Zero Knowledge

On this week’s episode, Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra chat with Mallesh Pai, Associate Professor of Economics at Rice University. They explore mechanism design in an economic context and Mallesh’s work around MEV topics - specifically on censorship in an MEV context and within his Special Mechanism Group. The discussion takes the team back into the topic of MEV, revisiting the proposer builder separation concept and the impact that this may have on the efficiency and censorship resistance of these systems. Here’s some additional links for this episode:Episode 183: CowSwap & DAO Tech with Gnosis’s Martin Köppelmann Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc Episode 243: Dive Back into MEV with Alex Stokes and Chris HagerEpisode 249: Impact of Tornado Cash: a Builders PerspectiveEpisode 269: Auctions with Kshitij Kulkarni, Matheus V. X. Ferreira and TarunVitalik’s Blog PostSpecial Mechanism Group’s Thread on Censoring EthBlock relating to ThreadSpecial Mechanism Group’s Research Papers (w

This week, Anna and Guillermo chat with David Wong, author of the Real-World Cryptography book, and a cofounder [zksecurity.xyz]((https://www.zksecurity.xyz/) - an auditing firm focused on Zero Knowledge technology. They chat about what first got him interested in cryptography, his early work as a security consultant, his work on the Facebook crypto project and the Mina project, zksecurity.xyz, auditing techniques and their efficacy in a ZK context, what common bugs are found in ZK code, and much more.Here’s some additional links for this episode: Crypto is not cryptocurrency NCC GroupOCaml websiteReal-World Cryptography bookMina Protocol3pages.frThe Frozen Heart vulnerability in PlonK | Trail of Bits Blog ZK Podcast Episode 284: Using Formal Verification on ZK Systems with Jon StephenszkSecurity WebsiteZK Podcast Episode 257: Proof of Solvency with Kostas Chalkias - ZK PodcastZK Podcast Episode 210: The Road to STARKs and Miden with Bobbin Threadbare - ZK PodcastZK Podcast Episode 76: Sean Bowe on SNARKs, T

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 Curve25519curve25519-dalek GithubReplicating Market Makers by Angeris, Evans, ChitraSecureDropFurther 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 Poseidon

In this week’s episode, Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan chat with Or Sattath, Assistant Professor at the Ben-Gurion University in the Computer Science department. They deep dive into Or’s work on Quantum Cryptography. They begin with definitions of Quantum Computing and Quantum Cryptography, covering what these will mean for existing cryptography. They also explore how new discoveries in this field can interact with existing Proof-of-work systems and how Quantum computers could affect the game theory of mining in the future. Here’s some additional links for this episode:On the insecurity of quantum Bitcoin mining by Sattath Strategies for quantum races by Lee, Ray, and Santha 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 Bell’s Theorem More in-depth resources recommended by Or Sattath:A recommended smbc-comics about the power of quantum computing, authored

This week, Anna Rose chats with Stefan George from Gnosis. They start with an update on the projects that have spun out of Gnosis - Safe, Zodiac, CoW Swap - as well as older experiments that the team had incubated. They then cover the evolution of Gnosis Chain from its origin as xDai, discuss the new aggregate bridge architecture Hashi and explore Gnosis Pay - an on-chain p2p payments product that fulfills some of the original motivations of Bitcoin. They discuss a range of relevant topics such as intents, prediction markets, account abstraction, ZK Bridges, decentralization and more.Here’s some additional links for this episode: Previous Podcast EpsEpisode 65: Bridges, xDai and Burner Wallets with Igor & Austin Episode 183: CowSwap & DAO Tech with Gnosis’s Martin Köppelmann Episode 255: Verifying Consensus On-Chain with Succinct Episode 285: Intents with Chris Goes from Anoma PapersWhy sharding is great: demystifying the technical properties Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi N

This week, host Anna Rose and guests Uma Roy, Zaki Manian and Tarun Chitra recap all things EthCC Paris. This impromptu chat takes a look back at the topics, talks, parties and goings-on of the Paris week and what really caught their attention. Expect some spicy takes, offtopic rambles, inside scoops and more.Here’s some additional links for this episode: EthCC LinksEthCC Website EthCC Side Events EthCC Mary Maller - How can we use Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Ethereum? EthCC Vitalik Buterin - a history of account abstraction EthCC6 After Movie EthCC6 Main Playlist Modular Summit TalksModular Summit Modular Summit Day 1 - Fourier Stage Modular Summit Day 2 - Fourier Stage Modular Summit Day 1 - Galois Stage Modular Summit Day 2 - Galois Stage Other Talks and LinksEpisode 285: Intents with Chris Goes from AnomaGnosis Pay DeFi Security Summit ZK Paris ZK Validator <> Geometry Tweet Research Day 2023 Playlist Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks by Georgios Konstantopoulos

