Zero Knowledge

Latest Episodes:

ZK & Games: Dark Forest with Brian Gu Aug 05, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, we chat with Brian Gu, a student at MIT and creator of the Dark Forest game. We chat about education, blockchain based games and what inspired his work on the Dark Forest game. We then dig into how this game creates an incomplete information game space by using zkSNARKs to create a “cryptographic fog of war” and more!

As described on their blog, Dark Forest is an MMO space-conquest game where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cryptographically-specified universe.

Find out more about the game here: https://zkga.me/

Least Authority is a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates, and cryptographers focused is on securing distributed systems: blockchain, peer-to-peer and other approaches to systems built with the principle of least authority. They are known for security audits and reviews like the Eth 2.0 Specification, Protocol Lab's Gossipsub Protocol, Zcash Sapling upgrade, & Tezos Foundation's TzBTC, as well as their work with zero knowledge proofs integrated into the Tahoe-LAFS (secure distributed file store) with "ZKAPs: zero knowledge access passes".

They are currently looking for a technical writer to help the Least Authority team write security research and audit reports, open source technical documentation and privacy analysis statements on technical approaches.

Find out more here: leastauthority.com/zkpodcast

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Staking derivatives & DeFi with Alex Evans (and Tarun!) Jul 29, 2020

Show notes

** Be sure to visit our ZKPodcast subreddit and leave us some questions for the upcoming AMA!**

In this week’s episode, Anna and guest-host / frequent guest Tarun Chitra catch up with Alex Evans, researcher at Placeholder Capital. They dive into the latest in DeFi, a topic that we don't cover too often, but has become hard to ignore. Specifically they discuss the emergence of liquidity farming, the difference between the zkresearch space and the DeFi space, some emerging concepts like AMM and Staking derivatives, and cover a recent report Tarun and Alex published together on the impact of staking derivatives on the security of PoS systems.

Here are a few of the articles and links mentioned in the episode:

What PoS and DeFi can learn from mortgage-backed securities by Tarun and Alex
Liquidity Provider Returns in Geometric Mean Markets by Alex Evans
Building Liquidity into Token Distribution
Black–Scholes model

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

Upgradeable contracts are not as safe as you think. Architectures for upgradeability can be flawed, locking contracts, losing data, or sabotaging your ability to recover from an incident. Every contract upgrade must be carefully reviewed to avoid catastrophic mistakes. The GitHub App Crytic now includes a comprehensive suite of 17 upgradeability checks to help you avoid these pitfalls.

This tool allows devs to stress test their upgradeable contracts as they go, saving time and potentially catastrophic headaches down the line.

For more check out their blog post where they describe how to use this tool - https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/06/12/upgradeable-contracts-made-safer-with-crytic/

So thanks again Trail of Bits

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Findora with Benedikt Bunz and Ben Fisch Jul 22, 2020

Show notes

** Check out the ZKPodcast subreddit and share some comments/questions for our upcoming AMA **

This week, we catch up with Benedikt Bunz and Ben Fisch, PhD students at Stanford, once again. In this episode, we dive deeper into Findora, a project that was co-founded by Ben (who is also the CTO) and where Benedikt works as the Head of Research. We look at what the Findora project is, discuss the "selective disclosure" concept at the heart of their constructions, explore the balance between transparency and privacy and describe what problems Findora aims to solve.

For some background on our guests, check out these previous episode with Benedikt Bunz on Bulletproofs and Ben Fisch on Accumulators

Here are some additional relevant links:

Findora's site

Alan Szepieniec on Supersonics - 11:33

Ben Fisch on Supersonics at the SF zkSummit in Oct 2019

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Validium with DeversiFi & Starkware Jul 15, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we will be exploring StarkWare and DeversiFi’s collaboration - a Layer 2 STARK-powered exchange for Ethereum assets. Guests Tom Brand, product manager at Starkware, and Will Harborne, co-founder of DeversiFi, discuss the project, how it works under the hood and give us a glimpse into what they have planned for the future.

We also look at how Validium, that is Layer-2 scaling solutions in which the validity of all transactions is enforced using zero-knowledge proofs, while data availability is kept off-chain, differ from other layer 2 scaling solutions like Plasma, Optimistic Rollup and zkRollup, and discuss the axioms used to quantify these differences.

Here is some of additional material:

At the beginning of the episode, Anna and Will also discussed their joint project ZKValidator which works on Cosmos, Polkadot and Kusama.

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Trusted Setup Bonus: Tornado Cash Jul 08, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, Anna follows up on the trusted setup survey she did in her previous episode on the topic with this bonus interview with Roman Semanov & Roman Storm from Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash's trusted setup, held in May 2020, was the largest to date with over 1000 participants.

Be sure to listen to the full ZKPodcast Trusted Setup episode first

Find out more about Tornado Cash's trusted setup here

There are a number of zkPodcast related channels and groups to explore. Here they are:

Do you want to join us?

Want to connect with the ecosystem, learn more and work on zk research? If you are very organised and have worked producing either events, content or generally organising people in the past, these roles might be interesting for you.

Here are the 2 roles:

1) zkPodcast Support: Work with Anna & Fredrik on our zk-related projects (excluding the zkValidator) on a part-time basis. This would primarily involve coordinating podcast guest, scheduling and coordinating studyclub sessions, help organise events like the zkSummit, writing blog posts and managing social channels. This would be 5-8 hours per week to start, and could be a student job.

If this is interesting, please email a brief CV (a short email describing your experience is also fine) to hello@zeroknowledge.fm or tweet at Anna -> @AnnaRRose

2) Project Manager at the zkValidator. In this role, you would be working with Anna and Will Harborne to connect with members of the networks the zkValidator operates on - that is Cosmos, Kusama, Polkadot and more as we add them. The role would entail writing reports, doing research, managing network partners, scheduling workshops, working with zk engineers and cryptographers and more. This would be 15 hours per week to start, and we are looking for someone with at least 3 years of work experience. If this is interesting, please send us a summarised CV and/or LinkedIn profile to hello@zkValidator.com

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Math competitions, crypto as alchemy & Gasper with Yan Zhang Jul 01, 2020

Show notes

This week, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Yan X Zhang, professor at SJSU, about math competitions, math education, how crypto is like alchemy and the Gasper paper - work Yan and his students collaborated on with the Ethereum Foundation.

“Gasper” is a proof-of-stake-based consensus protocol, which is an idealized version of the proposed Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. The protocol combines Casper FFG, a finality tool, with LMD GHOST, a fork-choice rule.

Here are a few episodes and papers that we mention:

Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham

Combining GHOST and Casper

Ali Rahimi - NIPS 2017 Test-of-Time Award presentation

As mentioned in the intro, we looking for some help on the organisational front with some of the zk related projects - this Zero Knowledge Podcast, zkStudyClub, zkSummit and the zkValidator.

If you are looking to connect with the ecosystem, learn more and work on zk research AND if you are very organised and have worked producing either events, content or generally organising people in the past, these roles might be interesting for you.

Here are the 2 roles:

If this is interesting, please email a brief CV (a short email describing your experience is also fine) to hello@zeroknowledge.fm or tweet at Anna -> @AnnaRRose

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Give us feedback! https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A

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Look into Solana Jun 24, 2020

Show notes

This week, Anna and guest host Georgios Konstantopoulos chat with Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana network. They learn about this system and discuss the innovations that allow them to achieve high performance without sharding.

For more on Solana check out their website - https://solana.com/

We also mention this episode on VDF's with Joseph Bonneau. Here is a further explanation of the differences.

Want to help support the show? Check out our grant on Gitcoin and please donate today!

CLR Matching is happening now! Link is here -->> https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast-2

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tBTC with Matt Luongo Jun 17, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we chat with Matt Luongo, CEO of Thesis, founder of Keep Network, and project lead of tBTC. We cover the need for BTC to ETH bridges, what the challenges are in building bridges with BTC, tBTC and how it is setup, what went down with the initial tBTC release - an event the team now refers to as "release candidate 0", and where we might be seeing tBTC go next.

Here are some useful links:

Want to help support the show? Check out our grant on Gitcoin and please donate today!

CLR Matching is happening now! Link is here -->> https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast-2

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Trusted Setup Ceremonies Explored Jun 10, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, Anna explores the state of trusted setups with 4 of the people who have recently coordinated and run trusted setups for different SNARK systems. She interviews Koh Wei Jie from the Ethereum Foundation, Thomas Walton-Pocock from Aztec Protocol, Brecht Devos from Loopring and Kobi Gurkan from the EF and cLabs. This episode covers the new generation of trusted setups and how the teams working on these are learning from each other and at times, even sharing parts of the trusted set up itself.

As a primer, Trusted Setups are those events or ceremonies that one needs to perform to generate the parameters that can kick off SNARK based systems. It is an MPC - or multiparty computation - that involves a number of participants sequentially downloading software, running a computation that includes some randomness that they generate and re-uploading their result to be folded into the next participants computation. At the end of this process, there is a hidden parameter that is used to create the keys that are used to create proofs for private transactions, and to verify those proofs. These keys prove that a transaction is correct.

Here are some helpful links about all the various trusted setups we mention:

Zcash's Trusted Setups

https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/50 - Zooko speaks about the trusted set up at timecode 17:45

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/ceremony

https://z.cash/technology/paramgen/

EF's Perpetual Powers of Tau

https://github.com/weijiekoh/perpetualpowersoftau

Semaphore

Semaphore blog post

Semaphore Phase 2 Multi-Party Trusted Setup Participant Guide

MACI (upcoming)

https://github.com/appliedzkp/maci

Aztec Protocol

https://www.aztecprotocol.com/ignition/

https://ignition.aztecprotocol.com/

Loopring

https://loopring.org/#/post/loopring-starts-trusted-setup-multi-party-computation-ceremony

Tornado Cash

https://medium.com/@tornado.cash/the-biggest-trusted-setup-ceremony-in-the-world-3c6ab9c8fffa

https://ceremony.tornado.cash/

cLabs (upcoming)

https://github.com/celo-org/snark-setup

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Handshake Protocol with Mark Tyneway Jun 03, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we chat with Mark Tyneway who is a contributor on the Handshake project - an experimental peer-to-peer root naming system. We learn about this decentralised, foundation-free project, the issues of DNS, how Handshake plans on fixing this, how it differs from ENS, their unique airdrop process, what an Urkel Trie is, and more.

Here are a few useful links:

Handshake Whitepaper
An airdrop that preserves recipient privacy - https://fc20.ifca.ai/preproceedings/54.pdf
ReadyLayerOne Presentation & Slides
Developer Protocol Summary
Messari Profile

Signup for zkMesh Newsletter - a monthly newsletter focused on sharing resources about decentralised privacy-preserving technologies, privacy protocol development and zero knowledge systems research.

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