Zero Knowledge

Latest Episodes:

NFTs & Rarible with Alex Salnikov Oct 07, 2020

Show notes

This week, Anna continues to dig into the topic of NFTs - That is Non-Fungible-Tokens or unique digital items - with Alex Salnikov, co-founder & chief product officer at Rarible. They talk about the project, the link between NFTs and DeFi concepts, how the NFT space is developing, novel use cases and more.

Here are some of the topics we mention:

The path to an ERC standard

CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs and Flow with Dieter Shirley

Somnium Space VR

0x Cert

Centrifuge

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Trail of Bits.

Trail of Bits has published a new guide for building secure contracts with their Crytic offering.

Crytic is a SaaS-based GitHub application created by Trail of Bits that continuously assures your Ethereum smart contracts are safe and functional. It reports build status on every commit and runs a suite of security analyses so you get immediate security feedback.

Check out this guide - which I have added to the show notes - for tips on how to build security into your dapps from the start and how to use the Trail of Bits suite of tools for automated vulnerability detection.

Thank you once again Trail of Bits

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CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs and Flow with Dieter Shirley Sep 30, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, we chat with Dieter Shirley, CTO Dapper Labs, Chief Architect of Flow Blockchain, and co-creator of CryptoKitties. We go back to look at the history of CryptoKitties, the NFT standard, what pushed Dapper Labs to build their own blockchain, how Flow works and what’s next.

Here are a few useful links:

The Path to an ERC standard where we look at the path to the ERC721 standard as an example.

DapperLabs Coinlist sale

Dieter's talk on Verifier’s Dilemma at Ready Layer One - subject we touched on briefly in our talk

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Aleo

Aleo is the first platform for fully private applications. It uses blockchain and zero-knowledge cryptography to deliver a web experience that is both personal and private. With Aleo, developers can write private applications, without a background in blockchains or expertise in cryptography.

Aleo has released Developer Preview I, an early peek at what the future of the web will look like. The release introduces a new programming language called Leo, a new community-driven package manager for Leo, and a new development environment or IDE called Aleo Studio.

We recently had Howard Wu, a co-founder of Aleo, on the show for an interview - you can find that episode here. Learn more about Aleo at https://aleo.org/

Thanks again Aleo!

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Sushiswap Bonus Chat Sep 24, 2020

Show notes

This is a short bonus chat to Episode 148 "Tale of the Sushi(swap)". Tarun, Hasu and Anna reconvene to wrap up the story of Governance Tokens, Sushiswap and the Uniswap token distribution.

Be sure to first listen to
"Tale of the Sushi(swap) - Part 1"
"Tale of the Sushi(swap) - Part 2" on the uncommoncore podcast

If you like what we do, be sure to check out the Zero Knowledge Podcast Gitcoin Grant - CLR matching is happening now! https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast

A Tale of Sushi(Swap) with Tarun, Hasu and Anna – Part1 Sep 24, 2020

Show notes

In this special podcast crossover episode, Tarun, Hasu and Anna cover the emergence of governance tokens in the DeFi space and then dive deep into the Sushiswap story - what protocols came before and how it performed a vampire attack on (what was at the time) a tokenless Uniswap. This story acts as a fascinating case study as well as a cautionary tale for moat-less protocols.

This episode is the 1st of 2 parts, with the 2nd part airing on Hasu's Uncommon Core podcast.

In this part, we cover the definition of governance tokens and the first half of the sushi swap story.

Tarun also mentions "impermanent loss" in this episode. However this term has been called to "divergence loss" and you can read more about what it is here.

A quick caveat: We recorded this episode just hours before the Uniswap token launch, and so we decided to produce an amendment section to tackle the aftermath of the launch and wrap up the story. You can find this here:

Sushiswap Bonus Chat

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.

Known for their security reviews, including work with zero knowledge proofs as well as having implemented zero-knowledge access passes with the distributed storage system, Tahoe-LAFS.

It seems fitting then that they are now working on a step by step guide to building zk-SNARKS called The MoonMath Manual which you can find and donate to on Gitcoin

As an aside, the Zero Knowledge podcast also has a grant there, so you might consider donating to both!

