Zero Knowledge

In this week's episode, Anna speaks with Awa Sun Yin, co-founder of Anoma & Namada. They discuss her background in crypto analytics, her shift to working on infrastructure and privacy tech, and how the Anoma project came to be. Awa introduces us to the soon to launch Namada network and then describes the various cryptographic pieces that the Anoma team has been developing. They discuss how these fit into Namada and into the future of the Anoma Protocol. Here are some additional links for this episode: Episode 115: Cosmos, IBC and ZKPs with Chris Goes Episode 184: Anoma’s Adrian Brink on Validity Predicates, Ferveo DKG & More Episode 32: Zero Knowledge at Zcon0! Sign up link for zkMesh newsletter ZK7: VampIR: universal representation for arithmetic circuits - Joshua Fitzgerald - Anoma ZK8: Namada: asset-agnostic interchain privacy - Chris Goes - Anoma Ferveo: Threshold Decryption for Mempool Privacy in BFT networks by Bebel and Ojha, 2022 Metastate Website Cryptium Labs Website Heliax We

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Pramod Viswanath, Professor of Engineering at Princeton and co-founder of Witness Chain. They discuss Pramod’s early work on wireless networks and how this type of research was brought to market at the time. They also cover topics such as the introduction of adversarial thinking into his research, his move over to blockchain, how the incentives of blockchain could be used within the wireless industry, and Pramod’s new project Witness Chain, which aims to reshape the wireless industry. Here are some additional links for this episode: Episode 244: Journey to Blockchain with David Tse Episode 217: Information Theory & Blockchain with Sreeram Kannan Everything is a race and Nakamoto always wins Fundamentals of Wireless Communication by Tse and Viswanath, 2005 Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity by Venkatakrishnan, Fanti and Viswanath, 2017 Blockchains at Princeton Class Join the ZK HACK III - kick off event here Join the

In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with Brian Retford and Jeremy Bruestle from RISC Zero. They discuss their previous work in cloud infrastructure and how ZK offered unique solutions to long standing scaling problems. They cover topics like RISC-V, building VMs, and how RISC Zero aims to build a system which could support a decentralized public cloud. Here are some additional links for this episode: RISC Zero: General Purpose Zero-Knowledge Computation by Brian Retford and Jeremy Bruestle RISC-V Website Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto AirSnort Website Arduino Website Metal: Mac OS's acceleration framework Episode 131: Proof of Necessary Work with Akis Kattis (NYU) Check out the ZK Whiteboard Sessions here. Produced by ZK Hack and powered by Polygon. Join the ZK Hack Discord ZK Hack Twitter Today’s episode is sponsored by Mina Protocol. If you’re a developer looking to get hands-on experience building zero knowledge applications then

In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi Gurkan speak with Dmitry Khovratovich, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, Dusk Network, and ABDK Consulting and JP Aumasson CSO at Taurus. This episode compares symmetric and asymmetric cryptography as well as a deep dive into hash functions. They explore what hash functions are used for, the process of developing and improving hash functions, and what it means for a hash function to be zk friendly. Here are some additional links for this episode: Dmitry Khovratovich Twitter Ethereum Foundation Dusk Network ABDK Consulting JP Aumasson Twitter JP Aumasson Website Taurus Twitter Taurus Website ZK8: New Directions in ZK hashing - Dmitry Khovratovich - Ethereum Foundation ZK8: On ZK hashes - JP Aumasson - Taurus ZK7: Security of ZKP projects: same but different - JP Aumasson - Taurus Serious Cryptography - JP Aumasson, 2017 Too Much Crypto - JP Aumasson, 2019 Crypto Dictionary - JP Aumasson Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity -

In this week’s episode, Anna and Martin Köppelmann, Co-Founder of Gnosis discuss the OFAC sanctions against Tornado Cash and the impact this has had on builders in the community. They specifically focus on how the Tornado action helped reveal centralizing forces in Ethereum as well as the need for decentralization. Here are some additional links for this episode: Gnosis Linktree Gnosis Discord Episode 183: CowSwap & DAO Tech with Gnosis’s Martin Köppelmann Episode 65: Bridges, xDai and Burner Wallets with Igor & Austin Episode 243: Dive Back into MEV with Alex Stokes and Chris Hager Lido Rocketpool All That Node 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 the

