Guests from Alpin Labs explain how they use cutting-edge technology like ZK to improve privacy, expressivity, and scalability in the Bitcoin system, sharing their journey to founding the project and their vision for global blockchain applications.
Summary
In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Sims Gautam and Liam Eagen from Alpen Labs. They dive into the world of Bitcoin L2s and focus on how ZK can be used to incorporate strong connections between Bitcoin and new execution environments. The group then explores BitVM, covenants, the distinction between the Bridge Operators and sequencers in this model and how this differs from how these actors work in Eth L2s. They then dive into SNARKnado, including what is happening under the hood, the ways in which this system offers round-based fraud games mixed with ZK and which agent provides DA and more.
Here’s some additional links for this episode:
- Bulletproofs++: Next Generation Confidential Transactions via Reciprocal Set Membership Arguments by Eagen, Kanjalkar, Ruffing, Nick
- Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More by Bünz, Bootle, Boneh, Andrew, Wuille, and Maxwell
- Zcash Website
- Protogalaxy: Efficient Protostar-style folding of multiple instances by Eagen and Gabizon
- cq: * Cached quotients for fast lookups by Eagen, Fiore and Gabizon
- Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin by Miers, Garman, Green and Rubin
- Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (extended version) by Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, Garman, Green, Miers, Tromer and Virza
- Monero Ring Signatures
- Blockstream Whitepapers
- Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity by Ben-Sasson, Bentov, Horesh and Riabzev
- Ordinal Theory by Casey Rodarmor
- BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin by Robin Linus
- BitVM 2
- BitVM Website
- Jeremy Rubin Blog on Lamport Signatures
- Introducting SNARKnado by Alpen Labs
ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here.
Episode Sponsors
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Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.
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