Zero Knowledge

In this week’s episode, we sit down with Alistair Stewart and Jeff Burges, researchers at the Web3 Foundation , to dig into what they are working on, what they are thinking about at the moment, and how zero knowledge proofs can be used throughout the Polkadot ecosystem. Here are some links and ressources to check out: Gavin Wood episode Rob Habermeier episode The Moral Character of Cryptographic W...

In this week's episode, we catch up with our friends Tarun Chitra and James Prestwich at the Stanford Blockchain Conference. We chat about the Flashloan phenomenon & the recent arbitrage 'exploit'. We also catch up about the known challenges facing PoS systems, what EVM support means on other chains & more! Catch our previous episodes with Tarun and James here: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm...

In this week’s episode, we take the podcast in a slightly different direction and dive into Isogenies - a topic at the cutting edge of cryptography. We look at how they are related to VDFs and randomness generation. Our guest, Luca de Feo , one of the co-inventor of SIDH, helps us get an understanding for what Isogenies - or morphisms of algebraic groups - really are. Here are some useful links to...

In this week's episode of the podcast, we catch up with Alex Glukowski of Matter Labs to hear about zkSync , the latest iteration of their zkRollup implementation built to be a scaling and privacy engine for Ethereum. We also touch on the Redshift protocol, a new transparent zkSNARK system that emerged as a result of work on this system. Here are a few links that we mention: Previous episode on Ma...

In this week’s episode, we catch up with Christopher Goes, IBC Lead at Tendermint . We learn a bit more about the Cosmos Network ecosystem and his work on IBC. We then focus in on how he is thinking about zero knowledge proofs in the context of IBC like-interoperability constructions. We explore some of the ways in which zkps could be incorporated into different schemes for interoperability - incl...

This week, we explore the Fractal transparent SNARK construction with its authors Dev Ojha and Nick Spooner - both students of Alessandro Chiesa at UC Berkeley. We explore how Fractal works, how it improves on some of the earlier work on Sonic and Marlin, how it borrows from but differentiates itself from STARKs, as well as what they discovered while working on this paper about recursive SNARKs an...

In this week’s episode, we catch up with Izaak Meckler from 0(1) Labs to talk about launching a recursive snark based incentivised test net, a recap of recursive SNARKs, updates on the working SNARKitecture, and a look at what's next for the project. We also touch on some new use-cases and ideas for how zkps may be a component in making computer programmes potentially more accountable to their use...

In this week’s episode, we learn more about Plonk with Ariel Gabizon and Zac Williamson from Aztec . PLONK is a recent highly efficient, universal SNARK construction. We explore what distinguishes Plonk from some other other new constructions including their focus on Lagrange-bases to deconstruct complex problem statements into simple polynomial identities. This episode goes very deep and so we do...

In this week’s episode, we chat with Roman Storm and Roman Semanov from Tornado.cash all about mixers. We explore what they are used for and how they work, how Zero Knowledge can be incorporated to provide more privacy, what the challenges are and what the future holds for the Tornado. Cash project. Here are some episodes or resources we mention: https://tornado.cash/ https://medium.com/@tornado.c...

In this end of year episode, we chat about what we've learned in 2019, some of our favourite episodes, this year's explosion in ZK research and what we are looking forward to in 2020! Thanks to Henrik José for updated jingle! We mention a number of episodes from this past year, have a look through our episodes here: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/ For the Zk Specific episodes have a look here: https...

In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with Daniel Benarroch and Aviv Zohar from QEDIT - a privacy software startup focused on bringing Zero Knowledge to enterprise customers. We chat about the power of zero knowledge proof systems, some of the emerging use cases using zk systems and The Zero Knowledge Standardization Effort . Here are some links we mention: Aviv's website Hilbert's problems - twe...

This week we catch up with Zaki Manian, Director at Tendermint , the company building Cosmos architecture, and co-founder of Iqlusion Validator. We chat about the blockchain in Silicon Valley, why SF loves DeFi, the challenge of balancing pragmatism and regulation with a decentralised ideology, the nuances of PoS systems, the wins of 2019 and what is on the horizon. Here are links to a few things...

In this week’s episode, we catch-up our friend Lucas Vogelsang from Centrifuge . Centrifuge is an open, decentralized platform to connect the global financial supply chain. We chat about the journey Lucas took to co-founding this company, how privacy plays a role in his thinking and we discover what it means to be a project building with zkSNARKs today. We touch on a few previous episodes includin...