This week, host Anna Rose and co-host Tarun Chitra catch up with Chris Goes from Heliax, the team behind Anoma and Namada. They start with a quick retrospective about IBC, a project he formerly worked on, and how the protocol has evolved since it launched. They dive into the concept of 'intents', exploring their origin, evolution, and discuss the intent-based systems that exist today. As well, they chat about the architectures enabled by a generalized intent-based infrastructure, the potential impacts on user experience, and the inherent trade-offs, particularly when zero-knowledge or privacy aspects are added to the mix.Further reading for this episode:Papers/DocsCosmos Whitepaper Anoma: Undefining Money Versatile commitments to value by Christopher Goes, Awa Sun Yin and Adrian Brink Differential Privacy in Constant Function Market Makers by Tarun Chitra, Guillermo Angeris and Alex Evans Wyvern Protocol Documents WebsitesSUAVE and the Future Opportunities and Challenges of MEV: Part I CoW Swap Zcash GitHub -

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 DilligCertifying Zero-Knowledge Circuits with Refinement Types by J. Liu, Kretz, H. Liu, Tan, Wang, Sun, Pearson, Miltner, Dillig, and FengPractical Security Analysis of Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits by Wen, Stephens, Chen, Ferles, Pailoor, Charbonnet, Dillig and Feng Episode 67: Formal Verification with Martin Lund

This week, host Anna Rose and co-host Kobi Gurkan chat with Yohei Nakajima, General Partner at Untapped Capital and creator of BabyAGI. They cover a wide variety of topics from the world of AGIs and agents to building no-code software in public. They kick-off with a chat about how Yohei’s interest in NFTs led him down the AI ‘rabbit hole’ and how he started to build out experiments in public that have inspired a new group of AI tools and projects. They wrap up with a discussion about the possible impacts of some of this AI tech, how ZK may help mediate the challenges it introduces and more.Here’s some additional links for this episode;ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models by Yao and Cao Episode 279: Intro to zkpod.ai with Anna and KobiBonus: zkpod.ai & Attested Audio Experiment with Daniel Kang BabyAGI GitHub Auto-GPT PixelBeasts Stable Diffusion DALL·E 2 Midjourney OpenAI Playground AI LangChainLlamaIndexDustUniversal Paperclips: the game by Frank Lantz AI and the Paperclip Problem C

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 RothblumProving 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 P

In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose chats with Chhi'mèd Künzang and François Garillot from Lurk Labs about all things Lurk, Lisp and zk languages.They discuss the history of the Lurk project, from its beginnings with Protocol Labs (the team that built Filecoin), to its emergence as a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zkSNARKs. They discuss Lurk’s relationship with Lisp, what Lisp is, and how developers familiar with that family of languages would be able to interact with Lurk. They then discuss how Lurk compares to other zkDSLs and the new innovations this Lisp-based language brings to the table.Here’s some additional links for this episode:Programming Languages Circom Arkworks GitHub Leo by Aleo SnarkyJS Noir Lurk LinksLURK: Lambda, the Ultimate Recursive Knowledge by Amin, Burnham, Garillot, Gennaro, Künzang, Rogozin and Wong Lurk Lab Lurk Lab TwitterLurk Language Lurk GitHubAdditional Reading/ListeningA Sloth-based Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) evaluator and SNARK prover GitHub Recurs

In this week’s episode, Anna Rose dives back into accumulation schemes with Benedikt Bünz and Binyi Chen from Espresso Systems. They discuss ProtoStar and how it compares to works such as Nova and HyperNova, as well as explore some definitions for commonly used terms in the accumulation literature. Here’s some additional links for this episode:Espresso Systems CAPE Espresso Sequencer Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More by Bünz, Bootle, Boneh, Poelstra, Wuille and Maxwell Verifiable Delay Functions by Boneh, Bonneau, Bünz and Fisch HyperPlonk: Plonk with Linear-Time Prover and High-Degree Custom Gates by Chen, Bünz, Boneh and Zhang Protostar: Generic Efficient Accumulation/Folding for Special-sound Protocols by Bünz and Chen Proof-Carrying Data without Succinct Arguments by Bünz, Chiesa, Lin, Mishra and Spooner Proof-Carrying Data from Accumulation Schemes by Bünz, Chiesa, Mishra, and Spooner Multivariate lookups based on logarithmic derivatives by Haböck Halo Infinite: Proof-Carr

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!

