In this week's episode, we sit down with Izaak Meckler & Evan Shapiro from O(1) Labs to discuss Coda, a blockchain using recursive composition of zkSNARKs to eliminate history. We discuss recursive zkSNARKs generally, what a recursive zkSNARK construction blockchain would look like, and the challenges in implementing this sophisticated scaling solution.

To find out more about the project and some of the resources mentioned in the episode, please have a look at the links below:

• Coda on Twitter: https://twitter.com/codaprotocol?lang=en
• Coda on Github: https://github.com/o1-labs
• Scalable Zero Knowledge via Cycles of Elliptic Curves https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/595
• Incrementally Verifiable Computation or Knowledge Implies Time/Space Efficiency https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4074/97eeb99a9341714e9db05b57f500270139d7.pdf

Thank you to our sponsor POA Network - for more information about their ERC20 to ERC20 TokenBridge, check out the POA Network repo: github.com/poanetwork/token-bridge

Follow Zero Knowledge on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

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This week, Anna chats with Matthew Finestone and Brecht Devos from Loopring about their zkrollup protocol, DEX and wallet. We explored the evolution of Loopring, how their zkrollup works, how they are bringing AMMs to L2 and what’s next for the project.

We mention Brecht’s previous episode as well the talk by Barry Whitehat at Devcon4

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Parity Technologies

Parity is a company building the core infrastructure to power Web 3.0. They strive to write the fastest, lightest, and safest core technology in blockchain and write lots of open-source code.

Parity is currently looking to fill a number of job positions

• Berlin office: experienced, creative and enthusiastic Content Marketing Manager.

• Remote: CI/CD Engineer to help automate an ever-growing set of open source repos in GitHub.

Interested or know someone? More details at parity.io/jobs

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm -https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm

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Catch us on Youtube -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYWsYz5cKw4wZ9Mpe4kuM_g

Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit -https://www.reddit.com/r/zkpodcast

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Support our Gitcoin Grant -https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast-2

Support us on the ZKPatreon -https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

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 the famous Wormhole hack, what the future holds and how they aim to explore using zk in bridging.

Here are some links for this episode:

• Ep 230: Designing Optimistic Interoperability with Nomad
• Ep 232: Cutting Edge ZK Research with Mary Maller
• Jump Crypto
• Wormhole Repository
• Wormhole Portal Bridge
• Jump Trading Group
• Key Pillars of Crypto Infrastructure
• Pyth Network
• Serum Project
• Fiat-Shamir Vulnerability
• Jump Trading Bug Bounties
• BN254 Curve Standard
• PlonK Proof System
• Nova Proof System
• Manta: a Plug and Play Private DeFi Stack
• BLS12-377 curve operations
• Wormhole Hack Report

The ZK Tech side round on Gitcoin starts today and runs until June 23rd.

During this CLR matching round funds that are donated to the ZK tech side round are matched from our 100K matching pool. This initiative is led by 0xPARC and zkValidator, as well as our fantastic matching partners from the ecosystem.

Visit gitcoin.co to get your grant in and choose the tag ZK tech to be eligible to our matching pool.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Anoma

Anoma is a suite of protocols that enable self-sovereign...

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Zac Williamson and Joe Andrews, respectively CTO and Head of Product at Aztec.

The episode is centered on Aztec’s latest release, zk.money, the “zk-zk-rollup” that targets privacy and scalability at the same time. zk.money allows users to shield their Ethereum-based assets while achieving a higher transaction count, a result that took months of research and development of the TurboPLONK. Zac and Joe explain how it works down to the nitty-gritty of elliptic curve arithmetic, logic gates, hashes and circuits.

The conversation then shifts to topics like WebAssembly (and its limitations), Ethereum, UltraPLONK, Noir & more.

Here are some links for this episode:

• Exploring Aztec with Zac Williamson, Zero Knowledge episode 75
• Dive into Plonk!, Zero Knowledge episode 112
• Building Private AMMs with Guillermo Angeris, Zero Knowledge episode 173
• Into the deep end: making sense of PLONK - Zac Williamson (CTO, Aztec Protocol), zkSummit from October 2019
• Plookup: Speeding up the PLONK prover - Zac Williamson & Ariel Gabizon, zkSummit from March 2020

Are you a passionate crypto and zk enthusiast? Think you’ve got the skills to contribute in the blockchain space? Then make sure to check out the ZK Jobs Fair on April 22.

This will be the first virtual job fair hosted by us, where leading builders in the zk community will join to connect with talented individuals who are looking to contribute to the cutting edge work on zero knowledge applications.

Check out the ZK Jobs Fair application form, if you are interested in partecipating to the event.

Thanks to this episode’s sponsor, Aave

Aave is an open source, decentralised non-custodial liquidity protocol on Ethereum.

With Aave, users can participate as depositors meaning they provide liquidity to earn a passive income. or they can also act as borrowers to borrow in an overcollateralized way or undercollateralized way (think: one-block liquidity Flash Loan).

Aave recently deployed a new market on Polygon’s sidechain to let users pay much lower gas fees. Assets can be transferred from Ethereum with the Polygon Bridge and put to use on Aave’s Polygon markets.

Learn more about it here.

So thanks again, Aave!

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

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In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan check in on the state of ZK today. They discuss recent ZK applications and tooling as well as developments from the last 6 months. They review new use cases such as ZK for off-chain computations and dive into research breakthroughs, trends, security and much more. Finally, they introduce the concept of zkpod.ai which will be covered fully in next week's episode.

Additional links mentioned in this episode:

• Renegade.fi
• Experimenting with Collaborative zk-SNARKs: Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Distributed Secrets
• Episode 256: New ZK Use Cases with Dan Boneh
• Episode 246: Adversarial Machine Learning Research with Florian Tramèr
• Episode 276: Expanding Computation on Ethereum with Axiom
• Episode 277: Nova and Beyond with Srinath Setty
• ProtoStar: Generic Efficient Accumulation/Folding for Special Sound Protocols by Bünz and Chen
• ezkl GitHub
• Yohei Nakajima Twitter
• LangChain Website
• Anna Rose’s zkpod.ai Blog Post
• zkpod.ai Twitter
• zkpod.ai Website
• One Server for the Price of Two: Simple and Fast Single-Server Private Information Retrieval by Henzinger, Hong, Corrigan-Gibbs, Meiklejohn, Vaikuntanathan
• Piano: Extremely Simple, Single-Server PIR with Sublinear Server Computation by Zhou, Park, Shi, Zheng
• Blyss Website
• Janmajayamall’s GitHub

Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Find your next job working in ZK!

Ever feel like developing zero-knowledge proofs is a daunting task?

The team at RISC Zero is here to remind you that it doesn't have to be that way. Their out-of-the-box tooling allows developers to access the magic of ZKProofs from any chain without needing to learn custom languages or building custom ZK circuits.

Bonsai, RISC Zero’s most anticipated product, is a proving marketplace that enables any protocol or application to leverage fast ZKProofs in languages like Rust, Go,...

In this episode, Fredrik sits down Martin, who is a Core Dev working on the Geth client and head of security for the Ethereum foundation. They chat about what got him into the space, his interest in security, his entry into blockchain development and, together, they offer some advice for devs wanting to get into this space.

Special thanks to POA Network for being our sponsor on this episode.

To find out more about their open source Verifiable Delay Function, or VDF, please check them out here: https://github.com/poanetwork/vdf

Follow Zero Knowledge on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Florian Tramèr, Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich. They discuss his earlier work on side channel attacks on privacy blockchains, as well as his academic focus on Machine Learning (ML) and adversarial research. They define some key ML terms, tease out some of the nuances of ML training and models, chat zkML and other privacy environments where ML can be trained, and look at why the security around ML will be important as these models become increasingly used in production.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 228: Catch-up at DevConnect AMS with Tarun, Guillermo and Brendan
• Florian Tramèr’s Github
• Florian Tramèr’s Publications & Papers
• ETH Zurich
• Single Secret Leader Election by Dan Boneh, Saba Eskandarian, Lucjan Hanzlik, and Nicola Greco
• GasToken: A Journey Through Blockchain Resource Arbitrage by Tramèr, Daian, Breidenbach and Juels
• Enter the Hydra: Towards Principled Bug Bounties and Exploit-Resistant Smart Contracts by Tramèr, Daian, Breidenbach and Juels
• Ronin Bridge Hack – Community Alert: Ronin Validators Compromised
• InstaHide: Instance-hiding Schemes for Private Distributed Learning, Huang et al. 2020.
• Is Private Learning Possible with Instance Encoding?
• OpenAI's GPT-3 model
• OpenAI's GPT-2 model
• OpenAI's GPT-2 model
• The Part-Time Parliament, Lamport, 1998.
• You Autocomplete Me: Poisoning Vulnerabilities in Neural Code Completion

ZK Whiteboard Sessions – as part of ZK Hack and powered by Polygon – a new series of educational videos that will help you get onboarded into the concepts and terms that we talk about on the ZK front.

ZK Jobs Board – has a fresh batch of open roles from ZK-focused projects. Find your next opportunity working in ZK!

Today’s episode is sponsored by Mina...

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 ideas we cover:

• STARK-friendly hash competition
• Succinct Arguments in the Quantum Random Oracle Model
• More resources about StarkWare and STARK technology
• Henri Pointcaré - Science and Hypothesis
• The chapter mentioned is "On the Nature of Mathematical Reasoning"

As mentioned in the intro, the Zero Knowledge Summit is happening on Oct 26th in San Francisco

If you are a dev, researcher or founder working on these topics and want to attend, please submit your application here: https://forms.gle/bZvaywbvCe2dnBkD7

Here are some impressions from the last one!

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

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In this bonus episode, Anna jumps back on the mic for a quick follow-up to Episode 279: Intro to zkpod.ai. Guest Daniel Kang describes a joint project he is doing with zkpod.ai - the Attested Audio Experiment. The objective is to prove that some piece of audio originates from a "real" (non-ai-generated) recording, even if this audio has been altered through edits or modifications. The goal is to differentiate between original "real" audio and the audio generated by zkpod.ai. In the future some iteration of this architecture could be used by content creators to distinguish deepfake audio from the real thing.

Here is the write up about the Attested Audio Experiment on Daniel Kang's blog.

Here is some of his other work as well:

• https://medium.com/@danieldkang/empowering-users-to-verify-twitters-algorithmic-integrity-with-zkml-65e56d0e9dd9
• https://medium.com/@danieldkang/verified-execution-of-gpt-bert-clip-and-more-6acb693fd55f

Follow @zkpodai on twitter for more updates!

Summary

This week, Anna and Nico catch up with Antonio Sanso, Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and Youssef El Housni, Engineer at ConsenSys and builder of Linea.

They discuss Antonio and Youssef’s new work, Families of prime-order endomorphism-equipped embedded curves on pairing-friendly curves and dive into Elliptic Curve cryptography, Bandersnatch and Verkle Tries amongst much more, before dissecting what terms in the title of this paper truly mean. After getting into the weeds of cryptographic technicalities, the group explores where this work could be used and what it would enable.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• zkSummit: A new optimized elliptic curve for one layer proof composition - Youssef El Housni (EY)
• ZK7: Pairings in a SNARK - Youssef El Housni - ConsenSys
• ZK Study Club - ZEXE reading pt 1 (of 3)
• ZK Study Club - ZEXE reading pt 2 (of 3)
• ZK Study Club - ZEXE reading pt 3 (of 3)
• Introducing Bandersnatch: a fast elliptic curve built over the BLS12-381 scalar field by Masson and Sanso
• Verifiable Delay Functions from Supersingular Isogenies and Pairings by De Feo, Masson, Petit and Sanso
• Episode 117: Isogenies with Luca De Feo
• Families of prime-order endomorphism-equipped embedded curves on pairing-friendly curves
• C∅C∅: A Framework for Building Composable Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Kosba, Zhao, Miller, Qian, Chan, Papamanthou, Pass, Shelat and Shi
• Constructing Elliptic Curves with Prescribed Embedding Degrees by Barreto, Lynn and Scott
• Welcome/Opening + Invited Talk by Nadia Heninger (PKC 2024)
• SafeCurves: choosing safe curves for elliptic-curve cryptography

Check out the latest jobs in ZK at the ZK Podcast...

