Accelerate with Mert Eli Ben-Sasson: The Godfather of ZK - From Zcash to Scaling Bitcoin | ACC 1.7
Nov 8, 2025
Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder and CEO of StarkWare and a pioneer in zero-knowledge proofs, discusses his journey from mathematics to blockchain. He unpacks the magic of ZK proofs, explaining how they ensure privacy and integrity. Eli contrasts ZK with multi-party computation and emphasizes the advantages of STARKs over SNARKs, including scalability and post-quantum security. He shares insights on StarkNet's role in making Ethereum scalable and its potential impact on Bitcoin, along with recommendations for those interested in learning about ZK technology.
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ZK Proofs Deliver Integrity Plus Privacy
- Zero-knowledge proofs convince verifiers that a statement is true without revealing hidden data.
- They provide two powerful properties: short verifiable proofs and privacy of inputs.
Scalability Comes From Pollable Encodings
- Scalability in ZK comes from probabilistic checking akin to polling few points.
- The prover encodes computation so random sampling exposes any cheating with high probability.
Polynomials Are The Secret Workhorse
- Polynomials underpin both privacy (secret sharing) and redundancy for ZK proofs.
- Computation maps to high-degree polynomials whose evaluations enable hiding and error-correcting redundancy.