This week, Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan continue their conversation with a full episode dedicated to their new side project zkpod.ai - the voice ai trained on transcripts from this show which uses both Anna and Kobi’s voices to share insights and answer questions about zk topics. They cover the origin of the project and discuss their motivations and concerns around its uses as well as how they could see the project developing and what this could mean for the field of zk. Kobi shares his thoughts on the current tooling available, where this could progress and potential limitations it holds. Additional links mentioned in this episode:zkpod.ai Website Anna Rose’s zkpod.ai Blog Post Yohei Nakajima TwitterLangChain WebsiteWeaviate Website Anthropic Product ‘Claude’Universal Paperclips: the game by Frank Lantz Large Language Models can be used to effectively scale Spear Phishing campaigns by Hazell Creating Word Embeddings: Coding the Word2Vec Algorithm in Python using Deep Learning Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: Z

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 SecretsEpisode 256: New ZK Use Cases with Dan Boneh Episode 246: Adversarial Machine Learning Research with Florian Tramèr Episode 276: Expanding Computation on Ethereum with AxiomEpisode 277: Nova and Beyond with Srinath SettyProtoStar: Generic Efficient Accumulation/Folding for Special Sound Protocols by Bünz and Chen ezkl GitHub Yohei Nakajima TwitterLangChain Website Anna Rose’s zkpod.ai Blog Post zkpod.ai Twitter zkpod.ai Website One Server for the Price of T

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 replica

In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with Yi Sun, co-founder of Axiom. Yi was recently on the show to discuss ZK ML’s, however this time they take a closer look at the Axiom project and what it means to be a ZK coprocessor for Ethereum. During the interview they also explore what problems Axiom are trying to solve, how ZKPs are used to help bring historic data into smart contracts and what new use cases this architecture can support. Here’s some additional links for this episode:Axiom Demo ReleaseCertifying Zero-Knowledge Circuits with Refinement Types by Junrui Liu, Ian Kretz, Hanzhi Liu, Bryan Tan, Jonathan Wang, Yi Sun Axiom, Luke Pearson, Anders Miltner Isil Dillig and Yu Feng Episode 265: Where ZK and ML intersect with Yi Sun and Daniel Kang Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Find your next job working in ZK!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

In this week's episode, Anna Rose chats with Scroll co-founders Ye Zhang and Sandy Peng, delving into updates about their zkEVM L2, the progress they have made over the past year and what it really means to build in public. They discuss the challenges and rewards of founding a fully remote organization and how the team navigates the ever changing ZK landscape. Here’s some additional links for this episode:Scroll’s @buildwithscroll Twitter Scroll Tech GitHub Scroll’s Ecosystem Episode 234: zkEVM with Scroll’s Ye Zhang and Haichen Shen PipeZK: Accelerating Zero-Knowledge Proof with a Pipelined Architecture by Zhang, Wang, Zhang, Dong, Mao, Long, Wang, Zhou, Gao and Sun ERC-4337 Information 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

This week, Anna and Ariel Gabizon cover the SNARK trilogy; a history of pairing-based SNARKs in 3 acts. Starting from Jens Groth’s early works on SNARKs, Ariel takes us on a journey through key moments and breakthroughs in SNARKs over the last decade. They also dive into the emerging accumulation research on folding schemes and Ariel’s latest work surrounding lookup tables! This is an episode you won’t want to miss.Here are some additional links for this episode:Relevant Jens Groth PapersShort Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Jens GrothShort Pairing-based Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Arguments by Jens Groth On the Size of Pairing-based Non-interactive Arguments by Jens GrothZero-knowledge Argument for Polynomial Evaluation with Application to Blacklists by Stephanie Bayer and Jens Groth PLONK-Relative PapersPLONK: Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge by Gabizon, Williamson, Ciobotaru HyperPlonk: Plonk with Linear-Time Prover and High-Degree Custom Ga

In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose sits down with Zac Williamson, the CEO of Aztec. Anna and Zac dive deep into the history of Plonk, one of the most important proving systems to emerge in the last 5 years. Zac explains how the initial ideas came to be, how it was developed with co-author Ariel Gabizon, and how the system has evolved over time, branching out into many different iterations of Plonk, leading up to his recent work on Goblin Plonk.The conversation also touches on Aztec's cutting-edge technology stack, including their Noir zkDSL and their planned private programmable L2, Aztec 3. Zac shares his insights on the state of ZK applications and folding schemes, and provides a glimpse into the future of the ZK space.Here’s some additional links for this episode:StarkWare Sessions 23 | Privacy Preserving Smart Contract Architectures | Zac Williamson High Level Overview of Goblin Plonk: lazy recursive proof composition by Zac Williamson Spec for Goblin Plonk: lazy recursive proof composition by Zac Wil