Is There a Top to Bottom Stack for Cryptography?

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We're building more and more cryptography that operates over some kind of computation. So I feel like we've done a pretty good job of mapping out a lot of these languages and concepts, like in some sort of framework. And it's so cool that this is all within this kind of specific cryptographic field. But I have a question for potentially people who want to get into working with this. How do you choose what actually works for your particular application or your idea? This is a great question. There are two layers of questions you have to ask yourself. The first question is where am I on the generality performance trade off? Am I Zcash? Or am I trying to build on top

In this week’s episode, Anna has a one-on-one chat with Alex Ozdemir, a PhD student at Stanford researching formal methods, cryptography and distributed systems. Alex’s work is closely tied to the world of generalized computations within zero knowledge systems. He is one of the main developers of CirC, an infrastructure framework for building zero knowledge languages.

In their conversation, Alex and Anna take a bird’s eye view of the current landscape of zk languages and libraries. Alex explains the history and current state-of-the-art of circuit-building tools, touching on libraries like Libsnark, Bellman and more comprehensive tools like Arkworks; hardware description languages like Circom; and the more dev-friendly family of RAM-register languages like ZoKrates, Pequin, Cairo, Leo and many more. Here, the race is still on as a number of academic and business-oriented teams grapple with limitations to memory access & performance given by zero knowledge proving systems.

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Here are all the links for this episode:

An intro dive into the world of zero knowledge languages and ZoKrates
Circom and Hermez with Jordi Baylina, Zero Knowledge episode 145
zk-SNARKs for Scale with Matter Labs, Zero Knowledge episode 72
zkStudyClub about CirC
zkStudyClub on Polynomial Commitments
StarkWare’s Eli Ben-Sasson on STARKs and Cairo, Zero Knowledge episode 96
Pratyush Mishra on all things Arkworks, Zero Knowledge episode 169
Alex’s Stanford page and paper on CirC.

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