Zero Knowledge

In this week’s episode, Anna (https://twitter.com/annarrose) and Guillermo (https://twitter.com/GuilleAngeris) catch up with Justin Thaler (https://twitter.com/SuccinctJT), Associate Professor at Georgetown (https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/jthaler/) and Research Partner at a16z (https://a16zcrypto.com/team/justin-thaler/). The group dive into a handful of points from Justin’s ‘17 Misconceptions about SNARKs’ (https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/17-misconceptions-about-snarks/) article, discussing if his views have changed since it was published back in 2023 and whether some points have become common knowledge since the article first rippled through the ZK community. They then dive into his new zkVM Jolt, which was initially described along with Lasso in 2023, but has now been implemented and is open to contributions from the community. Here’s some additional links for this episode: 17 misconceptions about SNARKs (and why they hold us back) by Justin Thaler (https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/17-misconce