Summary

In this week’s episode Anna and Nico chat with Alessandro Chiesa, Associate Professor at EPFL and Eylon Yogev, Professor at Bar-Ilan University. They discuss their recent publication; Building Cryptographic Proofs from Hash Functions, which provides a comprehensive and rigorous treatment of cryptographic proofs and goes on to analyze notable constructions of SNARGs based on ideal hash functions.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Building Cryptographic Proofs from Hash Functions by Chiesa and Yogev
• Episode 200: SNARK Research & Pedagogy with Alessandro Chiesa
• Barriers for Succinct Arguments in the Random Oracle Model by Chiesa and Eylon Yogev
• STIR: Reed–Solomon Proximity Testing with Fewer Queries by Arnon, Chiesa, Fenzi and Eylon Yogev
• ZK Podcast Episode 321: STIR with Gal Arnon & Giacomo Fenzi
• Computationally Sound Proofs by Micali
• Tight Security Bounds for Micali’s SNARGs by Chiesa and Yogev
• Interactive Oracle Proofs by Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, and Spooner
• Summer School on Probabilistic Proofs: Foundations and Frontiers of Probabilistic Proofs in Zürich, Switzerland
• Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Thaler
• ZK HACK Discord and Justin Thaler Study Club
• Justin Thaler Study Club by ZK HACK on YouTube
• Subquadratic SNARGs in the Random Oracle Model by Chiesa and Yogev
• ZK Learning Course

ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here.

Episode Sponsors

Launching soon, Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 blockchain focused on multichain, asset-agnostic privacy, via a unified shielded set. Namada is natively interoperable with fast-finality chains via IBC, and with Ethereum using a trust-minimized bridge.

Follow Namada on Twitter

In this week’s episode, we revisit the topic of consensus algorithms with Ren Zhang, a researchers at Nervos and previously at imec-COSIC (KU Leuven). We chat about an earlier work he did on evaluating PoW consensus protocols security and explore his more recent work on NC-Max - a consensus protocol that breaks the throughput limit and enables the full utilization of the nodes’ bandwidth in confirming transactions

Here are a few of the links we mention in the interview:

• 
  
• Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham
• 
  
• 
  
• Majority is not Enough:Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable
• 
  
• 
  
• FruitChains: A Fair Blockchain
• 
  
• 
  
• RSK technology
• 
  
• 
  
• Subchains: A Technique to Scale Bitcoin and Improve the User Experience
• 
  
• 
  
• Lay Down the Common Metrics: Evaluating Proof-of-Work Consensus Protocols' Security by Ren Zhang & Bart Preneel
• 
  
• 
  
• NC-Max: Breaking the Throughput Limit of Nakamoto Consensus by Ren Zhang, Dingwei Zhang, Quake Wang, Jan Xie and Bart Preneel
• 
  
• 
  
• SquirRL - A recent paper extending the "Lay Down the Common Metrics" paper
• 
  
• 
  
• Markov decision process on Wikipedia
• - Monsters in the Mempool with Dan Robinson from Paradigm
• 
  
• Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits
• 
  
• 
  
• Alan Szepieniec on Hash Functions & Supersonic SNARKs
• 
  

More on Nervos:

For the UTXO Programming Model of Nervos, the best starting point is Ren’s colleague Xuejie Xiao's blog.

An explanation of Nervos DAO

An introduction of the Virtual Machine and smart contract support

Thanks to our sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting company known for their dedication to pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates, cryptographers who...

In this episode, we are joined by Tomasz Drwięga, a Core Developer at Parity Technologies, to discuss the lifecycle of a transaction on the Ethereum network and how the mempool works.

We will be covering the following topics:

• What a mempool/transaction queue/transaction pool is.
• How a transaction reaches a mempool and what the mempool does with it.
• Looking at what causes the CPU increase and delays in the network.
• What happens when a transaction gets stuck.
• Gossip.
• The security properties of the mempool.
• What a network attack could look like.

Here are some additional links and ressources if you want to dig deeper.

• https://medium.com/blockchannel/life-cycle-of-an-ethereum-transaction-e5c66bae0f6e
• https://blog.infura.io/when-there-are-too-many-pending-transactions-8ec1a88bc87e
• https://etherscan.io/txsPending
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol
• https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethereum-Wire-Protocol

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, please have a look at these resources and past episodes!

• Design of Symmetric-Key Primitives for Advanced Cryptographic Protocols (the Marvellous (Vision/Rescue) paper)
• Transparent SNARKs from DARK Compilers (Supersonic paper)
• On a Generalization of Substitution-Permutation Networks: The HADES Design Strategy - Competing designs for arithmetization-friendly hash functions
• Starkad and Poseidon: New Hash Functions for Zero Knowledge Proof Systems
• MiMC https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/492.pdf and attack https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/951.pdf
• Jarvis and Friday, the first members of the Marvellous universe (may they rest in peace) https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1098.pdf
• ... and the Groebner basis attack that killed them: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/419.pdf

And here are some of the previous ZKP episodes that we mention:

• Ben Fisch Episode
• Benedikt Bunz Episode
• Joseph Bonneau Episode
• Eli Ben-Sasson Episode

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

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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 one, but hope you enjoy!

Here are some links for this episode:

• Ep 173: Building Private AMMs with Guillermo Angeris
• Ep 206: Distilling DeFi Primitives with Guillermo, Alex and Tarun
• Ep 212: 2021 < 2022 with Co-hosts & Friends
• Ep 228: Catch-up at DevConnect with Friends
• Grigori Perelman - Wikipedia
• Banach–Tarski Paradox - Wikipedia
• Understanding ZKPs Through Simple Examples
• Convex Analysis - Wikipedia
• Stephen P. Boyd - Wikipedia
• Four Color Theorem - Wikipedia
• A History of Mathematics/Middle Ages/Europe During the Middle Ages

The ZK Podcast team is growing! We're looking to hire an additional content producer to join us. There's a job posting for this content producer over on the ZK jobs board.

Learn more and apply here.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Anoma

Anoma is a suite of protocols that enable self-sovereign coordination. Their unique architecture facilitates efficiently the simplest forms of economic coordination such as two parties transferring an asset to each other. As well as more sophisticated ones like an asset agnostic bartering system involving multiple parties without direct “coincidence of wants”; or even more complex ones such as “N-party” collective commitments to solve multipolar traps – where any interaction can be performed with adjustable zero-knowledge privacy.

Visit Anoma to learn more!

If you like what we do:

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Summary

In this week’s episode Anna and Kobi chat with Muthu Venkitasubramaniam and Carmit Hazay from Ligero. They discuss their work on MPC and ZK for the last 20 years and how the research has evolved. They then dive into a nuanced conversation on how MPC & ZK are interrelated. The discuss Ligero, what led to the project and the early phases, as well as the new Ligetron system and how they plan on getting this technology into the wild.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Ligero
• Ligero: Lightweight Sublinear Arguments Without a Trusted Setup by Ames, Hazay, Ishai and Venkitasubramaniam
• Ligetron by Ligero
• Ligetron: Lightweight Scalable End-to-End Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Post-Quantum ZK-SNARKs on a Browser by Wang, Hazay and Venkitasubramaniam
• ℓ-Diversity: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity by Machanavajjhala, Gehrke, Kifer and Venkitasubramaniam
• Efficient RSA Key Generation and Threshold Paillier in the Two-Party Setting by Hazay, Mikkelsen, Rabin, Toft and Nicolosi
• MeshCal.com
• Zero-Knowledge from Secure Multiparty Computation by Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky and Sahai
• Introduction to MPC-in-the-Head by Carmit Hazay
• ZKBoo: Faster Zero-Knowledge for Boolean Circuits by Giacomelli, Madsen and Orlandi
• Episode 322: Definitions, Security and Sumcheck in ZK Systems with Justin Thaler
• Communication complexity of secure computation by Franklin and Yung

ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/

If you like what we...

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 community, his next steps and why he thinks people in crypto may wanna take themselves a bit less serious and remember to have some fun!

Here are some additional links:

• Zcash Foundation
• Josh’s parting letter
• Previous episodes on Zcash with Zooko, Sean Bowe, Sean and Daira and Henry de Valence
• Catch this cross-over appearance with Anna on Josh's Twodcast. His show is released once per ... whenever Josh feels like

As mentioned in the intro, the ZkValidator.com is now live on 3 networks: Cosmos, Kusama and, as of this month, Polkadot.

For the origin story of the ZKValidator, check out this zkpodcast episode with the guys from Bison Trails

If you are a token holder on Cosmos, Kusama and/or Polkadot and you think privacy matters, want to see more zkps integrated throughout these networks and generally wanna support this initiative, head to our website: ZkValidator.com. There you can find instructions on how to stake your tokens to our validator.

For Cosmos visit - https://zkvalidator.com/cosmos/

For Kusama visit - https://zkvalidator.com/kusama/

For Polkadot visit - https://zkvalidator.com/polkadot/

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on Youtube

Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit

Give us feedback! https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A

Support our Gitcoin...

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 Agoric with Dean Tribble
• Ep 201: DeFi’s Multichain Future with Zaki Manian from Sommelier
• Ep 174: Through the Cosmos Stargate Upgrade
• Ep 108: Catch up with Zaki Manian from Tendermint
• Inter.Trade
• Gaunlet
• Agoric
• Agoric Signs on Gauntlet for Inter Protocol Stablecoin Risk Optimization on Cosmos

We're excited to announce ZK Whiteboard Sessions – a weekly educational video series focused on the building blocks of ZK. Produced by ZK Hack and powered by Polygon.

zkSummit 8 is happening in Berlin on Sept 15th during Berlin Blockchain Week!

Apply to attend: https://www.zksummit.com/

Today’s episode is sponsored by Aleo.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain – if you’re building private applications then check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo which enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of ZKPs. Visit leo-lang.org to start building.

You can also participate in Aleo’s incentivized testnet 3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate. For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
• Follow us on Twitter

In this week’s episode, we chat with Omer Shlomovits from ZenGo Wallet about MPC, threshold cryptography and how the research around this topic can be used in a blockchain context.

We reference the Zero Knowledge Podcast Episode 90 with Nigel Smart.

Here are some additional links to check out:

• ZenGo X
• Flaws Could Have Exposed Cryptocurrency Exchanges to Hackers presented at Blackhat USA
• Omer’s work on Diogenes
• Survey of threshold ECDSA
• MPC Alliance
• JugglingSwap: Scriptless Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps
• CryptoWills: How to Bequeath Cryptoassets

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Least Authority.

If you are skilled in the area of zero-knowledge protocols and other advanced cryptography for scalability and privacy enhancing tech, you should get in contact with them. They currently have an open security auditor position see more at leastauthority.com/careers

You can also find the Gitcoin grants here:

Least Authority’s Grant for the Moon Math Manual -> https://gitcoin.co/grants/543/the-moonmath-manual-to-zk-snarks

Zero Knowledge Podcast -> https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast

If you like what we do:

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Catch us on Youtube

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Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

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This week, Anna and Fredrik do a look back at 2020 and chat about some of their favourite ZKPodcast episodes and themes from this past year. This is also a notable episode, as it will be Fredrik's last as a regular co-host. And so they also take this time to reminisce and look back over 3 years of the Zero Knowledge Podcast and share some thoughts on how the space has developed.

Some of the 2020 episodes discussed:

• ZK & Games: Dark Forest with Brian Gu
• Isogenies with Luca De Feo
• ZKPs in Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin & Justin Drake
• Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham
• Proof of Necessary Work with Akis Kattis (NYU)
• Trusted Setup Ceremonies Explored
• A Tale of Sushi(Swap) with Tarun, Hasu and Anna - Part1
• Josh Cincinnati on Zcash, governance and leaving the Zcash Foundation

Some of the projects that had previously been on the zkPodcast that launched or were announced this year:

Zk-projects:

• Hermez Network
• Aleo
• MACI
• DeversiFi
• Loopring

L1s:

• Polkadot
• Near
• Filecoin
• Nucypher

Thanks to our sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting company known for their dedication to pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates, cryptographers who specialize in security audits, design specification reviews, and security-by-design.

Given that privacy is at the core of their work and mission, least authority recognizes the importance of privacy in DeFi and other decentralizing technologies and the role it plays in preserving balance of power.

Join their mailing list to connect and stay informed on the latest in Least Authority security audit reports, upcoming events, open source contributions and product development initiatives. Subscribe at leastauthority.com/newsletter

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter -

This week, Anna and Josh chat with Jill Gunter (nèe Carlson), a well-known investor and crypto advocate, to dive deep into the eternal dilemma of privacy vs. transparency and how ZKPs can finally give us the tools to be more nuanced about our society’s approach to privacy.

Starting from Jill’s background as a bond trader on Wall Street, the conversation quickly shifts into how the need for transparency in the financial system and the ability to root out bad actors clashes with the need to maintain individual privacy. This topic touches aspects such as crypto & DeFi privacy, how regulation may be applied to them, and why ZKPs and their power of selective disclosure can change the paradigm of privacy.

