Introduction

The hosts introduce Howard Wu, a researcher at Berkeley and co-founder of Alio, and discuss the excitement of going public with their project after a year of working in stealth mode. They express their enthusiasm to delve deeper into Howard's project, Alio.

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Episode 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:

Aleo Developer Preview I
Zexe: Decentralized Private Computation with Pratyush Mishra
ZEXE paper
Proof-of-Necessary-Work with Akis Kattis (NYU)

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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