the best people in the space, the challenge of blockchain UX, and what has motivated them to become one of the fastest moving projects around. Links: Near for developer...

In this week's episode, we chat with Nigel Smart , Professor of Cryptology at KU Leuven and the co-founder of Unbound Tech , about his background in cryptology, the history of MPC systems, MPC systems in the real world, and how MPC stacks up versus other related cryptography and privacy techniques. He helps us better understand where MPC comes from, the power of this technology and shares some eme...

In this week’s episode, we invite Raul Jordan from Prysmatic Labs back to our show. He shares an update about Prysmatic Labs and ETH2.0 development. We cover some of the latest innovations, some existing challenges, timelines, implementation challenges and more. We also touch on an article that Raul published about the Libra protocol, and talk about how it compares to the public blockchains we all...

In this week’s episode, we chat with Ben Fisch, Stanford PhD student working in Dan Boneh's applied cryptography group. In our conversation, we dig into accumulators, Merkle trees & vector commitments. We also learn a bit about the RSA Accumulator Paper - entitled Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains - that he co-authored with Benedikt Bünz a...

This week, we chat with Will Harborne , co-founder of Ethfinex and previously at Bitfinex, about the path from traditional exchanges, to centralised crypto exchanges and more recently DEXs. We explore what the role of the DEXs really is and what we could imagine seeing in the future of the space. Some links and articles mentioned: Ethfinex Phil Daian's Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reo...

In this week’s episode, we welcome Ariel Gabizon, previously a Electric Coin Company (Zcash) engineer and now a cryptographer working on zero knowledge constructions for Filecoin . Ariel has worked closely with some of the most exciting projects and researchers pushing the boundaries on zero knowledge research. He is also the person who discovered the Zcash bug (along with Sean Bowe and Zooko). In...

In this episode, we sit down with Pratyush Mishra , CS PhD Student at UC Berkeley and one of the co-authors on the Zexe project, to discuss the Zexe protocol. We cover how this paper came to be, what it aims to solve, how it works, and how it could be used. Recorded at ZCon1 in Split For more on the protocol, check out: Zexe: Enabling Decentralized Private Computation Paper https://eprint.iacr.org...

In this episode, we sit down at the Zcon1 Conference in Croatia with Amber Baldet, CEO and co-founder of Clovyr, former JPMorgan Blockchain Program Lead, and board member of the Zcash Foundation . We chat about about her road to the blockchain space, the problems she aims to solve with her work on Clovyr, some updates about the Zcash community & foundation, the state of zero knowledge research...

In this episode, Anna chats with Robert Habermeier , one of the co-founders of Polkadot and an engineer at Parity Technology, about his early experience with Rust and cryptography, as well as the work he did at Parity on Warp Sync and Lightclients. We then discuss how this helped inspire some of the concepts and design of the Polkadot protocol. We also chat about some of the exciting concepts that...

In this week's episode we chat with two of the people behind the Graphene project , Chia-Che Tsai of Texas A&M University and Golem developer Lukasz Glen, about TEEs, Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX), and the way the Graphene project aims to make it easier for devs to interact with these hardware enclaves. Graphene started as a research project at Stony Brook University, led by Ch...

In this week’s episode, we meet with Dominic Tarr , a protocol designer and security auditor at Least Authority who works on Scuttlebutt - a decentralized secure gossip platform. We discuss P2P messaging and the challenges of sending messages within a p2p network in a truly decentralised manner. Here are some links we mention: https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server https://www.allthingsdistributed.com...

In this week's episode, Anna sits down with Joe Lallouz and Aaron Henshaw from Bison Trails - a validator infrastructure company based in NYC. Recorded during the NYC blockchain week, we chatted about the latest PoS systems to launch, what it means to be a validator, how the incentive structures can impact the ecosystem development and potential futures for this uncharted validator landscape. Than...

In this week's episode, we sit down with Liz Steininger and Chris Wood from Least Authority to discuss the state of privacy today, the case for private crypto subscription payments and their P4 proposal. The Private Periodic Payment Protocol, P4, uses the shielded account feature of Zcash to provide a fully decentralised method for recurring end-to-end private cryptocurrency payments. Links mentio...

In this week's episode, Anna sits down with Sunny Aggarwal to talk about his journey into blockchain, the beginnings of Blockchain at Berkeley, how he discovered Cosmos, his role as a validator and as a podcast co-host. We discuss: Coursera course that Sunny mentions https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking Blockchain at Berkeley https://blockchain.berkeley.edu/ Cosmos https://cosmos.network/...

In this week, we sit down with Kevin Owocki, co-founder of gitcoin, to have a look at how open source blockchain development is funded. We cover the different methods for funding open source work, what has worked in the past, what hasn’t, how funding blockchain projects can be quite different and what people are experimenting with today. We discuss: EIP1337 Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behi...

In this week’s episode, we welcome special guest Sean Bowe. Sean is an engineer at the Electric Coin Company and the author of the Sprout and Sapling Zcash trusted set ups and much of the underlying cryptography of the protocol. We had a chance to chat about his history, what got him into the topic, some of the joys & challenges to working with SNARKs, and what ideas are inspiring him. We also...

In this week’s episode, we sit down with Zac Williamson of the Aztec Protocol to discuss zero knowledge tools, range proofs, the Aztec Protocol, the different approaches to bringing privacy to ethereum, and how standards in the space are emerging. Check out Zac's talk at the ZK Summit for more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIg2aJQqNNc&feature=youtu.be Here was our episode with Benedikt Bunz...

In this week's episode, we sit down with Justin Drake , researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, to discuss randomness in blockchain, how it can be created and what adversarial models exist. We also discuss the random beacon and how that concept has evolved in the development of ETH2.0 Our initial definition of randomness in cryptography comes largely from this article by cloudflare: https://blog.cl...

In this week's episode, we invite J. Ayo Akinyele to the podcast. Ayo is a co-Founder of Bolt Labs which will be focused on developing the Bolt Protocol , a privacy preserving layer 2 approach for anonymous micropayments, which is similar to Lightning Network. Bolt, which stands for Blind, Offchain, Lightweight, Transactions, could be used for both scaling zcash or providing a scalable privacy sol...

In this week's episode, we sit down with the Alex Vlasov and Alex Gluchowski from Matter Labs to discuss their approach to using zkSNARKs for scaling the transaction processing capacity of Ethereum. We chat about the inspiration for the Roll-up project, the Matter Labs implementation, their proposed Franklin network and more. To learn about the project check out: https://matter-labs.io/ and their...

In this week's episode, we speak with Julian Arni about Radicle, a decentralized alternative to Github built on IPFS. Radicle is both a programming language and a set of tools to enable decentralised open source software development. We go deep into this project, it's hope to impact open source development and also touch on the societal questions that inspired it. Here is a short tweet that summar...

In this interview, we chat with Rune Christensen from MakerDAO about stablecoins, MakerDAO’s take on this concept, the peg and how this is maintained, security, oracles and more. Here are a few of the terms that we discuss in the episode: DAI: a crypto asset-backed token pegged to the USD  — it is designed to maintain a stable value. MKR: Valuebearing, tradeable token. As a governance token, MKR h...