A discussion with Justin Thaler about his role at A16Z, focusing on the diverse group of researchers and engineers specializing in various aspects of blockchain technology. The chapter highlights collaborative efforts, team composition, and future growth plans within the organization.
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 with Lasso in 2023, but has now been implemented and is open to contributions from the community.
Here’s some additional links for this episode:
- 17 misconceptions about SNARKs (and why they hold us back) by Justin Thaler
- ZK Hack Discord: contains Study Club, Thaler Book Club and more
- Approaching the 'lookup singularity': Introducing Lasso and Jolt
- Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
- zkStudyClub - Lasso/Jolt (Justin Thaler, Georgetown University/a16z)
- Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Book
- Episode 103: Exploring VDFs with Joseph Bonneau
- Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Justin Thaler
- Episode 261: Proofs, Arguments, and ZKPs with Justin Thaler
- The MoonMath Manual by Least Authority
- ZK Hack Whiteboard Sessions
- Unlocking the lookup singularity with Lasso by Setty, Thaler and Wahby
- Jolt: SNARKs for Virtual Machines via Lookups by Arun, Setty and Thaler
- Justin Thaler a16z Articles
- Episode 293: Exploring Security of ZK Systems with Nethermind’s Michał & Albert
- Fiat-Shamir Security of FRI and Related SNARKs by Block, Garreta, Katz, Thaler, Tiwari and Zając
- Fiat-Shamir Transformation of Multi-Round Interactive Proofs by Attema, Fehr and Klooß
- Caulk: Lookup Arguments in Sublinear Time by Zapico, Buterin, Khovratovich, Maller, Nitulescu and Simkin
- Spartan: Efficient and general-purpose zkSNARKs without trusted setup by Srinath Setty
- Stwo Prover: The next-gen of STARK scaling is here
The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com
Launching soon, Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 blockchain focused on multichain, asset-agnostic privacy, via a unified shielded set. Namada is natively interoperable with fast-finality chains via IBC, and with Ethereum using a trust-minimised bridge.
Follow Namada on Twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada.
Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.
Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/
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