In this week’s episode, Anna revisits the topic of FHE with Rand Hindi, CEO at Zama. FHE stands for Fully Homomorphic Encryption, a cryptosystem that allows for computation to occur on encrypted inputs. They discuss the FHE landscape, what specific use cases it is ideal for, where the technology is at and how FHE differs from MPC and ZK. They also explore some of the nuances of the different types of approaches to FHE to achieve this cryptographic environment where one can do computation in a truly private manner. Here are some additional links for this episode: Episode 124: Exploring FHE with Flavio Bergamaschi from IBM Research Definition of FHE A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms: Elgamal Scheme Pascal Paillier FHE.org FHE.org Discord TFHE GitHub ZK Jobs Board – has a fresh batch of open roles from ZK-focused projects. Find your next opportunity working in ZK! Check out the Sub0 Event from the Web3 Foundation to explore the latest in Polkadot Network

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 interest

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, Breide

In this episode, Anna explores the topic of the recent OFAC sanctions against Tornado Cash with 2 interviews: One is with TuongVy Le, Head of Regulatory and Policy at Bain Capital Crypto, who previously worked at the SEC and the other is with Michael Mosier, General Council at Espresso Systems, who used to work at the Treasury, within FinCen and at OFAC itself. For some context: On August 8th 2022, OFAC, a US government department issued sanctions against Tornado Cash, a privacy protocol that uses zero knowledge proofs to provide on-chain privacy. It was the first time that OFAC had sanctioned a set of smart contracts and a decentralized entity for which there's no clear ownership. This is an event which has had a ripple effect throughout the zk ecosystem and will be the topic explored in a series with different members of the community. In these two initial interviews, Anna explores what actually happened legally, what a sanction is, what kind of a tool is this, why it may have been issued and what p

In this episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with David Tse about his career and research spanning from early Networking, Mobile Networking, P2P, all the way up to his work on formalizing Blockchain systems. Along the way, they touch on topics like 'The Price of Anarchy', David’s Prism work, his work with the Ethereum Foundation and his new project Babylon. Here are some links for this episode: Episode 217: Information Theory & Blockchain with Sreeram Kannan The Price of Anarchy Babylon Prism Bram Cohen’s Twitter Everything is a Race and Nakamoto Always Wins Three Attacks on Proof of Stake Ethereum Ebb-and-Flow Protocols: A Resolution of the Availability-Finality Dilemma More of David Tse's Papers A Mathematical Theory of Communication - C. E. Shannon 1948 Hidden Hamiltonian Cycle Recovery via Linear Programming Concentration Inequalities and Model Selection - P. Massart John Tsitsiklis Bio Fundamentals of Wireless Communication - David Tse 2005 Qualcomm Website Cosmoverse Event Link Devc

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

In this week’s episode, Anna explores Halo 2 with Daira Hopwood and Str4d, cryptographic engineers at Electric Coin Company. They explored what new ideas Halo introduced and how Halo 2 built on these ideas, adding optimisations such as adding Plonk-ish arithmetization to take what was a breakthrough to a production ready proving system. This episode was recorded at Zcon3 in Vegas. Here are some links for this episode: Episode on Halo Episode recorded at Zcon0 ZK Whiteboard Sessions Episode with Sean Bowe Halo 2 explained Justin Drake on Polynomial Commitments Str4d’s talk at ZCon3 Daira’s talk at ZCon3 Ying Tong’s talk at ZCon3 Pratyush Mishra at Zcon3 The halo2 Book: Proving System The halo2 Book: Protocol The halo2 Book: Sinsemilla Check out ZK Whiteboard Sessions, produced by ZK Hack & powered by Polygon, a weekly educational series of interviews with ZK experts on the most important concepts and building blocks in ZK. If you are looking to jump into ZK professionally, check out the

