Zero Knowledge

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Zaki Manian from Sommelier and Dean Tribble from Agoric . They check-in with the latest project news, recap about the UST collapse, and look into IST - Inter Stable Token - a project by the Agoric team that aims to become the Cosmos native multi collateral stablecoin. Here are some links for this episode: Ep 218: Hardened JS and the Architecture of Agor...

No full episode this week. Just a quick message to let you know about the upcoming zkSummit 8 - happening in Berlin Sept 15 2022. Apply here: https://www.zksummit.com/ If you like what we do: Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Head to the ZK Community Forum Support our Gitcoin Grant

In this week’s episode, Anna talks with Illia from Near and Alex from Aurora about the work they did that lead them to the Near ecosystem and what the connection is between the Aurora project and Near. They also cover what’s new at Near since the last time Illia and Anna spoke, Aurora+, the Rainbow Bridge, and future plans with Near’s sharding system. Here are some links for this episode: Ep 91: N...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with guest Jens Groth , Director of Research at DFINITY and previously a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCL. Jens Groth is a leading ZK researcher and is behind a number of advances in the field of ZK in the last few years such as the popular proving system Groth16. The conversation covers his earlier career, the cryptographic problems...

In this week’s episode, Anna checks in with Aztec, a ZK-based privacy L2 project. She speaks with Joe Andrews and Lead Engineer, Charles Julian. They discuss some of the team’s most important ZK research and implementations such as Plonk and how bringing privacy to Ethereum could truly change the way we do DeFi. They also discuss Aztec Connect and how it relates to zk.money , the Aztec roadmap wit...

In this week’s episode, we throwback to a sake-fueled conversation between Anna and returning guest Guillermo Angeris , recorded in April during DevConnect in Amsterdam. They cover Guillermo’s personal journey into math, math history in general, how to bring more people into the space and the potential opportunities and downsides of bringing some kinds of math mainstream. It is a bit of different...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Ye Zhang and Haichen Shen, the founders of Scroll - a native zkEVM Layer 2 Solution for Ethereum. They cover the founding of Scroll, the problems they aim to solve with their native zkEVM layer 2 solution, why scaling Ethereum is important, the philosophy of their zkEVM, and how this differs from other proposals as well as potential use cases or pro...

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Rahul Magani , the Applied ZK Lead at Jump Crypto , and Hendrik Hofstadt , Project Lead at (Wormhole Crypto)[ https://twitter.com/wormholecrypto ]. They look at how Wormhole first came to be, the challenges of interoperability, the design decisions they made in balancing security, speed and functionality, the risks facing these types of solutions, including...

In this week’s episode, Anna and co-host Kobi Gurkan chat with Mary Maller , a ZK Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. They cover Mary’s journey into cryptography, her work on trusted setups, universal SNARKs and Plookup tables. They also discuss the work she and Kobi did on aggregatable DKGs, what working on research at the EF is like and more. Here are some links for this episode: Caulk: Looku...

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Julien Niset , co-founder of Argent , about crypto wallets. They explore the history of wallet landscape, the interfaces we use for the decentralized web, the importance of account abstraction, smart contract wallets and Argent’s bet on ZK rollups. Here are some links for this episode: Episode 24: Blockchain UX and the UXUnConf Argent Argent Labs | Github Wh...

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Anna Caroll and James Prestwich from Nomad . Together they explore the Nomad optimistic interoperability solution, how it first was developed, what lessons it takes from previous attempts at interoperability and cross-chain bridging, how the system works and more. Here are some links for this episode: Ep 118: Tarun and James talk Flash Loans & more...

In this week’s episode, Anna dives back into the Polkadot world with friend and occasional co-host Rob Habermeier from Parity. They cover XCM - the Cross-Consensus Messaging format - and how XCM allows parachains to speak to one another, passing messages through the validators on the relay chain via XCMP Cross-Chain Message Passing. Here are some links for this episode: @paritytech | Github @Polka...

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Tarun , Guillermo and Brendan at DevConnect Amsterdam to cover a range of interesting and random topics like how blockchain and AI thinking differs, where it could intersect and how ZK tech could be implemented, how science could benefit from more adversarial testing, why peer review is broken, math theory, takeaways from DevConnect and more! Here are s...

