Zero Knowledge

In this week's episode, we catch up with Eli Ben-Sasson and Alessandro Chiesa from StarkWare Industries. We talk about their longstanding academic work in theoretic & applied cryptography, how StarkWare came to be, the emergence of zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs, some of the differences between these different zero knowledge systems, dive into the specific features of STARKs (!) and what's coming next in the space. For some background on the topics we cover in this episode, please check out the other episodes in our ZK Series Here are a few papers we mentioned in the talk: Zero coin: http://zerocoin.org/media/pdf/ZerocoinOakland.pdf Zero cash: http://zerocash-project.org/paper Follow Eli on Twitter: https://twitter.com/elibensasson?lang=en To find out about our ZK Study Club, join the Zero Knowledge telegram group: https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA Special thanks to POA Network for being our sponsor on this episode. To learn more about threshold cryptography and how to use it, check ou

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

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 week's episode, Anna and Fredrik dig into the topic of Merkle trees. We discuss the history of the concept, explore different kinds of Merkle trees, and touch on Radix trees & Patricia Merkle tries. We also look a bit at their usage in both Bitcoin and Ethereum. The topic was a challenging one to explain without diagrams or visuals, so below we are sharing some resources we used in preperation for this episode. We will also be posting this on Github, please feel free to push additional links that might be relevant. Wikipedia definition of a Merkle Tree Dan Finlay's talk Merkle Trees explained Wikipedia definition of a Radix Tree Merkling in Ethereum Ethereum Modified Merkle Patricia Trie

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

In this week's episode, Anna interviews a number of participants at the ETHSingapore hackathon as part of the ETHGlobal series and tries to get a sense for how these hackers are approaching the space. In this showcase (which was recorded on the Saturday, right in the middle of the hackathon), we asked: What got you into this space? What's your take on singapore? What are you building? and What do you make of the state of Ethereum? To see our previous ETHGlobal Hackthon podcast - check out the ETHBuenosAires Ep The projects we interviewed: https://devpost.com/software/ethsingapore https://devpost.com/software/daico-hedge-grtcou https://devpost.com/software/showmewhatyougot-8bni16 https://devpost.com/software/ethereumjs-orbitdb https://devpost.com/software/hashedge https://devpost.com/software/quantstamp-ui https://devpost.com/software/ethereumjs-orbitdb https://devpost.com/software/dai-ly Also thanks to @Evan_Van_Ness - happy you were finally allowed back on twitter :P Follow ETHGlobal - https:

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

In this episode Fredrik sits down with Péter Szilágyi, lead developer of go-ethereum to talk about his background, what it means to be a Core Dev and some of the struggles of maintaining an open source project. Special thanks to the sponsor of this episode Trail of Bits. If you're interested in hardware wallet security, check out their article 10 Rules for the Secure Use of Cryptocurrency Hardware Wallets.

In this week's episode, we are joined by a couple greats in the space, Gavin Wood and Vlad Zamfir, to debate the merits of on-chain vs off-chain governance. If you want more, catch their governance panel at Web3Summit (which happened right before our interview). Thanks to our sponsor Trail of Bits - find out more about their upcoming event on their blog: https://blog.trailofbits.com/ And support Zero Knowledge on Patreon - https://patreon.com/zeroknowledge

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 note

In this Blockchain 101 episode, we sit down with Axel Ericsson of Vest (previously 1Protocol) to talk about Cryptoeconomic Primitives, incentive models, designing smart equilibria, and staking. Links: Game Theory Game Vest on Twitter Axel on Twitter Vest Website

In this episode, we sit down with Taylor Monahan of MyCrypto, to discuss how the project got started and share some customer support horror stories. We also reflect on the challenge of building UX that works for people while maintaining the spirit of decentralization, and finally, where she sees the space developing. Links: Taylor on Twitter MyCrypto Solidity Honeypots You can also find the Slither blog post from this week's sponsor Trail of Bits HERE

In this episode, we sit down with Richard Craib from Numerai to talk about crowdsourcing the role of a quant, how Numerai developed and where it is going, Dapp adoption in Ethereum and what it's like to build a hedge fund fulled by a crypto token. He also shares the new project Erasure - a decentralized data marketplace for financial predictions. Follow Richard on Twitter Learn more about Numerai

We finally sit down with Gavin to go through a bit of what Parity has been working on with Polkadot and Substrate. We talk about Polkadot early history and who was involved and where the idea spawned, up to coding practices and where Substrate became a thing. If you want to know more, links below. Meta-link of Polkadot Resources Substrate In A Nutshell Vitalik Tweet-storm about Sharding History

In this week's episode, we sit down with Henri Pihkala from Streamr to talk p2p messaging and what it means. We cover topics like pubsub, compare it to whisper, talk about the needs of different messaging systems as well as dig into why one would want to decentralize something like this. Finally we take a look at the data marketplace idea that streamr is trying out and what potential use-cases that could have.

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 episode, we chat with Hudson Jameson of the Ethereum Foundation about how he got involved in the space, the EIP process, and the challenges of decision making in the decentralised space. In decentralised communities, decision making and information gathering can be a uniquely difficult endeavor. Using some of the ideas from other open source communities as well as some new concepts emerging specifically for decentralised spaces, the Ethereum core devs are developing new tools to make these decisions more effectively. Follow Hudson on Twitter -> @hudsonjameson Here was the giant Core Dev Call -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CZ1uO_WxVk

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

In this episode, we had a chance to speak with Jacob Eberhardt about his work on Zokrates and the Zero Knowledge Proof Toolkit. Zokrates is a programming language & toolbox for zkSNARKS on Ethereum Note: this is a relatively advanced episode as part of our Zero Knowledge Series. For more on the Zokrates project, please explore the following material: Zokrates Github - https://github.com/JacobEberhardt/ZoKrates Devcon Presentation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSlrywb5J_0 Berlin Ethereum Meetup slides https://github.com/JacobEberhardt/documents/blob/master/talks/ZoKrates-EthereumMeetupBerlin.pdf zkSNARKs: Driver's Ed. - A practical beginner's guide to creating, proving, and verifying zkSNARKs in your contracts - https://github.com/jstoxrocky/zksnarks_example

In this episode, we speak to Benedikt Bünz, the author of Bulletproofs, about this novel zero knowledge proof system as well as about Verifiable Delay Functions. This is part of our Zero Knowledge Series, where we explore some of the new research in the space of Zero Knowledge research and the emerging concepts. Follow Bulletproof development & Benedikt on twitter