If you are interested in working with Least Authority on anything zero-knowledge related, reach out to them - whether you want an audit of your project, want to collaborate on security research or even just want to learn more about zk proofs, they would like to hear from you. I’ve added the email in the shownotes, contactus@leastauthority.com or visit them at LeastAuthority.com

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Oasis Labs & Privacy with Vishwanath Raman Sep 16, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we catch up with Vishwanath Raman, Privacy Architect at Oasis Labs where he works on privacy and confidentiality technologies for Direct to Consumer and Business to Business use cases. His interest and experience span formal methods, applied machine learning, security, and privacy. Vishwa got his PhD in Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz followed by postdoctoral work at Carnegie Mellon.

The Oasis Network is a privacy-enabled blockchain platform for responsible data use. Using a combination of secure computing and privacy technologies, the Oasis Network enables data owners to take control of their data and treat their data as a digital asset via data tokenization. They provide privacy as a service and use secure enclaves and differential privacy in order build a platform for a responsible data economy.

We dive into the way the Oasis system is architected for privacy, who the ideal customers are and what the use cases for this protocol is. We also chatted about some of the tradeoffs in using SGX as well as the recent Binance-led CryptoSafe Alliance announcement where Oasis is the primary infrastructure builder.

Here are some of the papers and links that we discuss:

Oasis Labs at zkSummit ZK0x02

Chorus: Differential Privacy via Query Rewriting

Towards Practical Differential Privacy for SQL Queries

Problems with machine learning and privacy (one of many)

Towards Practical Differentially Private Convex Optimization

One small correction: Vishwa mentions the number of Validators on Oasis as numbering in the hundreds, but upon checking, we were informed that the number of validators that will participate in the consensus committee at mainnet launch is 70-100. More details in the following blog post: https://docs.oasis.dev/oasis-network-primer/token-metrics-and-distribution

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Trail of Bits.

Trail of Bits has recently published a new guide for building secure contracts with their Crytic offering.

Check out this guide for tips on how to build security into your dapps from the start and how to use the Trail of Bits suite of tools for automated vulnerability detection.

Thank you once again Trail of Bits

Join their Slack channel (#crytic) for support, and follow Crytic on Twitter @CryticCI

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Catch up with Anna & Fredrik Sep 09, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s special episode, we flip the script and invite our friend Alexandra Heller to ask ZKPodcast co-hosts Anna & Fredrik some questions from the audience.. It’s a bit of a different format, so hope you will enjoy!

Here are a few of the episodes we mention:

-Chatting about consensus algorithms with Robert Habermeier

-Zooko talks Zcash on our 50th episode

-Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups & Elliptic Curve Cryptography

-A fireside chat with a couple Parity peeps

-Isogenies with Luca De Feo

-Statistical modeling of PoS systems with Tarun Chitra

-Introduction to ZKPs

And other podcasts we mention:

-Bikeshed: https://www.bikeshed.fm

-Distributed: https://distributed.blog/podcast/

-Extremities: https://anchor.fm/extremities

-Accidental Tech: https://atp.fm

-History of Rome: https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/

-Hardcore History: https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/

-Epicenter: https://epicenter.tv/

-Uncommon Core: https://uncommoncore.co/

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Aleo

We recently had Howard Wu, a co-founder of Aleo, on the show for an interview - you can find that episode here. Learn more about Aleo at https://aleo.org/

Thanks again Aleo!

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Circom & Hermez with Jordi Baylina Sep 02, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, Anna and Fredrik catch up with Jordi Baylina, co-founder of Iden3, the creator of Circom & SnarkJS. They chat about his work in the ecosystem, building zk circuits and the recently announced Hermez, a new zkrollup with a novel proof-of-donation mechanism that will redistribute 40% of earnings to Ethereum-based community projects.

Jordi has an amazing story, which we got to explore in this episode, so thanks again Jordi for being on the show!

Here are some relevant links:

Jordi's talk about Circom at the zkSummit

Iden3 Website

Circom on Github

Hermez Website & Twitter

His talk on Liquid Democracy at Web3

Our previous episode about the DAO hack with Griff Green

Thank you to this week's sponsor Parity Technologies

Parity is currently looking to fill a number of job positions including many on the engineering side.

As an engineer at Parity, you would get to write Rust all day, be at the forefront of creating and shaping the decentralized web and hopefully also dig into some cool zero knowledge crypto tech! The best way to get noticed for this role is to familiarise yourself with Substrate - the platform built by Parity to make building blockchains much much easier. So go check out the substrate libraries and then head over to parity.io/jobs to find out more

Thanks again Parity for sponsoring this episode!

