Zero Knowledge

Latest Episodes:

Mixers with Tornado.cash Jan 08, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we chat with Roman Storm and Roman Semanov from Tornado.cash all about mixers. We explore what they are used for and how they work, how Zero Knowledge can be incorporated to provide more privacy, what the challenges are and what the future holds for the Tornado.Cash project.

Here are some episodes or resources we mention:

https://tornado.cash/

https://medium.com/@tornado.cash/tornado-cash-version-2-has-been-released-8c739d3706df

https://github.com/tornadocash

https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/50 (Episode with Zooko)

Give the Zero Knowledge Podcast some feedback. Whether you are a long-time listener or new to the show, we would love to hear from you!

Please share your feedback with us here: https://forms.gle/LtQQyKJV6r7LrSND7

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Catch up with us on Youtube

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKP Patreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

So long 2019! What's next? Jan 01, 2020

Show notes

In this end of year episode, we chat about what we've learned in 2019, some of our favourite episodes, this year's explosion in ZK research and what we are looking forward to in 2020!

Thanks to Henrik José for updated jingle!

We mention a number of episodes from this past year, have a look through our episodes here: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/

For the Zk Specific episodes have a look here: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/zkseries

Give the Zero Knowledge Podcast some feedback. Whether you are a long-time listener or new to the show, we would love to hear from you!

Please share your feedback with us here: https://forms.gle/LtQQyKJV6r7LrSND7

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Catch up with us on Youtube

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKP Patreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Exploring use-cases for zkps and zk standards with QEDIT Dec 25, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with Daniel Benarroch and Aviv Zohar from QEDIT - a privacy software startup focused on bringing Zero Knowledge to enterprise customers. We chat about the power of zero knowledge proof systems, some of the emerging use cases using zk systems and The Zero Knowledge Standardization Effort.

Here are some links we mention:

Aviv's website

Hilbert's problems - twenty-three unsolved problems in mathematics presented in 1900

Give the Zero Knowledge Podcast some feedback. Whether you are a long-time listener or new to the show, we would love to hear from you!

Please share your feedback with us here: https://forms.gle/LtQQyKJV6r7LrSND7

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Catch up with us on Youtube

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKP Patreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Catch up with Zaki Manian from Tendermint Dec 18, 2019

Show notes

This week we catch up with Zaki Manian, Director at Tendermint, the company building Cosmos architecture, and co-founder of Iqlusion Validator. We chat about the blockchain in Silicon Valley, why SF loves DeFi, the challenge of balancing pragmatism and regulation with a decentralised ideology, the nuances of PoS systems, the wins of 2019 and what is on the horizon.

Here are links to a few things we discuss:

-Tarun Chitra's paper on how the existance of derivatives can undermine the security of a PoS system

-Blog post summarizing Tarun's paper here

-ZKValidator

Give the Zero Knowledge Podcast some feedback. Whether you are a long-time listener or new to the show, we would love to hear from you!

Please share your feedback with us here: https://forms.gle/LtQQyKJV6r7LrSND7

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Catch up with us on Youtube

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKP Patreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Centrifuge and zkSNARKs in action with Lucas Vogelsang Dec 11, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we catch-up our friend Lucas Vogelsang from Centrifuge. Centrifuge is an open, decentralized platform to connect the global financial supply chain. We chat about the journey Lucas took to co-founding this company, how privacy plays a role in his thinking and we discover what it means to be a project building with zkSNARKs today.

We touch on a few previous episodes including:

Thanks to this week's sponsor Nucypher!

Nucypher is currently looking for an engineering lead to work on a new open-source cryptosystem for privacy-preserving smart contracts. This is a new product and so you will get to work on some cool primitives like fully homomorphic encryption and zero knowledge proofs. For more about lead engineer role, check out the ad here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693548

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

IPFS, Libp2p & Filecoin with Juan Benet Dec 04, 2019

Show notes

In this week's episode, we chat with Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, about IPFS, Libp2p, and the much anticipated incentivised decentralised storage protocol Filecoin. We dig into the history of the Filecoin project, the gap in the “market” they are trying to fill, the challenges they have found in the development of the Filecoin protocol and the latest tech they are exploring.