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Vaibhav Chellani, a bridge builder and the co-founder of Socket. They explore what makes up the components of a bridge, the types of bridges, and then look at their framework for analysing the security trade-offs of different bridge architectures. This is an important topic, since at present, there are more and more bridges coming online to connect all the different chains together. And with these come a number of new bugs, hacks and exploits. This episode gives us an overview on how to think about bridges. Here are some links for this episode: Episode 223: Connecting Cosmos and Ethereum with Gravity Bridge Episode 226: Interoperability with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar Episode 229: Going Cross-Chain with Polkadot’s XCM Episode 230: Designing Optimistic Interoperability with Nomad Socket bungee exchange The Bridge Risk Framework Seminar Vitalik’s ‘Future Multi-chain, Not Cross-chain' Check out ZK Whiteboard Sessions, produced by ZK Hack & powered by P

In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with Shumo Chu, co-founder of Manta Network. They discuss the origin story of the project and how they aim to bring privacy to web3. They explore the unique accessibility that Polkadot parachains enable, the work they do on building ZK tooling and libraries for the general ZK community. They then take a look at their plans for a multi-asset shielded pool and the future they have planned for Manta projects and more. Here are some links for this episode: Episode 226: Interoperability with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar Episode 172: ZK languages with Alex Ozdemir Manta Network Manta: a Plug and Play Private DeFi Stack Dolphin Testnet ZK Garage Blog post: Enabling multi-asset privacy on Anoma plookup: A simplified polynomial protocol for lookup tables CirC: Compiler infrastructure for proof systems, software verification, and more Check out ZK Whiteboard Sessions, produced by ZK Hack & powered by Polygon, a weekly educational series of interviews with ZK expert

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 b

No full episode this week. Just a quick message to let you know about the upcoming zkSummit 8 - happening in Berlin Sept 15 2022. Apply here: https://www.zksummit.com/ If you like what we do: Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Head to the ZK Community Forum Support our Gitcoin Grant

In this week’s episode, Anna talks with Illia from Near and Alex from Aurora about the work they did that lead them to the Near ecosystem and what the connection is between the Aurora project and Near. They also cover what’s new at Near since the last time Illia and Anna spoke, Aurora+, the Rainbow Bridge, and future plans with Near’s sharding system. Here are some links for this episode: Ep 91: Near Protocol's focus on UX Ep 157: Illia Polosukhin on the development and launch of NEAR protocol Cross Chain Series - Interview with Anna and Aurora SputnikVM Near Bridge Near Joins Multichain to Bring More Cross Chain Electron Labs Check out the Zero Knowledge Podcast Linktree to stay up-to-date on all the ZK-focused channels and events in our ecosystem. Today’s episode is sponsored by Anoma Anoma is a suite of protocols that enable self-sovereign coordination. Their unique architecture facilitates the simplest forms of economic coordination such as two parties transferring an asset to each other.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with guest Jens Groth, Director of Research at DFINITY and previously a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCL. Jens Groth is a leading ZK researcher and is behind a number of advances in the field of ZK in the last few years such as the popular proving system Groth16. The conversation covers his earlier career, the cryptographic problems he tackled in his research, how he solved these, the results of this work as well as his move from research into industry and what he works on today. Here are some links for this episode: Episode 232: Cutting Edge ZK Research with Mary Maller Jens Groth's research Efficient Zero-Knowledge Argument for Correctness of a Shuffle Subversion-zero-knowledge SNARKs GGPR DFINITY Internet Computer Protocol Check out the Zero Knowledge Podcast linktree to stay up-to-date on all the ZK-focused channels and events in our ecosystem Today’s episode is sponsored by Anoma Anoma is a suite of protocols that enable sel

In this week’s episode, Anna checks in with Aztec, a ZK-based privacy L2 project. She speaks with Joe Andrews and Lead Engineer, Charles Julian. They discuss some of the team’s most important ZK research and implementations such as Plonk and how bringing privacy to Ethereum could truly change the way we do DeFi. They also discuss Aztec Connect and how it relates to zk.money, the Aztec roadmap with future projects like DSL Noir and Aztec 3, as well as a quick postmortem on the halted Aztec Connect launch. Here are some links for this episode: Ep 176: Zk-zk-rollup & zk.money with Zac and Joe from Aztec Ep 75: Exploring Aztec with Zac Williamson Ep 232: Cutting Edge ZK Research with Mary Maller AZTEC Trusted Setup PLONK: Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge AztecProtocol/barretenberg: C++ elliptic curve library | GitHub AztecProtocol/aztec-connect-bridges | GitHub If you are looking to jump into ZK professionally, check out the ZK Jobs board to find

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 additiona