Zero Knowledge

Latest Episodes:

Hardware for ZKPs & VDFs with Supranational Mar 03, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun talk with Simon Peffers and Kelly Olson from Supranational, a startup focused on building specialised software and hardware for advanced cryptographic computation. Simon and Kelly talk about their recent work helping out the Ethereum Foundation with VDFs, as well as building a better SNARK algorithm for Protocol Labs’ Filecoin.

They cover how specialised chips can push the boundaries of computation in a post-Moore’s law world, how hardware specialised for zero knowledge is optimised, and the challenges of building ASIC chips today.

Here are a few links to set the stage about what they discussed:

Zero Knowledge episode 103, Exploring VDFs with Joseph Bonneau

Supranational’s website

Supranational’s Medium blog

Simon's talk on hardware acceleration approach at SBC

The 20 year old puzzle by Ron Rivest, which the Supranational folks solved just a few days late.

Nvidia’s nerf of the RTX 3060 for Ethereum mining

How more specialized chips may be the solution to the end of Moore’s law

Thank you to this week’s sponsor, Aave.

Aave is an open source, decentralised non-custodial liquidity protocol on Ethereum.

With Aave, users can participate as depositors meaning they provide liquidity to earn a passive income. or they can also act as borrowers to borrow in an overcollateralized way or undercollateralized way (think: one-block liquidity Flash Loan).

A new feature is Credit Delegation, where users can delegate their credit to another person who can borrow against it

Aave has an ecosystem grants program for anyone building anything that contributes to the Aave ecosystem. Check out the Aave developers portal to learn more: https://docs.aave.com/portal/

To learn more Visit aave.com to learn more

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Arkworks SNARK libraries with Pratyush Mishra Feb 24, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode, Anna and Robert Habermeier chat with Pratyush Mishra, co-author of the Arkworks toolkit. Arkworks is a collection of Rust libraries designed to simplify development with SNARKs, both for developing high-level application circuits and building custom SNARK implementations.

Pratyush lays out what possibilities and trade-offs Arkworks offers, diving into the details of the Rust implementation and why it is the best language for developing cryptographic primitives. Anna, Rob and Pratyush then branch out into the philosophical and practical questions of open-source and blockchain development.

Here are a few links to Arkworks and the topics they discussed:

Arkworks GitHub page and Telegram group.

Pratyush’s GitHub, Twitter and Berkeley pages.

Bellman and Libsnark, some of the other libraries that are similar to Arkworks.

The Celo and Mina protocols, two major projects using Arkworks.

Here is a basic explainer of what projects like Arkworks are trying to do and why it’s useful, with a particular focus on ZoKrates, one of the languages Pratyush mentioned.

Intros to Circom, Leo and Zinc, some of the higher level languages.

An earlier episode with Robert Habermeier about the work he does on Polkadot.

Be sure to subscribe to the zkMesh Newsletter - a monthly rundown of the latest in decentralised privacy-preserving technologies, privacy protocol development and zero knowledge systems research. Put together by Anna & Mikerah (HashCloak).

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting and product development company known for pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates and cryptographers. They have developed an end-to-end encrypted cloud storage product that minimizes the collection of any data related to its users, called PrivateStorage.

PrivateStorage implements privacy and security by design, not by policy.

PrivateStorage is based on Tahoe-LAFS an open source distributed file store

PrivateStorage is launching in the second half of this year. Visit PrivateStorage.io to learn more and to sign up to be notified about its release.

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Flashbots with Phil Daian and Stephane Gosselin Feb 17, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode, Anna and James Prestwich chat with Phil Daian and Stephane Gosselin from the Flashbots project. Flashbots is a research and development organization formed to mitigate the negative externalities and existential risks posed by miner-extractable value (MEV) to smart-contract blockchains

They talk about the Flashbots organization and mission as well as the evolving opportunities and dangers lurking in the mempool.