Here are some links for this episode:

• Josh Cincinnati on Zcash, governance and leaving the Zcash Foundation, Zero Knowledge Episode 143
• The Why & How of Privacy for DAOs, Zero Knowledge Episode 190
• Analyzing Osmosis & Preventing MEV with Sunny and Dev, Zero Knowledge Episode 188

Make sure to subscribe to the zkMesh newsletter, a curated list of all the latest happenings in ZK land, coming out every month. The next installment is slated for the first week of August.

Thanks to this week’s sponsor, Least Authority!

Least Authority is a leader in the security of distributed systems. They provide security consulting services, develop open source products and contribute to the advancement of learning and research in the field.

They have recently published a whitepaper on Zero Knowledge Access Passes, a protocol that enables users to access services without revealing personal information.

Least Authority also reached a notable milestone this month with the completion of their 100th security audit.

To read their published audits, which include multiple projects on Ethereum, Tezos and other notable ecosystems, and to check out the ZKAPs whitepaper visit their website www.leastauthority.com.

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on Youtube

Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit

Give us feedback! -https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on 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 paradigms enable within the Ethereum ecosystem, their goal to provide privacy and scalability for blockchains, their recent acquisition by Polygon and more.

Here are some links for the episode:

• Polygon Zero
• Introducing Plonky2
• Episode 194: zkEVM with Jordi & David from Hermez
• Episode 210: The Road to STARKs and Miden with Bobbin Threadbare
• Episode 219: Scaling Ethereum with Polygon’s Mihailo Bjelic
• Episode 179: Diving into Arbitrum’s Optimistic Rollup
• Episode 32: Zero Knowledge at Zcon0!
• Tweet thread about Goldilocks field
• [EIP-4488: Transaction calldata gas cost reduction with total calldata limit](EIP-4488: Transaction calldata gas cost reduction with total calldata limit)

If you’re looking to jump into ZK professionally – head over to the ZK Jobs Board to find job openings from some of the top teams working in the ZK space! https://jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm/

Today’s episode is sponsored by Aleo.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that uses cutting edge cryptography to achieve the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. It gives developers the tools they need to build programs that protect privacy while allowing applications to be regulatory-compliant. It also features a new domain-specific programming language called Leo that enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of ZKPs to build private applications like decentralized exchanges, hidden information games, regulated stablecoins, and more.

Go to aleo.org to learn more about the protocol, or roll up your sleeves and visit leo-lang.org to start building.

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on

In this episode, we speak with Matthew Di Ferrante of the smart contract auditing firm Zero Knowledge Labs about security in the blockchain. Specifically we discuss how he first got interested in security and blockchain technology, some of the cases that have happened in the last few years and how the Ethereum security team responds to a security event.

If you want to learn more from Matt you can follow him here

This week's episode went long, so we are including this link to a bonus piece on governance

In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo catch up with Henry de Valence from Penumbra. They discuss his thoughts on requirements for adoption of privacy systems and how these led to him to develop Penumbra. They explore how Penumbra aims to use privacy features not as ‘nice to haves' within the system, but rather as essential components that offer a new paradigm for how to think about DeFi in a Multichain Ecosystem.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 126: Crypto libraries, Zcash’s Zebra and contact tracing with Henry de Valence
• Henry de Valence GitHub
• Penumbra Twitter
• Informal Systems
• Uniswap V3
• IBC
• Tendermint
• Rust
• Github
• Git

Find the Anoma Whitepaper here.

ZK Jobs Board – has a fresh batch of open roles from ZK-focused projects. Find your next opportunity working in ZK!

Today’s episode is sponsored by Aleo.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

If you’re interested in building private applications then check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo. Visit leo-lang.org to start building.

You can also join Aleo’s incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate. For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
• Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
• Join us on Telegram
• Catch us on Youtube
• Head to the ZK Community Forum
• Support our

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Omer Shlomovits and Yuval Domb from Ingonyama. They go back to the start of the project, exploring Ingonyama’s initial vision for what ZK Hardware could be, how the field has evolved and how they are accelerating ZK Hardware today. The group discuss hardware product cycles, the hardware and algorithmic components, how a ZK ASIC is developed, they review some of the latest research from Ingonyama and more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 158: Threshold Cryptography with Omer Shlomovits from ZenGo
• Episode 258: Ultrasound Money & VRFs with Justin Drake
• The first ever SNARK proving ASIC tweet by drakefjustin
• Episode 266: ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 1
• Episode 267: ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 2
• ZK10: ZPU: The Zero-Knowledge Processing Unit - Yuval Domb
• Supranational Website
• Accseal Twitter
• Episode 311: The Launch of Celestia and Beyond
• Episode 308: Avail’s Approach to DA with Prabal Banerjee
• Episode 301: EigenLayer @ Devconnect
• ICICLE GitHub by Igonyama
• Lazzo + Jolt by a16z
• HyperPlonk: Plonk with Linear-Time Prover and High-Degree Custom Gates by Chen, Bünz, Boneh and Zhang E
• The Sum-Check Protocol over Fields of Small Characteristic by Thaler
• Episode 303: A Dive into Binius with Ulvetanna
• Sumcheck 201 Paper by Ingonyama

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

This is an invitation to be part of a...

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 trusted setup here

There are a number of zkPodcast related channels and groups to explore. Here they are:

• Telegram
• Youtube
• Recent zkStudyClub with Sean and Daira
• ZKMesh Newsletter
• ZKValidator
• r/ZKPodcast & r/zeroknowledge on Reddit

Do you want to join us?

Want to connect with the ecosystem, learn more and work on zk research? If you are very organised and have worked producing either events, content or generally organising people in the past, these roles might be interesting for you.

Here are the 2 roles:

1) zkPodcast Support: Work with Anna & Fredrik on our zk-related projects (excluding the zkValidator) on a part-time basis. This would primarily involve coordinating podcast guest, scheduling and coordinating studyclub sessions, help organise events like the zkSummit, writing blog posts and managing social channels. This would be 5-8 hours per week to start, and could be a student job.

If this is interesting, please email a brief CV (a short email describing your experience is also fine) to hello@zeroknowledge.fm or tweet at Anna -> @AnnaRRose

2) Project Manager at the zkValidator. In this role, you would be working with Anna and Will Harborne to connect with members of the networks the zkValidator operates on - that is Cosmos, Kusama, Polkadot and more as we add them. The role would entail writing reports, doing research, managing network partners, scheduling workshops, working with zk engineers and cryptographers and more. This would be 15 hours per week to start, and we are looking for someone with at least 3 years of work experience. If this is interesting, please send us a summarised CV and/or LinkedIn profile to hello@zkValidator.com

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on

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 Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

** This episode uses visual aids and slides throughout, you may want to check out the video version here**

In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico Mohnblatt from Geometry Research host a ZK Jargon Decoder episode. Based on Nico’s ZK Jargon Decoder Website, they discuss some of the confusing terms and concepts commonly used by the ZK community. The session aims to be digestible for those still in the early stages of their ZK learning journey, but it does take a dive into the depths of detail every now and again!

This episode uses visual aids and slides throughout, so you may want to check out the full video version of this discussion over on the ZK Podcast YouTube channel. This ZK Jargon Decoder Session is also very well complimented by the ZK Whiteboard sessions. Nico specifically references sessions 1, 4, 5 and 6.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• ZK HACK IV - ZK Jargon Decoder
• ZK Jargon Decoder GitHub
• ZK Hack IV Sessions Playlist
• ZK-WALDO: A Simple Zero Knowledge Proof
• ZK Whiteboard Sessions: What is a SNARK? With Dan Boneh
• ZK Whiteboard Sessions: SNARKs vs. STARKs with Bobbin Threadbare and Brendan Farmer
• PLONKish Arithmetization - ZK Jargon Decoder Description
• ZK Whiteboard Sessions: PLONK and Custom Gates with Adrian Hamelink
• Oracles - ZK Jargon Decoder Description
• FRI Summary 1 - Contextualizing STARKs, ALI, FRI, and DEEP by RISC Zero Study Club
• R1CS - ZK Jargon Decoder Description
• ZK Whiteboard Sessions: Lookup Arguments for...

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/2018/962.pdf
• Zexe Library - https://github.com/scipr-lab/zexe
• This talk by Pratyush at SBC '19: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr4Es9s1Iog

Our ZK Study Club session on Zexe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RItcNRChrzI&t=4s

Thank you to our sponsor this week Aragon One.

If you love working with talented designers building smart user interfaces, or if you are simply excited about working on making DAOs easy and accessible to create & manage, then you should check out Aragon One’s available jobs. For more about the Frontend Engineer role, or available jobs in general, check out aragon.one/jobs.

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

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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 founder and the two important things missing in web services, high programmability and true user privacy. The project enables private applications with both data privacy and functional privacy - where the nature of the program running and all activity remains private. It is based on the ZEXE protocol and Proof-of-Succinct-Work, from the Proof-of-Necessary-Work originally presented Joseph Bonneau & Akis Kattis

For more info check out these additional links & episodes:

• Aleo Developer Preview I
• Zexe: Decentralized Private Computation with Pratyush Mishra
• ZEXE paper
• Proof-of-Necessary-Work with Akis Kattis (NYU)

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting company known for their dedication to privacy-respecting solutions and boundary-pushing technology. You may know them as the team behind the security audits and reviews of the Eth 2.0 Specification, Protocol Lab's Gossipsub Protocol, Zcash Sapling upgrade, Tezos Foundation's TzBTC, Blockstack's Investor Wallet, MetaMask's Lavamoat and more

If you are looking to improve the security of your protocol or verify your use of cryptography, schedule a no-obligation call to find out how Least Authority can help on your project. Visit leastauthority.com and hit the “Schedule a Call” button to book one of these calls.

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on Youtube

Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit

Give us feedback! https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

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z-add:...

In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with Jenna Zenk, the CTO of Melonport, to discuss her background, the path to the melon protocol, the challenges of building sophisticated smart contracts and what it means to release a decentralised protocol into the wild. This was recorded soon after the M1 conference in Zug.

A few resources to check out:

• Melonomics Blog posts
• The Melon Governance explained
• TechCrunch writes about Melon's technical council

Thanks again to this week's sponsor Neufund. If you’re interested in how Neufund has linked legal documents with smart contracts, check their GitHub profile at github.com/neufund or join Neufund on their Telegram channel.

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

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This week, Anna caught up on all things Aleo with Howard Wu co-founder of the Aleo Network & Alex Pruden executive director of the Aleo Foundation. Howard was last on the show back in 2020 when Aleo was in its infancy, so the group dive into how the project has evolved over the last few years, covering lessons learned along the way as well as technical decisions, detours, breakthroughs and reflecting on initial goals as they built out the system.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 144: Aleo with Howard Wu
• Episode 38: Intro to zkSNARKs with Howard Wu
• zk-creds: Flexible Anonymous Credentials from zkSNARKs and Existing Identity Infrastructure by Rosenberg, White, Garman, and Miers
• zPass by Aleo
• Cloudflare
• Aleo HQ GitHub for ZEXE
• Leo by Aleo
• Penumbra

ZK Hack IV online is now live, sign up for the next session on Tuesday 23 Jan here. For the latest news on the event check out the zhhack.dev/zkhackIV website.

Launching soon, Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 blockchain focused on multichain, asset-agnostic privacy, via a unified shielded set. Namada is natively interoperable with fast-finality chains via IBC, and with Ethereum using a trust-minimised bridge.

Follow Namada on Twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada.

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
• Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
• Join us on Telegram
• Catch us on YouTube

In this episode, we sit down with Ethan (Bucky) Buchman, co-founder & CTO of Tendermint, to talk about testnets. We look into what they are, what purpose they serve and cover examples from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos and Polkadot.

Links

• Testnets on Karl.tech
• The latest gossip on BFT consensus
• Bitcoin Testnet
• Ropsten Testnet
• Kovan Testnet
• Rinkeby Testnet
• Join the Cosmos testnet
• Join the Polkadot testnet

In this special live episode, recorded at zkSummit10, host Anna Rose chats with regular co-hosts Tarun Chitra, Guillermo Angeris and Nico Mohnblatt about the state of ZK today.

They cover how the term ‘ZK’ has evolved, market trends that are relevant to the ZK community today and ZK ‘crossovers’ like ZKML or ZKFHE and their current status in the industry. They also discuss how the ZK space could grow in the future and share their predictions. Much of the conversation is fuelled by some great questions and comments from the live zk10 audience.

This is the first episode recorded live from a ZK Podcast event, so if you have any feedback, pls tweet us @zeroknowledgefm!

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 90: MPC systems with Nigel Smart
• Episode 173: Building Private AMMs with Guillermo Angeris (Guillermo’s first episode!)
• Episode 269: Auctions with Kshitij Kulkarni, Matheus V. X. Ferreira and Tarun
• Episode 270: FHE and ZKPs with Sunscreen’s Ravital Solomon
• 17 misconceptions about SNARKs (and why they hold us back) by Justin Thaler

Applications are now open to attend zkHack Istanbul - Nov 10-12! Apply here: https://www.zkistanbul.com/

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q4, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at aleo.org

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
• Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
• Join us on Telegram
• Catch us on YouTube

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 Trail of Bits

Here is some background on the zkp vulnerabilities mentioned.

An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash

Remote Side-Channel Attacks on Anonymous Transactions

If you want to join the zkSummit 5 online event, happening on Marcch 31st at 7 am PST, 10am EST, 4pm CET, please buy a ticket for the crowdcast here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/zksummit

Hope to see you there!

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

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This week, Anna explores the topic of proof of solvency with Kostas Chalkias, co-founder and chief of Cryptography at MystenLabs. They cover Kostas’ background in Cryptography and explore his work on Proof of Reserves, otherwise known as Proof of Solvency. They review past Proof of Solvency models using ZKPs and look at the protocols that major centralized exchanges are currently using. Then they dive into the security vulnerabilities, privacy issues, and general bugs that Kostas and his collaborators have identified in these protocols and their recommendations on how to better build Proof of Solvency systems.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 227: Move & Sui with Sam Blackshear from Mysten Labs
• Hard Questions: Update on Cambridge Analytica
• Provisions: Privacy-preserving proofs of solvency for Bitcoin exchanges By Dagher, Bünz, Bonneau, Clark and Boneh
• Broken Proofs of Solvency in Blockchain Custodial Wallets and Exchanges By Chalkias, Chatzigiannis and Ji
• Groth16 still lives: exploring tradeoffs of modern ZKProof systems - François Garillot Mysten Labs
• Join the ZK HACK III - final sessions here
• Join the ZK HACK Discord

Today’s episode is sponsored by Aleo

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

If you’re interested in building private applications then check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo. Visit leo-lang.org to start building.

You can also join Aleo’s incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate. For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
• Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
• Join us on Telegram
• Catch us on Youtube
• Head to the ZK Community Forum
• Support our

In this week’s episode, Anna & Josh Cincinnati chat with Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director of Research at Coin Center. Coin Center is a non-profit research and advocacy group focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency and decentralized computing technologies. In this conversation, they cover the various branches in the US system, how these interact with the crypto/blockchain community, what the process is for making regulation and how coincenter gets involved.

Here are a few of the groups that they mention:

• FinCen: Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
• SEC: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
• CFTC: Commodities futures trading commission

Here are some handy links:

• Tangents from Coin Center: Rohan Grey
• https://www.coincenter.org
• Coincenter Blog: Coin Center files second comment in FinCEN rulemaking challenging its authority to make the surveillance rule
• Coincenter Blog: Join us in responding to an unfair and discriminatory midnight rulemaking
• Stablecoin Tethering and Bank Licensing Enforcement (STABLE) Act
• Interpretive Letter #1172 OCC Chief Counsel's Interpretation on National Bank and Federal Savings Association Authority to H

Thanks for this week’s sponsor Interchain Foundation or ICF

ICF is focused on the research, development, and promotion of open, decentralized, network technologies like Cosmos

One of the most recent developments in the Cosmos ecosystem is the Stargate upgrade. Stargate is the largest Cosmos upgrade yet, enabling blockchains to connect with each other using the first standardized protocol for inter-blockchain communication (IBC). Here is our episode with Chris Goes about IBC.

If you want to apply to the Interchain Foundation Grants program, here is the link: apply.interchain.io

Deadline for this round is February 14th.

Thanks again ICF!

*If you like what we do: *

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on Youtube

Read up on the

Summary

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Dan Boneh, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University. They discuss the focus of his research today, covering new ZK research problems and themes. This includes work on lattice-based SNARKs, ZK for content provenance, ZK in the FHE context, updates on ZK in ML and more!

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 256: New ZK Use Cases with Dan Boneh
• Episode 100: Dan Boneh on the past, present & future of cryptography
• Episode 341: coSNARKs with Ais and Lukas from TACEO
• LaBRADOR: Compact Proofs for R1CS from Module-SIS? Ward Beullens and Gregor Seiler
• Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More by Bünz, Bootle, Boneh, Poelstra, Wuille, and Maxwell
• Greyhound: Fast Polynomial Commitments from Lattices by Nguyen and Seiler
• LatticeFold: A Lattice-based Folding Scheme and its Applications to Succinct Proof Systems Dan Boneh and Binyi Chen
• Protostar: Generic Efficient Accumulation/Folding for Special-sound Protocols by Bünz and Chen
• BaseFold: Efficient Field-Agnostic Polynomial Commitment Schemes from Foldable Codes by Zeilberger, Chen and Fisch
• Blaze: Fast SNARKs from Interleaved RAA Codes by Brehm, Chen, Fisch, Resch, Rothblum and Zeilberger
• Episode 277: Nova and Beyond with Srinath Setty
• Verifiable FHE via Lattice-based SNARKs by Atapoor, Baghery, Pereira and Spiessens
• ARC: Accumulation for Reed–Solomon Codes by Bünz, Mishra, Nguyen and Wang
• VerITAS: Verifying Image Transformations at Scale by Datta, Chen and Boneh
• ZK Whiteboard Sessions - Module One: What is a SNARK? by Dan Boneh

ZK Hack V kicks off this week, running from Nov 26 to Dec 17! Sign up for your spot here.

Check out the latest jobs in ZK at the ZK Podcast jobs board here!

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and...

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/99

https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/61

https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/34

The tweet that Anna quotes in the episode is here -> https://twitter.com/bneiluj/status/1228757175595438080

If you want to join the zkSummit, happening on March 31st, Berlin, do get your application in here: https://forms.gle/WDhUCmowAEk2ymYa7

Thanks to this week's sponsor Nucypher!

Nucypher is currently looking for an engineering lead to work on a new open-source cryptosystem for privacy-preserving smart contracts. This is a new product and so you will get to work on some cool primitives like fully homomorphic encryption and zero knowledge proofs. For more about lead engineer role, check out the ad here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693548

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

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Summary

In this week’s episode Anna chats with Tracy Livengood, co-founder of Pluto; an applied cryptography org building developer tools which add verifiable data from web data to an on-chain application, using ZK.

They discuss Tracy’s move from being an engineer in Web2, what prompted his move into the decentralized web and how he eventually found his way into the ZK space. He shares the concept of ‘Web Proofs’, and how Pluto can use some of the TLSNotary stack to bring private web data into on-chain applications as well as a future tool set he hopes to develop with the project.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Pluto.xyz
• Pluto Telegram Channel
• Docs.Pluto.xyz
• 0xParc
• Signal vs. Noise: How LLMs Broke the Internet and How ZK Proofs Are Going to Fix It by Tracy Livengood

Sign up for zkMesh here!

Gevulot is the first decentralized proving layer. With Gevulot, users can generate and verify proofs using any proof system, for any use case.

Gevulot is offering priority access to ZK Podcast listeners, register on gevulot.com and write “Zk Podcast” in the note field of the registration form!

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
• Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
• Join us on Telegram
• Catch us on YouTube

This week we sit down with JP Smith from the software security firm Trail of Bits. Trail of Bits started as a traditional infosec company doing audits and R&D. Over the past year, the company has been getting into doing audits and building tools for the blockchain space.

We talk about what audits are and how to think about them, how you should work to secure your smart contracts using Trail of Bits tools along the way and share some stories and conversations from the world of security.

Links to some of the tools talked about in this episode:

• manticore
• ethersplay
• echidna
• not-so-smart-contracts

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.

Thank you to this week's sponsor - Event Horizon

Event Horizon is a Energy Blockchain event happening in Berlin on June 19-20 . The event is packed with everything you need to learn about how Blockchain tech can impact the Energy sector, it features the people making this happen, both from the engineers building the Ethereum based Energy Web Chain and the energy sector innovators looking to bring this tech into their industry.

If you are interested in finding out more, you can use our special ZeroKnowledge discount at www.eventhorizonsummit.com/ZeroKnowledge.

We are also giving away two free tickets - just ping us on twitter or in our telegram channel with the hashtag #EventHorizon #EH19 for your chance to win these!

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

In this week's episode, Anna and Tarun revisit the topic of MEV with Chris Hager from Flashbots & Alex Stokes from the Ethereum Foundation. In this episode, they tease out more of the nuances around MEV and how the field around it has evolved in the last year or so. The team explores what the MEV space could look like after the Merge, the PBS (Proposer Builder Separation) concept, what each role in the MEV landscape will do and the MEV-Boost architecture. They also chat about using cryptographic solutions to prevent some kinds of MEV and some recent work that Tarun released on the topic of MEV, as well as future ideas around MEV aim to democratize or even share the searchers rewards.

Here are some links for this episode:

• Episode 168: Flashbots with Phil Daian and Stephane Gosselin
• Episode 188: Analyzing Osmosis & Preventing MEV with Sunny and Dev
• Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc
• Alex Stokes Blog
• Flashbots MEV Research
• Flashbots Github
• Flashbots Discord
• Flashbots Docs: New to MEV?
• Flashbots Docs
• Tarun’s recent work on MEV: Improving Proof of Stake Economic Security via MEV Redistribution
• Here is more of Tarun's recent work: Towards a Theory of Maximal Extractable Value I: Constant Function Market Makers
• The Downside of Sanctioning Tornado Cash

ZK Whiteboard Sessions – as part of ZK Hack and powered by Polygon – a new series of educational videos that will help you get onboarded into the concepts and terms that we talk about on the ZK front.

ZK Jobs Board – if you are looking to find a new job, or if you are a team hiring, we have a fresh batch of open roles at ZK focused projects. This is a great place to learn about relevant projects and the types of roles they are looking for.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Polygon.

Introducing Polygon zkEVM. Polygon’s vision for zkEVM is simple: developers can deploy any Ethereum smart contract to a Layer 2 and benefit from the scaling power of ZK...

Summary

• Hart Lambur’s Twitter
• Uma Website
• Uma Docs
• Across Protocol Website
• Across Protocol Medium
• SchellingCoin: A Minimal-Trust Universal Data Feed
• ERC-7683 Cross Chain Intents Website
• Episode 286: Paris 2023 Recap with Uma, Zaki and Tarun
• Episode 292: State of ZK – Live at zkSummit10!
• Bell Curve Podcast - Deep Dive: The CAKE Framework & Building a One Click Experience | Hart Lambur & Stephane Gosselin
• ZK Whiteboard Sessions

Episode Sponsors

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 summarizes it well.

The project can be found on twitter and website

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

In this special podcast crossover episode, Tarun, Hasu and Anna cover the emergence of governance tokens in the DeFi space and then dive deep into the Sushiswap story - what protocols came before and how it performed a vampire attack on (what was at the time) a tokenless Uniswap. This story acts as a fascinating case study as well as a cautionary tale for moat-less protocols.

This episode is the 1st of 2 parts, with the 2nd part airing on Hasu's Uncommon Core podcast. 

In this part, we cover the definition of governance tokens and the first half of the sushi swap story.

Tarun also mentions "impermanent loss" in this episode. However this term has been called to "divergence loss" and you can read more about what it is here.

A quick caveat: We recorded this episode just hours before the Uniswap token launch, and so we decided to produce an amendment section to tackle the aftermath of the launch and wrap up the story. You can find this here:

Sushiswap Bonus Chat

Thanks to our sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting company known for their dedication to pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates, cryptographers who specialize in security audits, design specification reviews, and security-by-design.

Known for their security reviews, including work with zero knowledge proofs as well as having implemented zero-knowledge access passes with the distributed storage system, Tahoe-LAFS.

It seems fitting then that they are now working on a step by step guide to building zk-SNARKS called The MoonMath Manual which you can find and donate to on Gitcoin

As an aside, the Zero Knowledge podcast also has a grant there, so you might consider donating to both!

If you are interested in working with Least Authority on anything zero-knowledge related, reach out to them - whether you want an audit of your project, want to collaborate on security research or even just want to learn more about zk proofs, they would like to hear from you. I’ve added the email in the shownotes, contactus@leastauthority.com or visit them at LeastAuthority.com

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on Youtube

Read up on...

