Zero Knowledge

Latest Episodes:

Building in Public with Sandy & Ye from Scroll May 10, 2023

Show notes

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:

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 needing to learn custom languages or building custom ZK circuits.

Bonsai, RISC Zero’s most anticipated product, is a proving marketplace that enables any protocol or application to leverage fast ZK proofs in languages like Rust, Go, C++.

Visit https://r0.link/ZKpodcast to learn more and sign up today for the Bonsai waitlist.

If you like what we do:

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SNARKs: A Trilogy with Ariel Gabizon May 03, 2023

Show notes

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 Papers

PLONK-Relative Papers

Lookup-Relative Papers

Additional Resources

Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs.

Anoma’s first fractal instance Namada is launching soon!

Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy. Namada natively interoperates with fast-finality chains via IBC and with Ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge.

Follow Namada on twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada.

If you like what we do:

Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on YouTube

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History of Plonk, Noir, and the building of Aztec 3 Apr 26, 2023

Show notes

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:

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 Aleo’s programming language called Leo that enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of ZKPs to deploy decentralized exchanges, hidden information games, regulated stablecoins, and more. Visit http://developer.aleo.org.

For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.

If you like what we do:

Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
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Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
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The Move into Web3 with Aptos’ Avery Ching Apr 19, 2023

Show notes

This week, Anna Rose interviews Avery Ching, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Aptos Labs. They cover Avery’s working history, including his time working on Meta’s Blockchain project, what this experience meant to him and how this led to the creation of Aptos. They discuss Aptos as it stands today, Avery’s experience of building in the current market and the unique qualities of the Aptos project.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs.

Anoma’s first fractal instance Namada is launching soon!

Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy. Namada natively interoperates with fast-finality chains via IBC and with Ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge.

Follow Namada on twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada.

If you like what we do:

Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on Youtube

Read transcript

Between Two ZK Events with Nico and Guillermo Apr 12, 2023

Show notes

This week, Anna Rose chats with ZK Podcast regular Guillermo Angeris, Head of Research at BCC and Nicolas Mohnblatt, Researcher and Cryptographer at Geometry. This was recorded on April 3rd 2023, the day between the ZK Hack Lisbon hackathon and the zkSummit9 event.

They discuss Nico's move from music to cryptography, his earlier privacy research as a Master's student, and his recent research Sangria, which is a folding scheme for Plonk. Guillermo shares some of his current work cleaning up and formalising concepts in zk. And Anna shares some brief thoughts about the recent release of zkpod.ai - the friendly ZK bot featuring Anna’s voice and containing the entirety of the ZKPodcast knowledge (built by Kobi Gurkan).

They also chat about some news, insights from ZK Hack Lisbon and some of the projects that were built there and generally check in on the state of the ecosystem.

Relevant links:

Sangria: a Folding Scheme for PLONK - Geometry Research
ZK9: Sangria is relaxed PLONK a Nova-like folding scheme for PLONK – Nicolas Mohnblatt (Geometry)
Plonk isn’t real - Zac’s tweet confession
ZK Hack Lisbon closing ceremony
ZK Hack Lisbon Winner's list Twitter post
ZK Hack Lisbon projects & website
zkSummit video playlist (including part of the zkSummit9 videos - more coming soon!)
zkpod.ai announcement tweet from Kobi Gurkan
Anna's reaction to zkpod.ai

Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Find your next job working in ZK!

Anoma’s first fractal instance Namada is launching soon!

Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy. Namada natively interoperates with fast-finality chains via IBC and with Ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge.

Follow Namada on twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada.

If you like what we do:

Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on YouTube

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FHE and ZKPs with Sunscreen’s Ravital Solomon Apr 05, 2023

Show notes

This week Anna Rose chats with Ravital Solomon, founder of Sunscreen. They cover her early interest in lattice-based cryptography and how this paved the way for her work on FHE, starting at NuCypher then with her startup Sunscreen. They dive into the challenges involved when building with FHE as well as exploring the power in combining ZKP and FHE. They also discuss the early emergence of lattice-based zero knowledge proofs.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs.

