Summary This week, Anna and Nico catch up with Antonio Sanso, Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and Youssef El Housni, Engineer at ConsenSys and builder of Linea. They discuss Antonio and Youssef’s new work, Families of prime-order endomorphism-equipped embedded curves on pairing-friendly curves and dive into Elliptic Curve cryptography, Bandersnatch and Verkle Tries amongst much more, before dissecting what terms in the title of this paper truly mean. After getting into the weeds of...

Summary This week, Anna and Tarun catch up with Georgios Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm and long-standing friend of the ZK Pod! First they cover the work Georgios has been doing since he last appeared on the show, covering everything from updates on Foundry to the more recent work on Reth. They then dig into what makes it different, what inspires its design, where it is heading and the eventual end goals of the project. They also chat about the general client node landscape, from the...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo catch up with Justin Thaler, Associate Professor at Georgetown and Research Partner at a16z. The group dive into a handful of points from Justin’s ‘17 Misconceptions about SNARKs’ article, discussing if his views have changed since it was published back in 2023 and whether some points have become common knowledge since the article first rippled through the ZK community. They then dive into his new zkVM Jolt, which was initially described along...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with Gal Arnon, Ph.D student from the Weizmann Institute of Science & Giacomo Fenzi, Ph.D. student in the COMPSEC Lab at EPFL. Gal and Giacomo are amongst the co-authors of ‘STIR: Reed–Solomon Proximity Testing with Fewer Queries’ and in this conversation, they discuss how their research led them to work on these topics and where the thesis for this particular work sparked from. They set the stage by exploring the history of FRI and discussing...

A quick announcement for ZK Hack Krakow, happening from May 17-19 2024 in Krakow (!). In the spirit of ZK Hack Lisbon and ZK Hack Istanbul, ZK Hack Krakow will be hosting hackers from all over the world to join us for a weekend of building and experimenting with zk tech. Sponsors for this edition are Mina, O1Labs, Aleph Zero, Polygon, Scroll, Avail, Nethermind and more. If you are interested, apply as a hacker - there will be prizes and bounties to be won, new friends and collaborators...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Brendan Farmer catch up with Ben Fisch, CEO of Espresso Systems. They explore the inner workings of the current L2 sequencing landscape and then discuss how a shared sequencing marketplace like Espresso works. They touch on how MEV plays a part in the new system, how the role of the sequencer can be separated into subroles, how all these parts will work together in such a system and much more. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Episode 222:...

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Jordi Baylina, OG Ethereum contributor and Polygon zkEVM Technical Lead. They cover what Jordi has been working on since he was last on the show in 2021. Back then, zkEVMs were still just an idea. Now that many of these systems have launched, they have a chance to look at how these fit into the general L2 landscape. They cover Jordi’s view on engineering decentralized systems and how these are rolled out, and the recent research from Polygon,...

A quick announcement for ZK Hack Krakow, happening from May 17-19 2024 in Krakow (!). In the spirit of ZK Hack Lisbon and ZK Hack Istanbul, ZK Hack Krakow will be hosting hackers from all over the world to join us for a weekend of building and experimenting with zk tech. Sponsors for this edition are Mina, O1Labs, Aleph Zero, Polygon, Scroll, Avail, Nethermind and more. If you are interested, apply as a hacker - there will be prizes and bounties to be won, new friends and collaborators...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico chat with Chelsea Komlo, Chief Scientist for the Zcash Foundation and member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy lab at the University of Waterloo. They discuss what sparked Chelsea’s interest in cryptography research, starting with her work contributing to Tor, to her move to Zcash and her PhD work on Threshold Signature Schemes. They define some important terms around different signature schemes and discuss possible optimizations that can be...

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Niraj Pant and Anish Agnihotri from Ritual. They kick off by revisiting the AIxCrypto intersection before diving into the Ritual product and its goals around developing open access AI infrastructure. They explore the opportunities that open up when you bring ML to smart contracts. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc Episode 246: Adversarial Machine Learning Research with...

Quick reminder about our upcoming zkSummit 11 event. Happening in Athens on April 10th, we will be bringing together the top researchers and engineers working in zk to share their latest research and new findings. Apply at zksummit.com If you have already applied, please remember to buy your ticket! Email summit [at] zeroknowledge.fm if you have questions about your application or haven't received a response yet.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico chat with Alin Tomescu, founding team member and Head of Cryptography at Aptos Labs. They discuss Alin’s journey to Aptos and his work on distributed on-chain randomness as well as the new Aptos Keyless project. They cover the Keyless accounts architecture, how the flow works for the user and some of the subtleties in the approach they have taken. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Episode 302: ZK for web2 interop with zkLogin & ZK...