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Aleo with Howard Wu Aug 26, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we invite Howard Wu back to the show to share more about his new project Aleo - a privacy-focused blockchain that enables fully private applications. Howard's previous ZKPodcast episode, Introduction to zkSNARKs, remains one of our most popular episodes to date!

We chat about why you need programming languages for SNARKs, what it is like to switch from VC/Academia to being a founder and the two important things missing in web services, high programmability and true user privacy. The project enables private applications with both data privacy and functional privacy - where the nature of the program running and all activity remains private. It is based on the ZEXE protocol and Proof-of-Succinct-Work, from the Proof-of-Necessary-Work originally presented Joseph Bonneau & Akis Kattis

For more info check out these additional links & episodes:

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting company known for their dedication to privacy-respecting solutions and boundary-pushing technology. You may know them as the team behind the security audits and reviews of the Eth 2.0 Specification, Protocol Lab's Gossipsub Protocol, Zcash Sapling upgrade, Tezos Foundation's TzBTC, Blockstack's Investor Wallet, MetaMask's Lavamoat and more

If you are looking to improve the security of your protocol or verify your use of cryptography, schedule a no-obligation call to find out how Least Authority can help on your project. Visit leastauthority.com and hit the “Schedule a Call” button to book one of these calls.

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Josh Cincinnati on Zcash, governance and leaving the Zcash Foundation Aug 19, 2020

Show notes

In this episode we chat with Josh Cincinnati, the former executive director of Zcash Foundation. We cover Josh's career before Zcash, his work at the foundation, the important role privacy plays in crypto and the challenges of decentralised governance. We also discuss his decision to leave the foundation, Zcash Foundation's philosophy of transparency, his hopes for the future of the Zcash community, his next steps and why he thinks people in crypto may wanna take themselves a bit less serious and remember to have some fun!

Here are some additional links:

Zcash Foundation
Josh’s parting letter
Previous episodes on Zcash with Zooko, Sean Bowe, Sean and Daira and Henry de Valence
Catch this cross-over appearance with Anna on Josh's Twodcast. His show is released once per ... whenever Josh feels like

As mentioned in the intro, the ZkValidator.com is now live on 3 networks: Cosmos, Kusama and, as of this month, Polkadot.

For the origin story of the ZKValidator, check out this zkpodcast episode with the guys from Bison Trails

If you are a token holder on Cosmos, Kusama and/or Polkadot and you think privacy matters, want to see more zkps integrated throughout these networks and generally wanna support this initiative, head to our website: ZkValidator.com. There you can find instructions on how to stake your tokens to our validator.

For Cosmos visit - https://zkvalidator.com/cosmos/

For Kusama visit - https://zkvalidator.com/kusama/

For Polkadot visit - https://zkvalidator.com/polkadot/

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Z-add: zs1f8jjtkuqwvxy9h4q7grl6287hmpzyt4s55d392djx43wxxudwv20x7qgs74kp2h6e9k95lswst8 (Just added!!)

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Hasu & Georgios on Bitcoin Security & Elastic Block Size Proposals Aug 12, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Anna and guest host Georgios chat with Hasu, an independent crypto researcher focused on economics and security, about elastic block size proposals in both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

They cover how Hasu found his way into research as well as the history of the block size BIPs that shaped the ecosystem as well as Ethereum’s EIP 1559

Here are some additional links:

Research paper: A model for Bitcoin’s security and the declining block subsidy

Analysis of EIP-2593 (Escalator)

Analysis of EIP-1559

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Trail of Bits.

Trail of Bits found a bug in yVault that would have allowed an attacker to drain most (if not all) of the pool's assets. They quickly reported the bug to the yVault team and were able to secure the roughly $400K USD held in the system. This bug, which was thankfully caught, highlights the risk stemming from increased complexity caused by composition in the DeFi space. ‘

Generally - DeFi composability is hard. For example, If you integrate multiple tokens, any one token could compromise the security of your entire platform. On the other hand, if you integrate multiple platforms, your protocol could suffer from complex interactions.

If this is a relevant topic for you or the project you work on, reach out to Trail of Bits to arrange a security assessment, or sign up for their Ethereum security office hours.

Here is a link to their blog post “Accidentally stepping on a DeFi lego” https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/08/05/accidentally-stepping-on-a-defi-lego Contact them here: https://www.trailofbits.com/contact/

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