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 Casper FFG, a finality tool, with LMD GHOST, a fork-choice rule.

Here are a few episodes and papers that we mention:

Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham

Combining GHOST and Casper

Ali Rahimi - NIPS 2017 Test-of-Time Award presentation

As mentioned in the intro, we looking for some help on the organisational front with some of the zk related projects - this Zero Knowledge Podcast, zkStudyClub, zkSummit and the zkValidator.

If you are looking to connect with the ecosystem, learn more and work on zk research AND if you are very organised and have worked producing either events, content or generally organising people in the past, these roles might be interesting for you.

Here are the 2 roles:

1) zkPodcast Support: Work with Anna & Fredrik on our zk-related projects (excluding the zkValidator) on a part-time basis. This would primarily involve coordinating podcast guest, scheduling and coordinating studyclub sessions, help organise events like the zkSummit, writing blog posts and managing social channels. This would be 5-8 hours per week to start, and could be a student job.

If this is interesting, please email a brief CV (a short email describing your experience is also fine) to hello@zeroknowledge.fm or tweet at Anna -> @AnnaRRose

2) Project Manager at the zkValidator. In this role, you would be working with Anna and Will Harborne to connect with members of the networks the zkValidator operates on - that is Cosmos, Kusama, Polkadot and more as we add them. The role would entail writing reports, doing research, managing network partners, scheduling workshops, working with zk engineers and cryptographers and more. This would be 15 hours per week to start, and we are looking for someone with at least 3 years of work experience. If this is interesting, please send us a summarised CV and/or LinkedIn profile to hello@zkValidator.com

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Give us feedback! https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH:...

In this episode, we catch up with Phil Daian once again to dig deeper into the idea of cryptocommodities and storage rent. Cryptocommodities are defined as the resources used for blockchain transactions - for example blockchain memory or computation (such as Ethereum's gas) - and storage rent is the idea of issuing a payment for use of these resources per unit of time instead of as a one-time fee.

We discuss how the storage rent idea is becoming increasingly relevant as blockchain technology becomes more widely adopted, and the challenges in implementing this into existing systems.

Phil is a researcher with IC3 and PhD student at Cornell Tech as well as the creator of GasToken and member of Project Chicago.

Some links:

• Phil's site
• IC3
• Cornell Tech
• Project chicago
• Gas Token

This is a short bonus chat to Episode 148 "Tale of the Sushi(swap)". Tarun, Hasu and Anna reconvene to wrap up the story of Governance Tokens, Sushiswap and the Uniswap token distribution.

Be sure to first listen to
"Tale of the Sushi(swap) - Part 1"
"Tale of the Sushi(swap) - Part 2" on the uncommoncore podcast

If you like what we do, be sure to check out the Zero Knowledge Podcast Gitcoin Grant - CLR matching is happening now! https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast

In this week's episode, we sit down with Jutta Steiner, our friend and Fredrik's CEO at Parity Technologies, to talk about her history in the space, the origin of Parity, the last year in blockchain, and what we see coming in 2019!

Here is the cryptography conference Fredrik mentioned:

https://cyber.stanford.edu/sbc19

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

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 distributed testing infra to facilitate enterprise adoption
• how UX and simple tooling plays into the developer upgrade path
• the path to decentralisation and the importance of building bridges to the Web2 world

In preparation for this ep, it might be useful to check out our episode last fall with Juan Benet as well.

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Give us feedback! https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

In this week's episode Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra explore the topic of auctions with guests Kshitij Kulkarni, PHD student at Berkeley’s EECS department and Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

They discuss the history of auctions, both in the real world and in blockchain, and go on to cover more recent blockchain uses, such as MEV and NFT auctions. They review the incentives of both auction holders and the participants as well as how this incentive design can influence the effectiveness of the auctions themselves.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

• Credibility and Incentives in Gradual Dutch Auctions by Kulkarni, Ferreira and Chitra
• Credible, Optimal Auctions via Blockchains by Kulkarni, Ferreira and Chitra
• Optimal Strategic Mining Against Cryptographic Self-Selection in Proof-of-Stake by Kulkarni, Ferreira and Chitra
• Credible Auctions: A Trilemma by Akbarpour and Li
• Credible, Truthful, and Two-Round (Optimal) Auctions via Cryptographic Commitments by Ferreira and Weinberg
• Credible, Strategyproof, Optimal, and Bounded Expected-Round Single-Item Auctions for all Distributions by Essaidi, Ferreira and Weinberg
• Dynamic Posted-Price Mechanisms for the Blockchain Transaction Fee Market by Ferreira, Moroz, Parkes and Stern
• Proof-of-Stake Mining Games with Perfect Randomness by Ferreira and Weinberg
• Optimal Strategic Mining Against Cryptographic Self-Selection in Proof-of-Stake by Ferreira, Hahn, Weinberg, Yu
• Credible Decentralized Exchange Design via Verifiable Sequencing Rules by Ferreira and Parkes

https://jumpcrypto.com/thepit/zkweek/

Find out more about zkSummit9 here: zksummit.com.

Apply for ZK Hack Lisbon here: ZK Hack application

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s...

Fredrik has a chat about consensus algorithms with Parity Technologies in-house consensus expert Robert Habermeier. We cover what a consensus algorithm is and how they work. We try to explain some common terms like safety and liveness, what a fork choice rule is and how real-world constraints like networking play a role in your algorithm design.

--

Robert Habermeier

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 takes us through his philosophical reasoning of shifting from genomic research to blockchain research and the two major areas in P2P systems that he focuses on: maximum throughput and low latency.

Here are some links for the episode:

• Sreeram on Twitter
• Sreeram’s homepage
• Episode 136 - Math competitions, crypto as alchemy & Gasper with Yan Zhang
• Prism: Scaling Bitcoin by 10,000x
• Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits
• The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol: Analysis and Applications
• Everything is a Race and Nakamoto Always Wins
• Themis: Fast, Strong Order-Fairness in Byzantine Consensus
• Babylon: Reusing Bitcoin Mining to Enhance Proof-of-Stake Security
• Blockchain CAP Theorem Allows User-Dependent Adaptivity and Finality
• Combining GHOST and Casper

If you’re looking to jump into ZK Professionally I want to remind you to head over to the ZK Jobs board to find job posts from some of the top teams working in ZK: https://jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm/

ZK Hack returns for a 2nd edition with ZK Hack Mini – a shorter form event spanning 2 weeks and kicks off on March 1st with a series of workshops and puzzle hacking competitions.

Join the newsletter for updates or sign up for the first event on March 1st.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Electric Coin Company.

Electric Coin Company, the inventors of Zcash and Halo cryptography, are building the next generation of zero-knowledge tech. With Network Upgrade 5 happening this April, Zcash moves to the Halo zero-knowledge proving system, removing trusted setup and becoming shielded by default.

With the help of Zcash and Halo cryptography, ECC aims to usher in an era of self-sovereignty and creative freedom. To learn more and explore the relationship between privacy,...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Noam Nisan, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Principle Researcher at StarkWare Industries and one of the pioneers in the field of Algorithmic Game Theory. They cover his extensive research and academic background, starting with his work on complexity theory as well as Algorithmic Game Theory and his current work on blockchains and Tokenomics at StarkWare.

They discuss his recent blog post; Simple Tokenomics for a Proof-of-Stake Utility Token, comparing the measurable Tokenomic outcomes of different live PoS systems and explore how Noam aimed to better communicate best practices for those designing these systems, plus much more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Simple Tokenomics for a Proof-of-Stake Utility Token by Noam Nisan
• Algorithmic Game Theory by Nisan, Roughgarden, Tardos and Vasirani
• The Elements of Computing Systems by Nisan and Schocken
• Game Theory, Alive by Karlin and Peres
• Algorithmic VS Mechanism Design
• The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Combinatorial agency by Babaioff, Feldman, Nisan and Winter
• Noam Nisan Google Scholar
• From Nand to Tetris Part 1

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here!

Summary

• Episode 103: Exploring VDFs with Joseph Bonneau
• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies by Narayanan, Bonneau, Felten, Miller and Goldfeder
• Verifiable Delay Functions Dan Boneh, Joseph Bonneau, Benedikt Bunz, and Ben Fisch
• Naysayer proofs by Seres, Glaeser and Bonneau
• Sealed-Bid Auctions
• DARPA SIEVE Project
• Zombie: Middleboxes that Don’t Snoop by Zhang, DeStefano, Arun, Bonneau, Grubbs and Walfish
• Zero-Knowledge Middleboxes by Grubbs, Arun, Zhang, Bonneau and Walfish
• jbonneau.com
• Riggs: Decentralized Sealed-Bid Auctions by Tyagi, Arun, Freitag, Wahby and Mazières
• Cicada: A framework for private non-interactive on-chain auctions and voting by Glaeser, Seres, Zhu, and Bonneau
• Atomic and Fair Data Exchange via Blockchain by Tas, Seres, Zhang, Melczer, Kelkar, Bonneau and Nikolaenko
• Zero Knowledge Summit (zkSummit) 2024: Field notes

This week’s episode is a little different from the usual and is split into two parts with Anna and Kobi exploring the history of ZK Hack, its origins and how the event has evolved into what it is today, including current activity in the ZK Hack ecosystem. The second half of the show splits off into Anna and Nico chatting the top 3 hackers from ZK Hack IV Online, which wrapped back in February. Each mini interview catches up with one of the winners and dives into what it was like to hack on the puzzles, which their favourites were and how they can be improved in the future.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• ZK Jobs Board
• ZK Hack Website
• Episode 211: It’s a wrap! ZK Hack Takeaways & What’s Next!
• ZK HACK IV - Overview & Workshop Introductions: map featured at 1m28s
• ZK Hack Discord
• ZK Hack Whiteboard Sessions
• Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Justin Thaler
• ZK Hack Whiteboard Session 1 - What is a SNARK? with Dan Boneh
• ZK Hack Whiteboard Session 2 - Building a SNARK (Part I) with Dan Boneh
• ZK Hack Whiteboard Session 3 - Building a SNARK (Part II) with Dan Boneh
• Groth16 Malleability by Geometry
• Episode 309: ZK Jargon Decoder with Nico Mohnblatt
• Zellic Wins Second Place in ZK Hack IV Blog
• SSTIC
• Techiepriyansh GitHub
• Sampritipanda GitHub
• Niooss-ledger GitHub

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

This is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at

In this week’s episode, Anna and cohosts Guillermo, Kobi, Nico and Tarun share their predictions, hopes (and worries) for ZK in 2024. They cover emerging ideas in ZK, research predictions, dream applications, the best case for ZK in 2024, the worst case for ZK, possible ‘Black Swans’ and more.

ZK Hack IV online is coming soon, sign up for the kick-off session on 16th Jan here. For the latest news on the event check out the zhhack.dev/zkhackIV website.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
• Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
• Join us on Telegram
• Catch us on YouTube

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 episode:

• Episode 150: NFTs & Rarible with Alex Salnikov
• FingerprintsDAO
• Autoglyphs
• DEAFBEEF
• 0xmons
• CryptoPunks
• Sarah Meyohas
• Sarah Meyohas’ Cloud of Petals
• tuba
• Loot
• PleasrDAO
• Hypebeast
• Sol LeWitt
• ArtBlocks
• Fidenza
• Framergence
• Pulsquares
• Chromie Squiggle
• Twin Flames
• pplpleasr
• Cryptovoxels
• Mitchell F Chan
• NFTs, Generative Art, and Sol LeWitt by Mitchell F Chan
• Bitchcoin
• Tarun’s art project

Be sure to register for the next ZK Jobs Fair on September 30th if you’re looking for opportunities in crypto.

For potential hiring teams, we still have booths available, so do get in touch by emailing

In this week’s episode, Anna and Robert Habermeier chat with Pratyush Mishra, co-author of the Arkworks toolkit. Arkworks is a collection of Rust libraries designed to simplify development with SNARKs, both for developing high-level application circuits and building custom SNARK implementations.

Pratyush lays out what possibilities and trade-offs Arkworks offers, diving into the details of the Rust implementation and why it is the best language for developing cryptographic primitives. Anna, Rob and Pratyush then branch out into the philosophical and practical questions of open-source and blockchain development.

Here are a few links to Arkworks and the topics they discussed:

Arkworks GitHub page and Telegram group.

Pratyush’s GitHub, Twitter and Berkeley pages.

Bellman and Libsnark, some of the other libraries that are similar to Arkworks.

The Celo and Mina protocols, two major projects using Arkworks.