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Sam Blackshear , co-founder and CTO at Mysten Labs. Sam has a background in programming language research and is one of the authors of the Move language, a language that can be used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. They chat about Mysten’s concept of programmable objects and what properties are necessary to make this functional for a blo...

This week, Anna catches up with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar and revisits the topic of bridges. They chat about what led Sergey to work on interoperability, the problems these solutions try to solve, how it compares to existing solutions, and what's next for the project. They also chat about some of the challenges of a multi bridge landscape and the fragmentation of liquidity. Links for the episode...

This week, Anna catches up with Gubsheep from 0xPARC. They chat about Dark Forest – a decentralized zk-based RTS game, built on Ethereum. They cover how it has evolved in the past 2 years and what’s upcoming in the Dark Forest’s community, governance and experiments. They recap the recent Gitcoin GR13 ZK Tech side round, review some moonshot ideas for ZK projects of the future and discuss potentia...

No full episode this week! ZKV presents Privacy in Cosmos - April 15 - is here: https://www.events.zkvalidator.com/ Zk Summit - April 21 - is here: https://www.zksummit.com/ _Note: Both are sold out, if you can't make it, let us know and keep an eye on our Youtube Channel , we will be streaming both events there! _ And do check out our linktree to see all the links many of our ZK Channels http...

This week, Anna & Tarun catch up with Georgios Konstantopoulos from Paradigm - a well-known OG crypto VC. They chat about his move to CTO at the firm, the team he has built and what they are working on. Then they dive into Foundry - a fast, portable, modular testing toolkit for Ethereum app dev written in Rust. They discuss the tooling landscape, why Foundry is making a bet on solidity, the di...

This week, Anna chats with Deborah Simpier and Justin Kilpatrick , co-founders of Althea and the team working on Gravity Bridge. They start with the history of the Althea project and how they aim to build an open marketplace for independent entities to create their own ISPs, providing bandwidth to users in under-connected areas. They then dive into the larger topic of bridges and the work being do...

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Jill Gunter and Ben Fisch from Espresso Systems . Espresso recently went public with their Proof-of-Stake Layer 1 blockchain, developed with flexible private applications and ZK rollups in mind. In this conversation, they explore the founding and development of the project, the Espresso chain and CAPE - a wrapped privacy smart contract application that is design...

This week Anna dives into the topic of funding in the ZK space. She chats with a number of different groups who are all funding zero knowledge technology from different angles. She kicks off the conversation with her colleague from ZKValidator Susannah Evans and Gubsheep from 0xPARC about the Gitcoin side round they are leading which is focused on funding the next wave of ZK tech projects. She the...

This week, Anna chats with Brendan Farmer and Daniel Lubarov from Polygon Zero, formerly known as Mir, about their early experiments with different proving systems, their work combining PLONK and Halo called Plonky - as well as the more recent combination of PLONK plus FRI (a technique that is borrowed from STARKs) which makes up Plonky2. They discuss why these innovations matter, what the new par...

This week, Anna chats with Mihailo Bjelic one of the co-founders of Polygon. Mihailo takes us through the evolution of Polygon and how the promise of web3 has led them to betting big on ZK-focused technologies. We learn about their approach to the two main challenges within their mission to scaling Ethereum – security and data availability; and how their suite of products aims to tackle these. Las...

This week, Anna chats with Dean Tribble , co-founder and CEO of Agoric. Dean walks us through the landscape of programming languages and Agoric’s philosophy behind building a blockchain that has Hardened JS as its smart contract language. We hear about the two big challenges in using JavaScript in blockchain development, malleability and non-deterministic, and how Agoric addresses these. Dean expl...

This week, Anna and Tarun Chitra chat with Sreeram Kannan , Associate Professor at University of Washington where he runs the UW Blockchain Lab. In this episode, they look at how information theory and blockchain intersect and map the progression of Bitcoin security. They discuss Sreeram’s early work on P2P mobile networks and how this evolved to work on consensus and fair sequencing. Sreeram take...