Zero Knowledge

This week, Anna chats with Dean Eigenmann and Edgar Aroutiounian from Project Blanc , a team building bots and developing MEV strategies. They revisit the topic of MEV, what it is and how teams like Project Blanc work to capture it. They also dive into the concept of re-orgs, accelerationism as a philosophy and get a look at what goes on in the Dark Forest. Here are some links for the episode: Mon...

This week Anna chats with Nathan Ginnever , an applied cryptographer and contributor to Zodiac, and Auryn Macmillan , a product manager and Solidity dev at Gnosis Guild, about the modules and components that make up Zodiac’s suite of composable DAO tooling. In the conversation, they explore the DAO landscape and the lessons they’ve gathered from earlier tools like the Gnosis Safe and SafeSnap. As...

This week Anna chats with Emin Gün Sirer - CEO Ava Labs and Founder of Avalanche. They chat about the experiences that led him to become interested in distributed systems research and his work as a professor at Cornell that led to the development of Avalanche. They then dig into their novel consensus mechanism which uses the sub-sampling technique, the architecture of the network with the 3 distin...

This week Anna chats with Wanseob Lim an Applied ZKP Developer in the Privacy & Scaling Exploration Team at the Ethereum Foundation and one of the authors of the Zkopru protocol . They explore how Zkopru uses optimistic rollups and zero knowledge proofs to create a privacy-focused Layer 2. Wanseob walks us through the transaction process and how the protocol is built to circumvent high gas fee...

This week, Anna checks in with co-hosts & friends, Tarun Chitra , James Prestwich , Josh Cincinnati and Guillermo Angeris , for a retrospective look at 2021 and a look forward to 2022! Enjoy this conversation full of blasphemous hot takes, bad 2022 predictions and dad jokes. Listen to last year's recap: Episode 163: Kicking off 2021 with Anna, Tarun, James & Josh If you like what we do: Fo...

While we decided not to release a full episode this week, Anna did get a chance to catch up with Kobi Gurkan , one of the co-organizers of ZK Hack and someone who was very missed in the last episode about the event! Enjoy this special bonus New Years eve ep, one last look back at ZK Hack 2021 and a look forward as well for the project! We also mention a few links for ZK related channels to check o...

This week, Anna hosts a special 5-part interview with a roundup of perspectives from ZK Hack. First, she chats with puzzle hackers who share what it was like to solve these real-world cryptography bugs and learn complex concepts in real time. They discuss how they got started learning in this space and the resources and tools that helped them. Next, Anna speaks with the puzzle builders on the chal...

This week, Anna chats with Bobbin Threadbare about his project Miden, a STARK-based roll-up which was recently purchased by Polygon. We recap the differences between STARKs and SNARKs and the increasingly blurred line between these two proving systems. We then map Bobbin’s journey to Miden VM (now Polygon Miden), how it originated from his earlier project Distaff VM and now incorporates the Winter...

This week Anna and Tarun chat with Vasiliy Shapovalov from [Lido]( Lido ) and Felix Lutsch of Chorus One about liquid staking on the ETH2 Proof of Stake consensus chain. Vasiliy explains Ethereum’s unique PoS validator setup and how liquid staking behaves on this network. They also talk about how liquid staking behaves on other live PoS, the inevitability of liquid staking and how to best design t...

This week Anna chats with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia about how and why they’re focusing on building a data availability-first L1 blockchain. Ismail takes us through how data availability can be a problem, primarily with light clients and breaks down the components necessary to understanding the data availability problem such as state changes, the separation of consensus from execution and how Cel...

This week, Anna chats with Billy Rennekamp about the Cosmos Hub ecosystem, ICF and some of the latest innovations he is watching. They discuss his early experiments with NFTs that led to the Clovers Network and his move into the Cosmos ecosystem. Through this, they cover how the space has evolved and the game changing potential of the IBC paradigm. Billy explains how the Cosmos Hub aims to support...

This week, Anna catches up with Guillermo Angeris , Alex Evans and Tarun . The conversation charts their research on CFMMs, AMMs and related primitives and explores the goals and methodology of this work. They also revisit the topic of private AMMs and specifically their recent work on using differential privacy to achieve a more private system. Here are some links for the episode: Paper: Replicat...