Miner extractable value (MEV) is a measure devised to study consensus security by modeling the profit a miner (or validator, sequencer, or other privileged protocol actor) can make through their ability to arbitrarily include, exclude, or re-order transactions from the blocks they produce.

Here are some links to previous episodes, the project & MEV:

In case you missed the announcement - zkSessions: DeFi+Privacy has been postponed until Feb 22. Grab your free spot here -> https://hopin.com/events/zksessions-defi-and-privacy

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Optimism PBC.

Optimism PBC is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) building the Optimistic Ethereum Network and the Optimistic Virtual Machine to keep Ethereum half-full.

They are calling all curious hackers and seasoned engineers to Come work on the cutting edge of the most interesting problems to push the limits of blockchains, VMs and compilers. No blockchain experience required!

You'll work alongside global teams that are defining completely novel businesses and games that need our software to scale. If you're a developer who loves to see your code getting used by innovators around the world, then Optimism is your gateway to paradise.

Please reach out to join@optimism.io if you're interested in becoming part of this compassionate, hard-working team! People of all backgrounds are encouraged to apply.

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Where Media & Music meet NFTs & Blockchain Feb 10, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode, Anna & Tarun take a step further into the NFT/Art space and chat with 2 content creators/entrepreneurs Andre Anjos (RAC) and Trevor McFedries (Brud) who are both making work that intersects with NFTs, crypto & other novel blockchain concepts. They discuss their respective works, and explore the new ways in which creators & influencers can engage with Blockchain tech and NFTs. They also try to imagine what living a digital reality actually means for the creation and consumption, or ownership of content.

Here are a few of the links and projects mentioned:

Check out and sign up for the zkSessions event happening on Feb 15th! https://hopin.com/events/zksessions-defi-and-privacy

It's free and focused on DeFi & Privacy

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Aave!

Aave is an open source, decentralised non-custodial liquidity protocol on Ethereum.

Aave is decentralised and community-governed and has an ecosystem grants program for anyone building anything that contributes to Aave! DeFi-staked NFT collectibles game Aavegotchi originated as an Aave ecosystem grant.

To learn more about the grant program visit aave.com and find the link to apply for the Aave grants program here!

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Coin Center’s Peter Van Valkenburgh on regulation & crypto Feb 03, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode, Anna & Josh Cincinnati chat with Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director of Research at Coin Center. Coin Center is a non-profit research and advocacy group focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency and decentralized computing technologies. In this conversation, they cover the various branches in the US system, how these interact with the crypto/blockchain community, what the process is for making regulation and how coincenter gets involved.

Here are a few of the groups that they mention:

FinCen: Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
SEC: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
CFTC: Commodities futures trading commission

Here are some handy links:

Thanks for this week’s sponsor Interchain Foundation or ICF

ICF is focused on the research, development, and promotion of open, decentralized, network technologies like Cosmos

One of the most recent developments in the Cosmos ecosystem is the Stargate upgrade. Stargate is the largest Cosmos upgrade yet, enabling blockchains to connect with each other using the first standardized protocol for inter-blockchain communication (IBC). Here is our episode with Chris Goes about IBC.

If you want to apply to the Interchain Foundation Grants program, here is the link: apply.interchain.io

Deadline for this round is February 14th.

Thanks again ICF!

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Aave with Stani Kulechov Jan 26, 2021

Show notes

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Stani Kulechov, co-founder of Aave, about the origin and evolution of the project, the changing DeFi landscape, collateralized debt in crypto, Flash Loans, Flash Minting, Credit Delegation and the future of DeFi.

Quick recap: A Flashloan is an uncollatoralised loan which must be issued and repaid in the same transaction before the blockchain updates the user’s account balances. If it isn’t repaid in this time, the transaction will fail.

We have discussed Flashloans on the show before see this previous episode:

https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/118

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Hermez Protocol!

Hermez is a Layer 2 solution that scales token transfers on top of Ethereum and which can handle up to 2000 transactions per second. Designed for high-frequency tokens, Hermez is a zk rollup which leverages zk-SNARKs for validity proofs and with on-chain data availability.