In this week's episode, we chat with Juan Benet , founder of Protocol Labs , about IPFS , Libp2p , and the much anticipated incentivised decentralised storage protocol Filecoin . We dig into the history of the Filecoin project, the gap in the “market” they are trying to fill, the challenges they have found in the development of the Filecoin protocol and the latest tech they are exploring. Here are...

In this week’s episode, we catchup with Alan Szepieniec, a researchers at Nervos and co-author of the Supersonics paper & the Marvellous family of Hash Functions (which specify the Vision/Rescue cyphers). We chat about his past work in cryptography, how the Supersonics paper came to be, and dive into the new generation of hash functions emerging, including the Marvelous universe. For more info...

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Fredrik and Nicole Zhu , Developer at Parity Technologies , about the experimental Polkadot Canary Network they call Kusama . We cover how Kusama was developed, the goals of this format and what launching a Chaos Canary Network is all about. Here is a few more links: https://twitter.com/kusamanetwork https://kusama.network/ Zero Knowledge Podcast is also loo...

In this week’s episode, we sit down with Joseph Bonneau , Assistant Professor at NYU and co-author on the Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) paper. We discuss VDFs, what they are, how they were developed and what they can be used for. Here are a few links that we reference: Blockchain 101: Randomness episode with Justin Drake Verifiable Delay Functions by Dan Boneh, Joseph Bonneau, Benedikt Bünz, a...

In this week’s episode, we chat with Brandon Ramirez , Research Lead and co-founder of The Graph , about the problem the project is trying to solve, the fast evolving Layer1-Layer2 paradigm, the emerging group of Service Protocols, and how these projects interact with other elements of the Web3 stack. Introduction of GraphQL The Graph protocol design Talk on trust-minimized services More on Servic...

In this week’s episode, we chat with Yan Michalevsky , CTO & Co-founder, Anjuna Security about their work with TEEs, a continuation of topic we covered in episode 82 of this podcast . In this episode, we go deeper and cover Intel SGX vs AMD memory, the risk profiles, tooling for TEEs, how zk techniques can be used alongside TEEs, applications of enclaves and how these techniques are being opti...

In this, our special 100th episode of the Zero Knowledge Podcast, we caught up with Dan Boneh , professor and researcher in applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford. In this far-reaching conversation, we talk about Dan's background in the field of cryptography, how the field has evolved over the years, his work on cryptography & blockchain education, where zero knowledge research...

In this week's episode, Anna catches up with Tarun Chitra ( Gauntlet Networks ), James Prestwich ( Summa ) and Georgios Konstantopoulos on the last day of Devcon5 in Osaka. In this special 99th episode, we cover a broad range of topics from their Devcon take-aways, emerging ideas in the ecosystem, the latest in PoS systems, Roll-up and DeFi, to the explosion in zero knowledge research, and more. W...

In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with with Alexander Zaidelson and Alex Romanov from BEAM - a Mimblewimble based privacy coin. We discuss how this implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol differs from Grin, how the two groups work together, funding protocol development, how the Beam business model works, and the future of the protocol. Here is our previous episode about Grin Here are a fe...

In this week’s episode, we chat with Daniel Lehnberg about Grin - an implementation of the MimbleWimble privacy protocol. We cover the story behind MimbleWimble, how Grin first came to be, and how this technology works. We also look back at how this protocol came to be as well as were Daniel sees it going. Here are a few links of topics we discuss: MimbleWimble Whitepaper Grin Tech Step by step wa...

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Eli Ben Sasson to talk about the latest from StarkWare , the explosion of new research within the zero knowledge space and the origin of new mathematical ideas. Recorded right after the StarkWare Sessions in tel aviv, and during a period of incredible development in new cryptographic zk techniques and protocol proposals. Here are some of the papers and...

In this episode, we chat with the Oleg Andreev, a protocol architect from Stellar, about zkVM, the zero-knowledge virtual machine. In this episode, we learn a little bit about the history of Stellar, Chain and the zkVM project. We touch on the general concepts of VMs as well as compare zkVM with some other zero knowledge protocols like ZCash and ZEXE. Some other episodes you may want to check out...