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with MP , Trent and Sam from JPG about this on-chain NFT curation protocol. They walk through what the JPG team wanted out of this decentralized curation protocol and how to bring in voices that aren't always heard in the traditional art world. They also explore the idea of rethinking the mechanism of curation, indexing and permissionless access in order to bring a c...

This week, Anna catches up on what has been happening in the Kusama network ecosystem with Will Pankiewicz, Raul Romanutti , and Bruno Skvorc . First up, Will, the Master of Validators at Parity, takes us through the fundamentals of Kusama, how it differs from Polkadot and some future predictions for the ecosystem and its parachains. Next, Raul, Community Manager and council member, breaks down ho...

This week, Anna speaks with Adam Gągol and Matthew Niemerg about Aleph Zero - an L1 project mixing ZKPs and MPCs with a DAG consensus algorithm. The aim of their project is to enable private smart contracts. In the conversation, they explore the underlying DAG structure and their privacy solutions that leverage zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) and Secure Multiparty Computation (sMPC). Here are so...

This week, Anna speaks with Dankrad Feist , a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. They talk about the future of the ETH client infrastructure, the merge, the difference between merkle trees and verkle tries, and more. They also explore how concepts that originated in the ZK research space have made their way into the ETH client stack. Here are some links for this episode: Episode 120: ZKPs in E...

This week, Anna catches up with Zaki Manian and his new project Sommelier . They explore how Sommelier aims to develop strategies to better serve the more complex emerging DeFi projects like Uniswap V3, and how this would allow the average user to benefit from these new powerful tools. They also discuss Zaki’s vision for multichain DeFi and how the space has evolved over the last few years. Here a...

200th Episode of Zero Knowledge Podcast! This week, Anna chats with Alessandro Chiesa , a professor working on cryptography, complexity and security and one of the co-founders Zcash and StarkWare. Anna and Ale dig into some of the recent SNARK research coming out of his lab and discuss how to navigate the challenges of teaching in a space that changes quickly. Here are some links for this episode:...

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Emre Tekişalp and [Izaak Meckler](twitter.com/izmeckler) about what’s new with Mina, O(1) Labs, the network launch and of course the anticipated release of Snapps to testnet later this year. We learn all about how Snapps, these SNARK-powered applications, bring data privacy and scalability to blockchain. Here are a few links for this episode: Latest recursiv...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun dive back into the NFT space with their guest Luiz from FingerprintsDAO . FingerprintsDAO is a collector organization for artists, curators and producers. Luiz takes us through new paradigms of NFT creation, its governance and the wild world of on-chain art where it’s the smart contract that is the art and wherein the value lies. Here are some links mentioned...

This week, Anna chats with Pedro Gomes , Founder of WalletConnect, about how wallets and DApps traditionally interact and the journey to WalletConnect and WalletConnect 2.0. They explore how the tech incorporates the Waku protocol, as well as the role of CAIPs (Chain Agnostic Improvement Proposals) in determining how WalletConnect evolves. Pedro shares what prompted the new WalletConnect 2.0 devel...

This week, Anna chats with Harry Halpin , the CEO of the Nym project, about a variety of topics related to privacy, politics and the need to build censorship-resistant systems. Harry talks about his early involvement in cryptography and his changing perspectives on capitalism as a tool for good. He shares how Nym aims to protect blockchain transactions from network-based deanonymization attacks. H...

This week, Anna and James chat with Joseph Delong , CTO of Sushi, who talks about everything that’s happened since the initial SushiSwap genesis and the gradual transition into a large organization capable of shipping multiple products: MISO, Kashi, BentoBox and the upcoming Trident. Joseph then dives into a few of the recent events like the MISO vulnerability, the scrapped VC raise, the Optimism...

This week, Anna chats with Jordi Baylina and David Schwartz from Hermez about their zkEVM design that was first revealed at EthCC. Jordi and David explain the design choices such as why they push for recreating the EVM, how it’s done at a technical level and how Hermez’s approach is different from other zk teams like Matter Labs and StarkWare. The original recording was done before the news of the...

No full episode this week, but we just wanted to let you know about the brand new zeroknowledge.fm website! Finally, we have a site that brings together all the different parts of the ZK Community: podcast episodes, upcoming and past events, blog, social channels and more. We also have a new updated ZK Jobs Board featuring zk focused job opportunities, as well as a new ZK Community Forum where we...