This week’s episode is a little different from the usual and is split into two parts with Anna and Kobi exploring the history of ZK Hack, its origins and how the event has evolved into what it is today, including current activity in the ZK Hack ecosystem. The second half of the show splits off into Anna and Nico chatting the top 3 hackers from ZK Hack IV Online, which wrapped back in February. Each mini interview catches up with one of the winners and dives into what it was like to hack on...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun catch up with Uma Roy, CEO and cofounder of Succinct. They dive into Succinct’s developments over the last year ranging from the work they did on the ZK bridge infrastructure to the Succinct platform, the Succinct prover network and their most recent release of SP1. They discuss connections between these products, how their development evolved, the competitive landscape, the future for the project and much more. Here’s some additional links for this...

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Omer Shlomovits and Yuval Domb from Ingonyama. They go back to the start of the project, exploring Ingonyama’s initial vision for what ZK Hardware could be, how the field has evolved and how they are accelerating ZK Hardware today. The group discuss hardware product cycles, the hardware and algorithmic components, how a ZK ASIC is developed, they review some of the latest research from Ingonyama and more. Here’s some additional links for this...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun interview Brian Weickmann & Richard Liang from the ZKP2P project. They cover the opportunities and challenges of building ZK applications with the current tools available, as well as revisit the topic of ZK Email and explore how this lies at the heart of the current version of ZKP2P. They also discuss the goals of ZKP2P, what’s happening under the hood, the types of experiments and initiatives the project is running, how a user can already use the...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with Yaz Khoury and Ismail Khoffi from Celestia. They share how the team prepared for the launch of the Celestia mainnet and what has been happening at Celestia since. They revisit the topic of DA (Data Availability) and explore how rollups and dApp developers can already use the Celestia DA layer. The group discusses Blobstream, which brings the benefits of Celestia to Ethereum and helps to scale the network, as well as community building, the...

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Noam Nisan, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Principle Researcher at StarkWare Industries and one of the pioneers in the field of Algorithmic Game Theory. They cover his extensive research and academic background, starting with his work on complexity theory as well as Algorithmic Game Theory and his current work on blockchains and Tokenomics at StarkWare. They discuss his recent blog post; Simple Tokenomics for a...

Quick reminder about our upcoming ZK Job Fair - happening tomorrow Feb 6th at 7pm UTC, right after the finale of the online ZK Hack IV event. This is a great chance to meet with hiring teams, and if you are looking to jump into ZK professionally, you won’t wanna miss it! Sign-up for our ZK Hack IV Session #4 so we can share the link with you! https://events.ringcentral.com/events/zkhackiv-4

** This episode uses visual aids and slides throughout, you may want to check out the video version here** In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico Mohnblatt from Geometry Research host a ZK Jargon Decoder episode. Based on Nico’s ZK Jargon Decoder Website, they discuss some of the confusing terms and concepts commonly used by the ZK community. The session aims to be digestible for those still in the early stages of their ZK learning journey, but it does take a dive into the depths of detail...

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Prabal Banerjee, co-founder of Avail. They deep dive into Prabal’s career, starting with his work in academia, his move to Polygon and to his spinning out the Avail project. They discuss how the project was built, tech decisions and the motivations behind them as well as their use of KZG, validity proofs and their position within the Ethereum and wider blockchain ecosystem. They go on to revisit Data Availability and the interaction with different...

This week, Anna caught up on all things Aleo with Howard Wu co-founder of the Aleo Network & Alex Pruden executive director of the Aleo Foundation. Howard was last on the show back in 2020 when Aleo was in its infancy, so the group dive into how the project has evolved over the last few years, covering lessons learned along the way as well as technical decisions, detours, breakthroughs and reflecting on initial goals as they built out the system. Here’s some additional links for this...

In this week’s episode, Anna and cohosts Guillermo, Kobi, Nico and Tarun share their predictions, hopes (and worries) for ZK in 2024. They cover emerging ideas in ZK, research predictions, dream applications, the best case for ZK in 2024, the worst case for ZK, possible ‘Black Swans’ and more. ZK Hack IV online is coming soon, sign up for the kick-off session on 16th Jan here. For the latest news on the event check out the zhhack.dev/zkhackIV website. Aleo is a new Layer-1...

No full episode this week. Just a brief message about the upcoming [ZK Hack IV Online](www.zkhack.dev/zkhackIV). ZK Hack is a 4-week virtual event featuring weekly workshops, advanced puzzle solving competitions and a virtual ZK Jobs Fair. Find out more www.zkhack.dev/zkhackIV Sign up for the 1st session happening on Jan 16th: https://hopin.com/events/zkhackiv-1

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up in person with Guillermo, Tarun and Alex Evans for a look back at 2023. They revisit their state of mind back in Jan 2023 and share how the year unfolded and evolved for each of them as well as the ZK space as a whole. They survey the themes, applications and research topics that dominated ZK throughout this year and offer retrospective takes on how the ecosystem has changed. Hope you enjoy! We are taking the next week off, but will return with...