Here is a basic explainer of what projects like Arkworks are trying to do and why it’s useful, with a particular focus on ZoKrates, one of the languages Pratyush mentioned.

Intros to Circom, Leo and Zinc, some of the higher level languages.

An earlier episode with Robert Habermeier about the work he does on Polkadot.

Be sure to subscribe to the zkMesh Newsletter - a monthly rundown of the latest in decentralised privacy-preserving technologies, privacy protocol development and zero knowledge systems research. Put together by Anna & Mikerah (HashCloak).

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting and product development company known for pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates and cryptographers. They have developed an end-to-end encrypted cloud storage product that minimizes the collection of any data related to its users, called

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.

We mention the following episodes, presentations and articles in our talk:

• James Prestwich talks Smart Contracts
• Tarun Chitra on Statistical modeling of PoS systems
• Light clients & ZKPs with Celo
• Ariah Klages-Mundt - (In)Stability for the Blockchain: Deleveraging Spirals and Stablecoin Attacks
• Designing Smart Contracts With Free Will
• Research paper: A model for Bitcoin’s security and the declining block subsidy - Hasu, Prestwich, Curtis
• On the Frontiers of Validation with Bison Trails

Thank you to this week's sponsor Trail of Bits

Trail of Bits shared their review of this year's IACR Crypto Conference on the Trail of Bits blog. They highlighted some of the major themes of the conference, including the importance of getting basic cryptographic primitives right and the ascendance of cryptographic tools for privacy-preserving computation such as Zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, and secure messaging systems.

For more on their thoughts from the conference and what they see on the horizon in their industry, check out the blog post here: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/09/11/crypto-2019-takeaways/

Our very own Zero Knowledge Summit is happening on Oct 26th. Spend the day with some of the best researchers and thinkers working on Zero Knowledge topics. Get your application in to attend here: https://forms.gle/ZouC15vhTguZ5azq9

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

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In this episode, we sit down with Julian Loss, a researcher at Spacemesh, to explore DAGs, the Proof-of-Spacetime idea and the Spacemesh project.

Links:

• Spacemesh on twitter
• SoK: A Consensus Taxonomy in the Blockchain Era

Thanks to our Sponsor POA Network!

Check out their blog to find out more about their new blockchain consensus protocol, HoneyBadger BFT

In this special 50th episode, we invite our friend Zooko to the podcast to chat about his background and explore the history of Zerocoin and Zcash. We dig into the inner workings of Zcash, the trusted setup, the sapling upgrade, and what the future of the project might look like!

The Sapling upgrade promises to reduce the proving times of the zk-SNARKs from 37 seconds to 2.3 seconds by replacing the SHA256 hash function with an improved performance Pedersen hash function called Bowe-Hopwood Pedersen, introducing an updated eliptic curve (Groth16/BLS12-381), moving from Libsnark to Bellman, and using a new split circuit design.

We dig deep on this and into what the UTXO model actually is to help us better understand the changes being introduced with Sapling. Hope you enjoy coming on this journey with us!

Links:

• Zerocoin Paper
• Zerocash Paper
• Sapling details
• Radio Lab Episode on The Ceremony
• Balance vs UTXO data models
• Zcash Engineer Ariel explaining Zcash at the Zero Knowledge Summit
• ZEXE Paper
• Love notes on the blockchain
• Howard Wu on Zero Knowledge

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 built an extensive collection of open access research papers on cryptography, distributed computer systems and blockchain

If you are interested in finding out more, check out welcome.apograf.io or this link to a curated list of cryptocurrency course materials: https://apograf.io/c/cryptocurrency_class

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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 few links of topics we discuss:

MimbleWimble Whitepaper

Beam Position Paper

Thank you to our sponsor this week Streamr.

Streamr has just launched their global pub/sub network for machine data. Unlike a cloud based data pipeline, the Streamr Network runs peer-to peer, in a system that offers a smart balance between high privacy and low latency as well as MQTT support.

If you want to start using it today, just visit streamr.network.

For more on the Streamr offering, have a listen to the episode we did last year with their co-founder Henri Pihkala

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• Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Its Applications on Solana
• Episode 135 - Look into Solana
• Solana projects mentioned: Backpack, Anza, Gido, Jupiter 
• ZK projects mentioned: Phantom, Elusiv, Light Protocol, Dark Protocol 
• Solana Token Extensions

In today’s episode, Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt interview Srinath Setty, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of notable works such as Spartan, Nova, SuperNova, and HyperNova. This discussion covers Setty's early work and how this led to him working on SNARKs, folding schemes and sumcheck protocols, as well as his views on the future trajectory of the ZK space.

Given the current chatter around Nova-style accumulation schemes, this interview offers a chance to explore the perspective of a key contributor behind these developments.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Pepper Project Publications
• Depot: Cloud storage with minimal trust by Mahajan, Setty, Lee, Clement, Alvisi, Dahlin, and Walfish
• Resolving the conflict between generality and plausibility in verified computation by Setty, Braun, Vu, Blumberg, Parno, and Walfish
• Proving the correct execution of concurrent services in zero-knowledge (extended version) by Setty, Angel, Gupta and Lee
• Replicated state machines without replicated execution by Lee, Nikitin and Setty
• Quadratic Span Programs and Succinct NIZKs without PCPs by Gennaro, Gentry, Parno and Raykova
• Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation by Parno, Howell, Gentry and Raykova
• Incrementally Verifiable Computation or Proofs of Knowledge Imply Time/Space Efficiency by Valiant
• Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments via Linear Interactive Proofs by Bitansky, Chiesa, Ishai, Ostrovsky and Paneth
• Open VDF: Accelerating the Nova SNARK-based VDF Article
• Episode 274: SNARKs: A Trilogy with Ariel Gabizon
• ZK Study Club: Supernova Srinath Setty - MS Research

Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Find your next job working in ZK!

Zero-knowledge is changing the world and until now, building ZK applications meant learning new, chain-specific languages and complex cryptography. But no more!

With SnarkyJS, the easiest to use zk SDK, developers can add the magic of zk to their apps using TypeScript!

Whether you're targeting Mina, the leading zk-native...

We welcome Jack back to the show to discuss what's been going on in our world for the past month. We share a little review of our recent event - the Zero Knowledge Summit - and an update from the Taiwan Sharding Workshop. We also discuss the role of testnets and explore the purpose and practice of ASIC resistance.

Links to things talked about in the episode:

• Fredriks talk about Rust smart contracts & wasm
• Ethereum Sharding Research Compendium
• Zero Knowledge Youtube channel
• Zero Knowledge Twitter account (stay up to date folks)
• ASIC resistance EIP
• Phil Daian's (previous guest) blog post response to hard forking for ASIC resistance

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 and the potential and challenges around the implementation of zero knowledge systems in the real world.

Thanks again to this week's sponsor Neufund. If you’re interested in how Neufund's open-source technical environment is enabling tokenization of real-world assets or the QA position, check their GitHub profile at github.com/neufund or the Neufund job offers at neufund.org/careers

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Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

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Or directly here:

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• ZK Podcast: Disclosures
• ZODA: Zero-Overhead Data Availability by Alex Evans, Guillermo Angeris and Nico Mohnblatt
• FRIDA: Data Availability Sampling from FRI by Mathias Hall-Andersen, Mark Simkin and Benedikt Wagner
• Foundations of Data Availability Sampling by Mathias Hall-Andersen, Mark Simkin and Benedikt Wagner
• The Accidental Computer: Polynomial Commitments from Data Availability by Alex Evans and Guillermo Angeris
• Guille's Tweet “anon, what if I told you that you can prove the correctness of the largest celestia block in <200ms on a single core of an mba”
• Bain Capital Crypto Blog

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 some links for this episode:

• Paper - Aleph: Efficient Atomic Broadcast in Asynchronous Networks with Byzantine Nodes
• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System by Leslie Lamport
• Episode 188: Analyzing Osmosis & Preventing MEV with Sunny and Dev

ZK Hack kicked off on October 26th and goes until December 7th — a multi-round online event with workshops and puzzle solving competitions. Put together by the Zero Knowledge podcast and the ZKValidator and supported by all of our fantastic sponsors. Even if you missed the first session you can still join the next ones, head to the website to check out the schedule of workshops and puzzles: https://www.zkhack.dev/

Thank you to this week’s sponsor DeversiFi!

DeversiFi's mission is to make the opportunities of DeFi available to everyone and their platform enables this with an impressive user experience and simple to use interface. Built with some of the cutting edge StarkWare scaling tech you've heard about on the podcast, this is a great way to start using zk tech live today. Right now on the platform you can invest, trade and send tokens and manage your portfolio all without paying gas fees.

Find out more about how you can make to most of DeFi at https://www.deversifi.com/.

If you like what we do:

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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:

• Episode 223: Connecting Cosmos and Ethereum with Gravity Bridge
• Axelar Network
• Github @axelarnetwork
• Axelar Whitepaper
• IBC Overview
• Interoperability and Market Segmentation by Steve McKeon

If you are looking to jump into ZK professionally, check out the ZK Jobs board to find job posts from some of the top teams working in ZK - like Aleo, Anoma and Mina. If you’re looking to hire, be sure to add your jobs as well! More at ZK Jobs Board.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Polygon Zero.

Polygon Zero is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, powered by Plonky2. A groundbreaking prover system, which generates zk proofs faster than any other existing tech. Plonky2 supports efficient recursive proof generation allowing Polygon Zero to scale horizontally – meaning the throughput of the protocol is limited not by the weakest nodes on the network, but only by the total compute available.

Visit polygon.technology to learn more.

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Head to the ZK Community Forum

Support our Gitcoin Grant

In this week's special episode, Anna pops over to EthCC - the Ethereum Community Conference - to find out what's on people's minds. Speaking with Boris Mann, Maria Paula Fernandez, Hudson Jameson, Sunny Aggarwal, Yalda Mousavinia, and Peter Mauric, these conversations centre around decision making in the decentralised space, the role of transparency, the different organisations and groups that have formed in Ethereum to help make decisions, how compensation can play a role, the code of conduct, the importance of signaling and much more.

Here are some of the groups or initiatives or talks mentioned in the podcast:

• Fellowship of the Ethereum Magicians
• Ethereum Cat Herders
• Rick Dudley's talk at EthCC
• Tennagraph Signaling Site
• Ethereum Community’s Code of Conduct
• Cosmos Protocol blog
• Autark
• Aragon
• Decred

If you are looking for some further context for this episode, you may want to check out some previous episodes about governance related topics:

• Hudson Jameson talks EIPs and Ethereum core decision-making
• Vlad and Gav go head-to-head on blockchain governance
• Path to an ERC Standard

Special thanks to this week's sponsor: Trail of Bits

Trail of Bits is looking for companies writing Ethereum smart contracts that could use their security help! If you would like to test out their continuous assurance system, fill out the signup form on crytic.io

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

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Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on...

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.

Here are a few links mentioned in this episode:

• Mixnets and privacy technology with Claudia Diaz from Nym, Zero Knowledge Episode 125
• Harry’s talk at the ZKV event on Cosmos privacy
• Nym Whitepaper

The latest Gitcoin CLR matching round is live, so be sure to check out Zero Knowledge Podcast’s page and use it to make a powerful contribution to the show! Thank you for the previous support, which directly contributed to the launch of the new zeroknowledge.fm website and community.

Thank you to our sponsor, Mina Protocol!

Mina is a layer-one protocol working to connect crypto to the real world. This means developers can leverage private, verified, real world data from any website to build decentralized apps. Mina’s decentralized apps, called Snapps, also allow users to access on-chain services without sacrificing personal data privacy.

Now that Mina’s mainnet is live, the ecosystem is growing fast. Join the community and find out more by visiting minaprotocol.com!

If you like what we do:

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Summary

This week, Anna and Tarun catch up with Georgios Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm and long-standing friend of the ZK Pod!

First they cover the work Georgios has been doing since he last appeared on the show, covering everything from updates on Foundry to the more recent work on Reth. They then dig into what makes it different, what inspires its design, where it is heading and the eventual end goals of the project. They also chat about the general client node landscape, from the ETH 2.0 research days to present day, before diving into discussing different clients from different teams, how this diversity can protect a chain and how each client can differ.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Georgios’ GitHub
• Introducing Reth by Paradigm
• Reth GitHub
• Episode 224: Foundry with Georgios Konstantopoulos
• Loom Network
• CryptoZombies
• Geth: Ethereum
• Full BSC Node Guide: How to Run BNB Smart Chain Nodes
• GitHub: flashbots:mev-geth
• Arbitrum
• The Definitive Guide to Sequencing by James Prestwich
• Verkle Trees for Statelessness

Check out the latest jobs in ZK at the ZK Podcast Jobs Board.

The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com.

o1Labs is excited to announce the v1 release of o1js, THE fastest way to build zkApps and

deploy to the Mina blockchain.

After 2 years and 70,000 downloads, o1js v1 is the enterprise-grade

Typescript zkDSL the community has been waiting for.

Are you ready to build the next killer zkApp? Then visit o1js.org and get started today.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive...

In this episode we sit down with Ele and Alexis from OSCoin to talk about what they are building and the general problem of open source incentivization. We dig into the incentivization and governance models they imagine for the Open Source world as well as some technical aspects of the platform they intend to build.

Links:

• OScoin
• Social Architecture - Building On-line Communities
• Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure
• Elinor Ostrom
• Radical Markets Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
• Open Source Without Maintainers

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 some helpful links:

https://ipfs.io/

https://libp2p.io/

https://filecoin.io/

https://protocol.ai/

https://protocol.ai/projects/#IPFS

Decentralised storage pt 1

Orient

Decentralised storage pt 2

Arweave Decentralised Storage episode

You can see some of the constraints and parameters for filecoin here:

• https://filecoin-project.github.io/specs/docs/diagrams/orient/filecoin.dot.svg
• https://filecoin-project.github.io/specs/#appendixorient
• https://github.com/filecoin-project/specs/tree/master/src/orient

Give the Zero Knowledge Podcast some feedback. Whether you are a long-time listener or new to the show, we would love to hear from you!

Please share your feedback with us here: https://forms.gle/LtQQyKJV6r7LrSND7

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In this week's episode, we sit down with Martin Lundfall from Dapphub & MakerDAO to discuss formal verification - a topic request that comes directly from the Zero Knowledge audience.

We cover what formal verification is, where it makes sense, where it doesn't, the k-framework, how different this approach is to the "move fast and break things" approach, and much more.

Here are some of articles and videos we mention:

• Is a type a lifebuoy or a lamp?
• https://github.com/dapphub/klab
• https://github.com/kframework/evm-semantics
• https://github.com/kframework/k
• https://jellopaper.org/
• https://dapphub.chat/

Thanks to Web3Foundation for being our sponsor on this week's episode. For more about the Web3Foundation grants, check out their blog: https://medium.com/web3foundation/introducing-web3-foundation-grants-442f6753926a and grants.web3.foundation

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

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In this episode, Anna and Fredrik have a look back at 2017 and the changing blockchain ecosystem with ex-Ethereum Foundation and current-Parity core dev, Marek Kotewicz. We also share our predictions about what we can expect to see next year in crypto land.

FYI: opinions are our own, and we definitely won't be giving financial advice :P

• Blocksize research: https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/resources/1txn.pdf
• ParityDB: https://github.com/paritytech/paritydb

In this episode, we sit down with Mitch Kosowski, director of product at ETHPrize and Andrew Cravenho, project leader at POA Network. We cover ETHPrize's inception and activity, the way that pain points in the community are identified, and the open source block explorer project that POA Network is building with an ETHPrize bounty.

ETHPrize developed out of a series of interviews with devs in the community. Unlike traditional grants, ETHPrize aims to use bounties, sub-communities and working groups to tackle specific problems emerging in the ecosystem.

ETHPrize is funded by 0x, Status, ECF, CoinbaseWallet and Ethereum Foundation and initialised by Robbie Bent and inspired by the findings in the ETHReport

Read more about the open source block explorer - https://medium.com/poa-network/introducing-blockscout-the-ethereum-explorer-86b4ddd9e8a4

Here are some additional links:

• ETHPrize website
• Mitch's Twitter contact
• Andrew's Twitter contact
• POA Network website

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 how Kusama's governance and council functions. Last but not least, we learn about RMRK founded by Bruno, an NFT project on Kusama which started as a hack to support basic NFTs without smart contracts and grew into full-blown NFT ecosystem on Kusama.

Here are some links for this episode:

• Episode 46: Gavin Wood on Polkadot, Sharding and Substrate
• Episode 83: From Warp Sync to SPREE with Polkadot’s Rob Habermeier
• Episode 104: Exploring Kusama, the Canary Chaos Network
• Episode 171: Mapping the Polkadot Ecosystem
• Episode 181: Aping into DeFi and NFTs with Andy Chorlian and Tarun Chitra
• RMRK
• Clusters: how trusted & trust-minimized bridges shape the multi-chain landscape

ZK Hack kicked off on October 26th and goes until December 7th — a multi-round online event with workshops and puzzle solving competitions. Put together by the Zero Knowledge Podcast and the ZKValidator and supported by all of our fantastic sponsors. Even if you missed the first session you can still join the next ones, head to the website to check out the schedule of workshops and puzzles: https://www.zkhack.dev/

Thank you to this week’s sponsor. Centrifuge - A Real-world DeFi project. Centrifuge puts real-world assets on the blockchain, allowing issuers to get liquidity on their assets and investors to make a safe, stable yield in the volatile crypto world.

They are hiring positions! Head to https://centrifuge.io/careers to learn more.

If you like what we do:

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This week, Anna chats with Justin Thaler, Associate Professor at Georgetown. They cover Justin’s academic history and discuss what led him to working on interactive proofs and SNARKs. They also take a look at several other topics such as the Thaler Book Study Group, his earlier work Spartan, comparing the security of different rollups built with SNARKs and STARKs and more.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

• Justin Thaler Georgetown Profile
• Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Justin Thaler, 2022
• vSQL: Verifying Arbitrary SQL Queries over Dynamic Outsourced Databases Paper
• Hardware-friendliness of HyperPlonk by Ingonyama
• Proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheels
• A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography by Boneh and Shoup, 2023 - Page 617 for elliptic curves over finite fields
• Quarks: Quadruple-efficient transparent zkSNARKs by Setty and Lee
• Brakedown: Linear-time and post-quantum SNARKs for R1CS by Golovnev, Lee, Setty, Thaler and Wahby, 2021
• zkHack Website
• zkHack Discord
• Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Gentle Introduction to
• A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography By Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup
• Number theory explained from first principles
• The Animated Elliptic Curve
• BLS12-381 For The Rest Of Us

Apply for zkSummit9 here: zkSummit9 Ticket Application.

Check out ingonyama.com to learn more about Zero Knowledge Hardware acceleration.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo by visiting

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 Facebook's Libra protocol.

The papers and references we mention:

• Early zkpodcast episode on consensus with Robert Habermeier
• PBFT (Castro and Liskov) (see project here)
• BASE (Castro, Rodrigues, and Liskov) (the forgotten companion of PBFT that suggests a clean State Machine abstraction)
• Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony (Dwork, Lynch Stockmeyer)
• Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony (Dwork, Lynch Stockmeyer) (this paper won the 2007 Dijkstra award)
• Multiple leader BFT (Katz and Koo)

Some of Ittai's work:

• SBFT (with Golan, Grossman, Malkhi, Pinkas, Reiter, Seredinschi, Tamir, and Tomescu)
• Hotstuff (with Yin, Malkhi, Reiter, and Golan)
• Asynchronous BFT (with Malkhi and Spiegelman)
• Sync Hotstuff (with Malkhi, Nayak, Ren, and Yin)
• Optimal Good-case Latency for Byzantine Broadcast and State Machine Replication (with Nayak, Ren, and Xiang) new!
• On the Optimality of Optimistic Responsiveness (with Nayak ,Ren, and Shrestha) new!

Ittai's group blog on cryptography and consensus: Decentralized Thoughts blog

We also mention:

• Tendermint (from 2016 not 2014)
• Casper FFG
• Thunderella
• The AVA...

This week, host Anna Rose chats with Finch, Erwan and Jen from the Penumbra team. They share an update about Penumbra and discuss how this zk-powered project works under the hood. Specifically, how Penumbra harnesses ZK to offer new paradigms for staking, voting and trading.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 247: Exploring Penumbra with Henry de Valence
• Penumbra Storage
• Penumbra GitHub
• ZK8: How to build a private DEX - Henry de Valence - Penumbra
• ZK8: Tiered Merkle Topiary in Rust – finch – Penumbra Labs
• Plaidfinch (Penumbra) - Interchain Private Trading with Penumbra
• Privacy in Cosmos Live: Finch (Penumbra)- Full-Stack Private Protocol Design
• A pure-Rust implementation of group operations on Ristretto and Curve25519
• curve25519-dalek Github
• Replicating Market Makers by Angeris, Evans, Chitra
• SecureDrop

Further reading;

• Penumbra’s DEX Arrives From The Future
• How to See in the Dark: Navigating Penumbra
• Private Governance on Penumbra
• Bringing Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Penumbra
• Introducing Poseidon377, our instantiation of a SNARK-friendly hash
• Testnet #4: Shielded Staking Is Here

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form

Check out the ZK Jobs Board

Anoma’s first fractal instance, Namada, is launching...

This week, Anna and guest co-host James Prestwich chat with David Vorick from Skynet Labs about the scope and goals of the Skynet project. They discuss the journey from earlier work on Sia & distributed data to Skynet, SkyDB, and their idea for Recursive Content Monetization - a new model to pay online creators and content owners.

They also chat about the SkyFeed project - a decentralised Twitter like project. In this part of the conversation, they explore how the decentralised community could potentially remove the harm done by the social chat algorithms, but also the potential impact - and danger - that fully decentralised systems can have.

Here are some helpful links:

• https://siasky.net/
• https://sia.tech/
• https://support.siasky.net/article/nz6p6876e3-skynet-resources
• https://blog.sia.tech/skydb-a-mutable-database-for-the-decentralized-web-7170beeaa985
• https://blog.sia.tech/skynet-the-future-of-nebulous-c9922eb53456
• https://joinmastodon.org/

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Aave. 

Aave Protocol is an open source and non-custodial protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets 

Aave Protocol also features access to innovative DeFi building blocks like Flash Loans. They are now introducing a new feature is Credit Delegation, where users can delegate their credit to another person who can borrow against it 

For anyone thinking of contributing to the ecosystem, check out the Grants Program - here is the link: https://docs.aave.com/portal/  

Also vIsit aave.com or join the Aave Discord #developers channel https://aave.com/discord to find out more!

If you like what we do: 

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm -https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm

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Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit -https://www.reddit.com/r/zkpodcast 

Give us...

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.

It also describes itself as a personal server built from scratch.

For some additional links about the project, have a look here:

https://urbit.org/faq/

https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-and-the-blockchain/

https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-for-normies/

If you are interested in participanting in the now ONLINE version of the zkSummit - Sign up directly here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/zksummit

You will then receive a link to an updated ticket page shortly.

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Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

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Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

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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-conquest game where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cryptographically-specified universe.

Find out more about the game here: https://zkga.me/

Least Authority is a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates, and cryptographers focused is on securing distributed systems: blockchain, peer-to-peer and other approaches to systems built with the principle of least authority. They are known for security audits and reviews like the Eth 2.0 Specification, Protocol Lab's Gossipsub Protocol, Zcash Sapling upgrade, & Tezos Foundation's TzBTC, as well as their work with zero knowledge proofs integrated into the Tahoe-LAFS (secure distributed file store) with "ZKAPs: zero knowledge access passes".

They are currently looking for a technical writer to help the Least Authority team write security research and audit reports, open source technical documentation and privacy analysis statements on technical approaches.

Find out more here: leastauthority.com/zkpodcast

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In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico interview Or Sattath, Assistant Professor at the Ben-Gurion University in the Computer Science department. This is the 2nd episode with Or on this show, continuing the conversation around Quantum Cryptography. This time, he describes how we can transition from a pre-quantum to a post-quantum environment, looking at existing systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. He covers why the methods used in the transition will be important, techniques on how this could be executed and the challenges in designing these techniques and the complications that can arise. Finally, they go on to discuss Quantum Money and recent works in this area.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Part 1 - Episode 288: Quantum Cryptography with Or Sattath
• Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer by Shor
• Shor’s Algorithm
• Grover’s Algorithm
• A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search by Grover
• Fawkescoin: A cryptocurrency without public-key cryptography by Bonneau and Miller
• Bitcoin is not quantum-safe, and how we can fix it when needed by Buterin
• Cryptographic canaries and backups by Justin Drake

Notes and recommended links by Or Sattath:

• NIST post-quantum standardization for post-quantum digital signatures and public-key encryption (or, more precisely, Key Encapsulation Mechanism, KEM). These are classical schemes that, unlike almost all the existing schemes that are used in practice, are secure against quantum adversaries.
• Signature Lifting (arXiv link) is discussed as a technique to migrate to post-quantum signatures, especially for those who didn't prepare in advance. Here's a recommended Twitter thread summarizing the results by Shai Wyborski, Or’s co-author.
• An approach to upgrade Bitcoin to quantum money is available here. This uses a cryptographic primitive which is called quantum lightning, which was introduced here.
• Some smart contacts capabilities can be supported as well. This

In this week’s episode, Anna spoke with Nolan Smith and Locke Brown, co-founders at NuID - a zero knowledge authentication solution. They explore the use-case of zk-powered password management and how this relates to Identity.

Here are a few of the articles mentioned in the episode:

-Universally Composable Direct Anonymous Attestation by Jan Camenisch , Manu Drijvers , and Anja Lehmann

-Practical UC-Secure Delegatable Credentials with Attributes and Their Application to Blockchain by Jan Camenisch , Manu Drijvers , and Anja Lehmann

-Privacy-Preserving User-Auditable Pseudonym Systems by Jan Camenisch & Anja Lehmann IBM Research – Zurich

Find out more at the NuID developer portal https://portal.nuid.io

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Aleo

Aleo is the first platform for fully private applications. It uses blockchain and zero-knowledge cryptography to deliver a web experience that is both personal and private. With Aleo, developers can write private applications, without a background in blockchains or expertise in cryptography.

Aleo has released Developer Preview I, an early peek at what the future of the web will look like. The release introduces a new programming language called Leo, a new community-driven package manager for Leo, and a new development environment or IDE called Aleo Studio.

We recently had Howard Wu, a co-founder of Aleo, on the show for an interview - you can find that episode here. Learn more about Aleo at https://aleo.org/

Thanks again Aleo!

If you like what we do:

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This week Anna Rose chats with Jon Stephens, Computer Science Ph.D. student in the UToPiA group at UT Austin and co-founder of Veridise. Veridise is a blockchain auditing firm that audits smart contracts and ZK systems. They discuss what led Jon to work on system security, what tools are available to test the security of ZK systems and the process of performing formal verification on ZK systems. They also cover general ZK security, why this topic matters and ways we can incentivise ethical disclosures when bugs and vulnerabilities are found.

Additional reading for this week's episode;

• SmartPulse: Automated Checking of Temporal Properties in Smart Contracts by Stephens, Ferles, Mariano, Lahiri, and Dillig
• Certifying Zero-Knowledge Circuits with Refinement Types by J. Liu, Kretz, H. Liu, Tan, Wang, Sun, Pearson, Miltner, Dillig, and Feng
• Practical Security Analysis of Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits by Wen, Stephens, Chen, Ferles, Pailoor, Charbonnet, Dillig and Feng
• Episode 67: Formal Verification with Martin Lundfall
• Episode 70: Digging into DAI with Rune Christensen from Maker
• Episode 255: Verifying Consensus On-Chain with Succinct
• Boogie: An Intermediate Verification Language
• Circom-lib
• How Coders Hacked Back to ‘Rescue’ $208 Million in Ethereum

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form

Polygon Labs is thrilled to announce Polygon 2.0: The Value Layer for the Internet.

Polygon 2.0 and all of our ZK tech is open-source and community-driven. Reach out to the Polygon community on Discord to learn more, contribute, or join in and build the future of Web3 together with Polygon!

Anoma’s first fractal instance, Namada, is launching soon!

The MASP circuit's latest update enables shielded set rewards directly in the shielded set, a novel feature that funds privacy as a public good.

Follow Namada on twitter

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.

Want to help support the show? Check out our grant on Gitcoin and please donate today!

CLR Matching is happening now! Link is here -->> https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast-2

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Join us on Telegram

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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 some real world applications.

In this interview, we discuss the origin of the technology, what it is, how it can be combined with other cryptographic techniques such as MPC and ZKPs, and applications for FHE technology being explored today.

Here are some relevant links:

IBM's Open Source Homomorphic Encryption Library (HElib) v1.0.0

Towards a Homomorphic Machine Learning Big Data Pipeline for the Financial Services Sector

Homomorphic Training of 30,000 Logistic Regression Models

Homomorphically Securing AI at the Edge

Article on IBM's FHE work with a Brazilian bank

Episode 63: Proxy re-encryption and FHE with NuCypher

Nigel Smart on Multi-Party Computation: From Theory to Practice

If you like what we do:

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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 Chia-Che Tsai and Don Porter, about emerging hardware platforms. In 2015, Intel Labs recognized the potential for Graphene to be an open-source compatibility layer for Intel® SGX, and has contributed to Graphene development since. With Golem and Invisible Things Lab (ITL), the Graphene project has also been now used within a decentralised blockchain context.

The security around TEEs is a hotly debated topic (at least in our community) and we delve into the questions around these with our guests. That said, we do see this as the first of a series of episodes where we explore the challenges and advantages of using TEEs.

https://grapheneproject.io/

Thank you to this week's sponsor Apograf! Apograf has built an extensive collection of open access research papers on cryptography, distributed computer systems and blockchain

If you are interested in finding out more, check out welcome.apograf.io or this link to a curated list of cryptocurrency course materials: https://apograf.io/c/cryptocurrency_class

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

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This week, host Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt chat with Ron Rothblum, Professor of Computer Science at Technion. They explore information theory and ZK, diving into the weeds on multiple topics including error correcting codes, FRI, FFTs, Reed-Solomon encoding, Fiat-Shamir and more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Fiat-Shamir via List-Recoverable Codes (or: Parallel Repetition of GMW is not Zero-Knowledge) by Holmgren, Lombardi and Rothblum
• Proving as Fast as Computing: Succinct Arguments with Constant Prover Overhead by Ron-Zewi and Rothblum
• Faster Sounder Succinct Arguments and IOPs by Holmgren and Rothblum
• The Random Oracle Methodology, Revisited by Canetti, Goldreich and Halevi
• Linear-Time Arguments with Sublinear Verification from Tensor Codes by Bootle, Chiesa and Groth
• Testudo: Linear Time Prover SNARKs with Constant Size Proofs and Square Root Size Universal Setup by Campanelli, Gailly, Gennaro, Jovanovic, Mihali and Thaler
• Reed-Solomon Codes
• Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem
• Guy Rothblum Publications
• Episode 274: SNARKs: A Trilogy with Ariel Gabizon

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> https://9lcje6jbgv1.typeform.com/zkSummit10

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo that enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of ZKPs to deploy decentralized exchanges, hidden information games, regulated stablecoins, and more. Visit http://developer.aleo.org.

For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
• Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
• Join us on

In this week’s episode, Anna and Fredrik chat with Alin Tomescu, a post-doc researcher at VMWare Research Group, about the concept of stateless systems. Specifically, they explore his work on stateless validation, why this would be desirable and what is the state of the research around this topic.

Have a look at Alin’s previous zkStudy Club episodes: zkStudyClub: Alin Tomescu on authenticated dictionaries and cross-incremental proof (dis)aggregation & zkStudyClub: Aggregatable Subvector Commitments with Alin Tomescu (VMWare Research)

This episode is packed full of info and Alin shared an amazing list of resources to help navigate this :

RMCI17e, Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries, with Applications to Cryptocurrencies, Leonid Reyzin and Dmitry Meshkov and Alexander Chepurnoy and Sasha Ivanov

CPZ18, Edrax: A Cryptocurrency with Stateless Transaction Validation, 2018, Alexander Chepurnoy and Charalampos Papamanthou and Yupeng Zhang

BBF18, Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains, 2018, Dan Boneh and Benedikt Bünz and Ben Fisch

Tome20, How to Keep a Secret and Share a Public Key (Using Polynomial Commitments), 2020, Tomescu, Alin,

CFG+20, [Vector Commitment Techniques and Applications to Verifiable Decentralized Storage](https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/149], 2020, Matteo Campanelli and Dario Fiore and Nicola Greco and Dimitris Kolonelos and Luca Nizzardo

GRWZ20, Pointproofs: Aggregating Proofs for Multiple Vector Commitments, 2020, Sergey Gorbunov and Leonid Reyzin and Hoeteck Wee and Zhenfei Zhang

TAB+20e, Aggregatable Subvector Commitments for Stateless Cryptocurrencies, 2020, Alin Tomescu and Ittai Abraham and Vitalik Buterin and Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist and Dmitry Khovratovich

LGG+20, Aardvark: A Concurrent Authenticated Dictionary with Short Proofs, 2020, Derek Leung and Yossi Gilad and Sergey Gorbunov and Leonid Reyzin and Nickolai Zeldovich

AR20, KVaC: Key-Value Commitments for Blockchains and Beyond, 2020, Shashank Agrawal and Srinivasan Raghuraman

TXN20, Authenticated Dictionaries with Cross-Incremental Proof (Dis)aggregation, 2020, Alin Tomescu and Yu Xia and Zachary Newman

zkSummit6 is happening on Nov 23-24 2020 - grab your spot: https://www.zksummit.com/

Thanks to this week's sponsor Parity...

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 Behind Our Digital Infrastructure
• A handy guide to financial support for open source
• Funding through foundations
• Grants programs
• Crowdfunding
• Token payments
• Founder rewards/block rewards

Thank you to this week's sponsor Apograf! Apograf has built an extensive collection of open access research papers on cryptography, distributed computer systems and blockchain

If you are interested in finding out more, check out apograf.io or this link to a curated list of cryptocurrency course materials: https://apograf.io/c/cryptocurrency_class

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

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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 info related to the interview:

Nomadic blog post about the Sapling integration

Tezos implementation of Sapling

Wired article about early Tezos issues

Transparent Polynomial Delegation and Its Applications to Zero Knowledge Proof

Thank you to this week's sponsor - Trail of Bits.

Trail of Bits has partnered with Johns Hopkins University to supply vulnerability researchers with software that can produce ZK proofs of exploitability. This is part of a larger effort funded by DARPA, called SIEVE, to push forward the state of the art in zero-knowledge proofs. For more info check out their blog!

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/05/21/reinventing-vulnerability-disclosure-using-zero-knowledge-proofs/.

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Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

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Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

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This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Stani Kulechov, co-founder of Aave, about the origin and evolution of the project, the changing DeFi landscape, collateralized debt in crypto, Flash Loans, Flash Minting, Credit Delegation and the future of DeFi.

Quick recap: A Flashloan is an uncollatoralised loan which must be issued and repaid in the same transaction before the blockchain updates the user’s account balances. If it isn’t repaid in this time, the transaction will fail.

We have discussed Flashloans on the show before see this previous episode:

https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/118

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Hermez Protocol!

Hermez is a Layer 2 solution that scales token transfers on top of Ethereum and which can handle up to 2000 transactions per second. Designed for high-frequency tokens, Hermez is a zk rollup which leverages zk-SNARKs for validity proofs and with on-chain data availability.

Hermez's zero-knowledge circuits are developed using iden3’s circuit compiler language, Circom. They also introduce a novel consensus algorithm, Proof-of-Donation, that gives 40% of each transaction fee back to Ethereum community projects as a donation, thereby supporting Ethereum development.

After passing two security audits, Hermez is running a bug bounty program, offering up to 100 ETH to whoever discovers any critical vulnerabilities. We recently had Jordi Baylina, Technical Lead at Hermez, on the show for an interview - you can find that episode here. Learn more about the project and bug bounty at https://hermez.io/

If you like what we do:

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Summary

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Connor O’Hara from Celestia. After discussing the latest ZK Hack Montréal event where Connor was a judge, they dive into his professional background, the ecosystems he has been a part of and what led him to work on Celestia. They then discuss various ZK-focused initiatives within the Celestia ecosystem.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

Episode 311: The Launch of Celestia and Beyond

03:22 ZK Hack Montréal

08:08 ZK Hack Devfolio

24:33 Episode 151: John Adler on Optimistic vs ZK Rollup and the data availability problem

30:24 Episode 208: Digging into Data Availability with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia

41:26 Episode 220: The Road to Plonky2 with Brendan and Daniel from Polygon Zero

46:49 Vitalik Buterin Endgame Blog Post

49:41 Light Nodes Everywhere: Why & How - Connor O'Hara at Modulard Summit

56:29 ZK11: 1 Circuit, 5 Rollups: Building a Re-Usable DA Integration for ZK Rollups - Connor O'Hara

Check out the ZK Jobs Board for the latest jobs in ZK at jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm

Episode Sponsors

Get ready to build with intention. Anoma is the universal intent machine, introducing a new era of applications where you define the outcomes you want.

Follow Anoma on X to learn more at x.com/anoma

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/.

If you like what we do:

• Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
• Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
• Join us on