Zero Knowledge

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 Confer

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 If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledg

In this week’s episode, we chat with Daniel Lehnberg about Grin - an implementation of the MimbleWimble privacy protocol. We cover the story behind MimbleWimble, how Grin first came to be, and how this technology works. We also look back at how this protocol came to be as well as were Daniel sees it going. Here are a few links of topics we discuss: MimbleWimble Whitepaper Grin Tech Step by step walkthrough of Grin transactions What’s inside a Grin transaction file Grin’s monetary model Slides and talks from grincon0 in Berlin, including Cuckoo Cycle Proof of Work 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 Head of Support role, or available jobs in general, check out https://aragon.one/jobs If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zer

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

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

In this episode, Anna chats with Friederike Ernst from Gnosis about their work on prediction markets, wallet security, exchanges, and the co-working space Full Node in Berlin - a hub for the blockchain community that Friederike spearheaded. Some links that were mentioned: sight.pm Phil Daian's front-running article slow.trade Full Node Berlin Thank you to this week's sponsor [Trail of Bits](trailofbits.com) Trail of Bits recently releases their smart contract audit executive summary. They aggregated the work of 23 smart contract audits and found that 78% of high impact, easily exploitable findings are discoverable with automated analysis tools, 50% of all findings will never be found with automated tools, and Unit testing has no impact on security For more on this audit, have a look at their latest blog post https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/08/08/246-findings-from-our-smart-contract-audits-an-executive-summary/ If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Te

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

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 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: 0xC0

In this episode, we sit down with Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin from Near Protocol to find out about their work. We discuss what brought them to develop Near Protocol, how they used their whiteboard sessions to learn from the best people in the space, the challenge of blockchain UX, and what has motivated them to become one of the fastest moving projects around. Links: Near for developers: https://studio.nearprotocol.com/ Whiteboard session: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9tzQn_TEuFWweVbfTbaedFdwVrvaYPq4 Thank you to this week's sponsor [Trail of Bits](trailofbits.com) Trail of Bits recently releases their smart contract audit executive summary. They aggregated the work of 23 smart contract audits and found that 78% of high impact, easily exploitable findings are discoverable with automated analysis tools, 50% of all findings will never be found with automated tools, and Unit testing has no impact on security For more on this audit, have a look at their latest blog post https://b

In this week's episode, we chat with Nigel Smart, Professor of Cryptology at KU Leuven and the co-founder of Unbound Tech, about his background in cryptology, the history of MPC systems, MPC systems in the real world, and how MPC stacks up versus other related cryptography and privacy techniques. He helps us better understand where MPC comes from, the power of this technology and shares some emerging MPC research topics that he is excited about. Here are some of the papers or concepts mentioned in this episode: Our MPC episode GarbledCircuit Yao's Millionaire Problem First FHE paper Spdz protocol MPC in the head NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Initiative Thank you to our sponsor this week StarkWare StarkWare will be presenting the StarkWare Sessions - on Sept 16th in Tel Aviv. The event will bring together some of the brightest minds in zero knowledge research from both the academic and application spheres. Topics that will be discussed are self-custodial trading, STARKs for Layer 1, STARK-fr

In this week’s episode, we invite Raul Jordan from Prysmatic Labs back to our show. He shares an update about Prysmatic Labs and ETH2.0 development. We cover some of the latest innovations, some existing challenges, timelines, implementation challenges and more. We also touch on an article that Raul published about the Libra protocol, and talk about how it compares to the public blockchains we all know and love. You can find this here: https://www.tokendaily.co/blog/a-close-look-at-libra-s-source-code For some more info, please check out the following: Our previous ZKP episode with Prysmatic Labs Prysmatic Labs Saphire Testnet 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

In this week’s episode, we chat with Ben Fisch, Stanford PhD student working in Dan Boneh's applied cryptography group. In our conversation, we dig into accumulators, Merkle trees & vector commitments. We also learn a bit about the RSA Accumulator Paper - entitled Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains - that he co-authored with Benedikt Bünz and touch on some of the ways these RSA accumulators could potentially be used in a blockchain context. Here are a few previous episodes that might help you prep for this interview: Merkle Trees https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/57 MPCs https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/60 Here are a few concepts and links we mention: Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem) https://github.com/cambrian/accumulator https://medium.com/@chia.net/chia-vdf-competition-guide-5382e1f4bd39 Thank you to our sponsor this week StarkWare Star

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

In this week’s episode, we welcome Ariel Gabizon, previously a Electric Coin Company (Zcash) engineer and now a cryptographer working on zero knowledge constructions for Filecoin. Ariel has worked closely with some of the most exciting projects and researchers pushing the boundaries on zero knowledge research. He is also the person who discovered the Zcash bug (along with Sean Bowe and Zooko). In this episode, we explore his journey into the space, what inspires him, and what exciting new paradigms he is exploring today! Here are some of the articles and topics he mentions: Algebraic Methods for Interactive Proof Systems ECC (Zcash) Vulnerability Blog post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Riemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_function_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Hasse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasse_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Weil Thank you to our sponsor this week StarkWare StarkWare will b

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.

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 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 o

In this episode, Anna chats with Robert Habermeier, one of the co-founders of Polkadot and an engineer at Parity Technology, about his early experience with Rust and cryptography, as well as the work he did at Parity on Warp Sync and Lightclients. We then discuss how this helped inspire some of the concepts and design of the Polkadot protocol. We also chat about some of the exciting concepts that he is discovering along the way - such as new architectures to promote interchain security, Trust Wormholes and more! For more about what we discussed, check out these links: Polkadot: https://polkadot.network/about/ Warp sync: https://wiki.parity.io/Warp-Sync Lightclient https://www.parity.io/what-is-a-light-client/ Special thanks to this week's sponsor: Trail of Bits Trail of Bits is offering a service for young technology companies who could use expert security support, but aren't quite at a stage to hire their own team. The service includes staffing a #security channel to answer questions, review

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

In this week’s episode, we meet with Dominic Tarr, a protocol designer and security auditor at Least Authority who works on Scuttlebutt - a decentralized secure gossip platform. We discuss P2P messaging and the challenges of sending messages within a p2p network in a truly decentralised manner. Here are some links we mention: https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf For more on Scuttlebutt, please have a look at these resources. https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ For more on Dominic, check out this article in the Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/meet-the-counterantidisintermediationists/527553/ 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: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55

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](www.eventhorizonsummit.com). 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 g