Here are some helpful links:

https://protocol.ai/projects/#IPFS

Decentralised storage pt 1

Orient

Decentralised storage pt 2

Arweave Decentralised Storage episode

You can see some of the constraints and parameters for filecoin here:

Give the Zero Knowledge Podcast some feedback. Whether you are a long-time listener or new to the show, we would love to hear from you!

Please share your feedback with us here: https://forms.gle/LtQQyKJV6r7LrSND7

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Catch up with us on Youtube

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKP Patreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Alan Szepieniec on Hash Functions & Supersonic SNARKs Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we catchup with Alan Szepieniec, a researchers at Nervos and co-author of the Supersonics paper & the Marvellous family of Hash Functions (which specify the Vision/Rescue cyphers). We chat about his past work in cryptography, how the Supersonics paper came to be, and dive into the new generation of hash functions emerging, including the Marvelous universe.

For more info, please have a look at these resources and past episodes!

Design of Symmetric-Key Primitives for Advanced Cryptographic Protocols (the Marvellous (Vision/Rescue) paper)
Transparent SNARKs from DARK Compilers (Supersonic paper)
On a Generalization of Substitution-Permutation Networks: The HADES Design Strategy - Competing designs for arithmetization-friendly hash functions
Starkad and Poseidon: New Hash Functions for Zero Knowledge Proof Systems
MiMC https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/492.pdf and attack https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/951.pdf
Jarvis and Friday, the first members of the Marvellous universe (may they rest in peace) https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1098.pdf
... and the Groebner basis attack that killed them: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/419.pdf

And here are some of the previous ZKP episodes that we mention:

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Exploring Kusama, the Canary Chaos Network Nov 20, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Fredrik and Nicole Zhu, Developer at Parity Technologies, about the experimental Polkadot Canary Network they call Kusama. We cover how Kusama was developed, the goals of this format and what launching a Chaos Canary Network is all about.

Here is a few more links:

https://twitter.com/kusamanetwork

https://kusama.network/

Zero Knowledge Podcast is also looking for some feedback!

Whether you are a long-time listener of the Zero Knowledge Podcast, or new to the show, we would love to hear from you!

Please share your feedback with us here: https://forms.gle/LtQQyKJV6r7LrSND7

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Catch up with us on Youtube

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKP Patreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Exploring VDFs with Joseph Bonneau Nov 13, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we sit down with Joseph Bonneau, Assistant Professor at NYU and co-author on the Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) paper. We discuss VDFs, what they are, how they were developed and what they can be used for.

Here are a few links that we reference:

Blockchain 101: Randomness episode with Justin Drake

Verifiable Delay Functions by Dan Boneh, Joseph Bonneau, Benedikt Bünz, and Ben Fisch

vdfresearch.org

Numbers Game

A Programmer Solved a 20-Year-Old, Forgotten Crypto Puzzle

Bitcoin Book

Thank you to this week's sponsor Trail of Bits

Trail of bit recently released a blog post that might be interesting for our listeners who are concerned about privacy. The post is about the concept of 'Safe browsing'. Safe browsing claims to protect users by providing them with something called k-anonymity.

Recent security news suggests that the k-anonymity has failed at protecting user privacy in certain circumstances. This is the topic that Trail of Bits explores in the blog post. Find out more about how k-anonymity works and why it is insufficient here: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/10/30/how-safe-browsing-fails-to-protect-user-privacy/

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Mapping the Web3 stack with The Graph Nov 06, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we chat with Brandon Ramirez, Research Lead and co-founder of The Graph, about the problem the project is trying to solve, the fast evolving Layer1-Layer2 paradigm, the emerging group of Service Protocols, and how these projects interact with other elements of the Web3 stack.

Introduction of GraphQL

The Graph protocol design

Talk on trust-minimized services

More on Service Protocols from Arjun (NuCypher)

More on Service Protocols from Yondon (LivePeer)

Give us feedback!!

Whether you are a long-time listener of the Zero Knowledge Podcast, or new to the show, we would love to hear from you!

Please share your feedback with us here: https://forms.gle/LtQQyKJV6r7LrSND7

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Catch up with us on Youtube

Support our Gitcoin Grant