Hermez's zero-knowledge circuits are developed using iden3’s circuit compiler language, Circom. They also introduce a novel consensus algorithm, Proof-of-Donation, that gives 40% of each transaction fee back to Ethereum community projects as a donation, thereby supporting Ethereum development.

After passing two security audits, Hermez is running a bug bounty program, offering up to 100 ETH to whoever discovers any critical vulnerabilities. We recently had Jordi Baylina, Technical Lead at Hermez, on the show for an interview - you can find that episode here. Learn more about the project and bug bounty at https://hermez.io/

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The road to Skynet & beyond with David Vorick Jan 20, 2021

Show notes

This week, Anna and guest co-host James Prestwich chat with David Vorick from Skynet Labs about the scope and goals of the Skynet project. They discuss the journey from earlier work on Sia & distributed data to Skynet, SkyDB, and their idea for Recursive Content Monetization - a new model to pay online creators and content owners.

They also chat about the SkyFeed project - a decentralised Twitter like project. In this part of the conversation, they explore how the decentralised community could potentially remove the harm done by the social chat algorithms, but also the potential impact - and danger - that fully decentralised systems can have.

Here are some helpful links:

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Aave.

Aave Protocol is an open source and non-custodial protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets

Aave Protocol also features access to innovative DeFi building blocks like Flash Loans. They are now introducing a new feature is Credit Delegation, where users can delegate their credit to another person who can borrow against it

For anyone thinking of contributing to the ecosystem, check out the Grants Program - here is the link: https://docs.aave.com/portal/

Also vIsit aave.com or join the Aave Discord #developers channel https://aave.com/discord to find out more!

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Kicking off 2021 with Anna, Tarun, James & Josh Jan 13, 2021

Show notes

This week, Anna chats with guests Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet & Robot Ventures), James Prestwich (cLabs) and Josh Cincinnati (previously Zcash Foundation). Throughout this conversation, they touch on topics like the state of zero knowledge applications, blockchain technology, privacy and DeFi. They also explore what we can expect in the near future.

Here are a few of the papers and links we mention in the show:

If you like what we do:

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Year end and end of an era with Anna & Fredrik Dec 30, 2020

Show notes

This week, Anna and Fredrik do a look back at 2020 and chat about some of their favourite ZKPodcast episodes and themes from this past year. This is also a notable episode, as it will be Fredrik's last as a regular co-host. And so they also take this time to reminisce and look back over 3 years of the Zero Knowledge Podcast and share some thoughts on how the space has developed.

Some of the 2020 episodes discussed:

Some of the projects that had previously been on the zkPodcast that launched or were announced this year:

Zk-projects:

L1s:

Thanks to our sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting company known for their dedication to pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates, cryptographers who specialize in security audits, design specification reviews, and security-by-design.

Given that privacy is at the core of their work and mission, least authority recognizes the importance of privacy in DeFi and other decentralizing technologies and the role it plays in preserving balance of power.

Join their mailing list to connect and stay informed on the latest in Least Authority security audit reports, upcoming events, open source contributions and product development initiatives. Subscribe at leastauthority.com/newsletter

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Loopring with Matt & Brecht Dec 23, 2020

Show notes

This week, Anna chats with Matthew Finestone and Brecht Devos from Loopring about their zkrollup protocol, DEX and wallet. We explored the evolution of Loopring, how their zkrollup works, how they are bringing AMMs to L2 and what’s next for the project.

We mention Brecht’s previous episode as well the talk by Barry Whitehat at Devcon4

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Parity Technologies

Parity is a company building the core infrastructure to power Web 3.0. They strive to write the fastest, lightest, and safest core technology in blockchain and write lots of open-source code.

Parity is currently looking to fill a number of job positions

• Berlin office: experienced, creative and enthusiastic Content Marketing Manager.

• Remote: CI/CD Engineer to help automate an ever-growing set of open source repos in GitHub.

Interested or know someone? More details at parity.io/jobs

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