Polygon zkEVM is here. This performant, ZK-powered, open-source, EVM-equivalent rollup launched its Mainnet Beta last month. Polygon zkEVM is making scaling truly frictionless—fast finality and EVM-equivalence means devs can do everything they can do with the EVM, only cheaper.

To connect to Polygon zkEVM, go to Polygon.technology

If you like what we do:

Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on Youtube

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Auctions with Kshitij Kulkarni, Matheus V. X. Ferreira and Tarun Mar 22, 2023

Show notes

In this week's episode Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra explore the topic of auctions with guests Kshitij Kulkarni, PHD student at Berkeley’s EECS department and Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

They discuss the history of auctions, both in the real world and in blockchain, and go on to cover more recent blockchain uses, such as MEV and NFT auctions. They review the incentives of both auction holders and the participants as well as how this incentive design can influence the effectiveness of the auctions themselves.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

https://jumpcrypto.com/thepit/zkweek/

Find out more about zkSummit9 here: zksummit.com.

Apply for ZK Hack Lisbon here: ZK Hack application

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 Aleo’s programming language called Leo by visiting http://developer.aleo.org.

You can also participate in Aleo’s incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate.

For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.

If you like what we do:

Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on YouTube

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A Rollup-Centric Future & Sovereign Chains with Mustafa Al-Bassam Mar 15, 2023

Show notes

In this week’s episode Anna Rose interviews Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia. They cover where Celestia as an idea emerged from, how its rollup-centric data availability (DA) network works and what can be expected from their upcoming launch. They also chat about how Celestia aims to empower Sovereign chains - independent rollup chains that use Celestia as the DA and consensus layer - and how this Sovereign chain model compares with the Ethereum rollup architecture.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs.

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 Aleo’s programming language called Leo by visiting http://developer.aleo.org.

You can also participate in Aleo’s incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate.

For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.

If you like what we do:

Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on YouTube

Read transcript

ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 2 Mar 08, 2023

Show notes

In this two-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo. Throughout these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical techniques in ZKPs that can be optimized for and the tricks and strategies that ZPrize competitors used to achieve these optimizations.

In Part 2 of the series, Anna and Alex first interview Hamid Salehi and Swati Gupta from Xilinx AMD who contribute insights from the perspective of an FPGA manufacturer. Alex and Anna then interview competitor Niall Emmart, previously from NVIDIA. They discuss his previous work and what went into winning both the MSM for GPUs and MSM for Wasm competitions in ZPrize.

Here is some additional information for this episode:

Hardware/Board options:

Varium C1100 board (targeted at accelerating blockchain applications).
This board has been used to accelerate the following:
Poseidon hash (used in the storage sealing process for Filecoin)
NTT acceleration at ZPrize
Startups are using this to explore NTT and MSM acceleration
Other boards
The U55C in particular has been shown to provide a competitive and more power efficient alternative to GPUs for MSM acceleration in this study by Ingonyama called PipeMSM. There has been interest in U55C for NTT acceleration as well due to the high HBM capacity it provides (16GB).

Research and documents on using FPGAs for ZK related implementation:

Projects using the C1100 board (These can be a good starting point for getting familiar with the hardware and tools):

ZPrize submissions in the NTT category
Poseidon hash implementation from the Adaptive Computing 2021 challenge conducted by Hackster.io

Documentation on tools and boards:

Vitis unified software tutorial
Alveo debug guide
Alveo usage documentation
Vitis for CUDA developers

GitHub Repositories:

Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs.

Ingonyama’s mission is to improve the performance of Zero-Knowledge Provers by designing hardware optimized for ZK computation. They are proud to introduce their latest project, ICICLE.

For ideas and discussion around the code, visit the ICICLE channel in the Ingonyama discord server, where team members and fellow developers await.

If you like what we do:

Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on YouTube

Read transcript

ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 1 Mar 01, 2023

Show notes

In this 2-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo. Through these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical techniques in ZKPs that can be optimized for and the tricks and strategies that ZPrize competitors used to achieve these optimizations.

In Part 1 of the series, Anna and Alex first interview Luke Pearson from Polychain Capital, who was an architect on the ZPrize. They then interview Ben Devlin and Rahul Yesantharao from Jane Street who were members of one of the winning teams, Hardcaml.

Here are some additional links for this episode: