Zero Knowledge

This week, Anna Rose chats with ZK Podcast regular Guillermo Angeris, Head of Research at BCC and Nicolas Mohnblatt, Researcher and Cryptographer at Geometry. This was recorded on April 3rd 2023, the day between the ZK Hack Lisbon hackathon and the zkSummit9 event. They discuss Nico's move from music to cryptography, his earlier privacy research as a Master's student, and his recent research Sangria, which is a folding scheme for Plonk. Guillermo shares some of his current work cleaning up and formalising concepts in zk. And Anna shares some brief thoughts about the recent release of zkpod.ai - the friendly ZK bot featuring Anna’s voice and containing the entirety of the ZKPodcast knowledge (built by Kobi Gurkan). They also chat about some news, insights from ZK Hack Lisbon and some of the projects that were built there and generally check in on the state of the ecosystem. Relevant links: Sangria: a Folding Scheme for PLONK - Geometry Research ZK9: Sangria is relaxed PLONK a Nova-like folding scheme for PLONK – Nicolas Mohnblatt (Geometry)Plonk isn’t real - Zac’s tweet confessionZK Hack Lisbon closing ceremonyZK Hack Lisbon Winner's list Twitter postZK Hack Lisbon projects & websitezkSummit video playlist (including part of the zkSummit9 videos - more coming soon!)zkpod.ai announcement tweet from Kobi GurkanAnna's reaction to zkpod.aiCheck out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Find your next job working in ZK!Anoma’s first fractal instance Namada is launching soon! Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy. Namada natively interoperates with fast-finality chains via IBC and with Ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge. Follow Namada on twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada. If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on YouTube Read transcript

This week Anna Rose chats with Ravital Solomon, founder of Sunscreen. They cover her early interest in lattice-based cryptography and how this paved the way for her work on FHE, starting at NuCypher then with her startup Sunscreen. They dive into the challenges involved when building with FHE as well as exploring the power in combining ZKP and FHE. They also discuss the early emergence of lattice-based zero knowledge proofs.Here are some additional links for this episode:Episode 269: Auctions with Kshitij Kulkarni, Matheus V. X. Ferreira and Tarun Sunscreen TwitterSunscreen Website zkSummit6: Beating the Flash Boys with Fully Homomorphic Encryption + ZKPs Ravital Solomon NuCypher Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Polygon zkEVM is here. This performant, ZK-powered, open-source, EVM-equivalent rollup launched its Mainnet Beta last month. Polygon zkEVM is making scaling truly frictionless—fast finality and EVM-equivalence means devs can do everything they can do with the EVM, only cheaper. To connect to Polygon zkEVM, go to Polygon.technology If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on Youtube Read transcript

In this week's episode Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra explore the topic of auctions with guests Kshitij Kulkarni, PHD student at Berkeley’s EECS department and Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. They discuss the history of auctions, both in the real world and in blockchain, and go on to cover more recent blockchain uses, such as MEV and NFT auctions. They review the incentives of both auction holders and the participants as well as how this incentive design can influence the effectiveness of the auctions themselves. Here are some additional links for this episode:Credibility and Incentives in Gradual Dutch Auctions by Kulkarni, Ferreira and ChitraCredible, Optimal Auctions via Blockchains by Kulkarni, Ferreira and Chitra Optimal Strategic Mining Against Cryptographic Self-Selection in Proof-of-Stake by Kulkarni, Ferreira and ChitraCredible Auctions: A Trilemma by Akbarpour and LiCredible, Truthful, and Two-Round (Optimal) Auctions via Cryptographic Commitments by Ferreira and Weinberg Credible, Strategyproof, Optimal, and Bounded Expected-Round Single-Item Auctions for all Distributions by Essaidi, Ferreira and Weinberg Dynamic Posted-Price Mechanisms for the Blockchain Transaction Fee Market by Ferreira, Moroz, Parkes and Stern Proof-of-Stake Mining Games with Perfect Randomness by Ferreira and Weinberg Optimal Strategic Mining Against Cryptographic Self-Selection in Proof-of-Stake by Ferreira, Hahn, Weinberg, Yu Credible Decentralized Exchange Design via Verifiable Sequencing Rules by Ferreira and Parkes https://jumpcrypto.com/thepit/zkweek/ Find out more about zkSummit9 here: zksummit.com.Apply for ZK Hack Lisbon here: ZK Hack application Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo by visiting http://developer.aleo.org.You can also participate in Aleo’s incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate.For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on YouTube Read transcript

In this week’s episode Anna Rose interviews Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia. They cover where Celestia as an idea emerged from, how its rollup-centric data availability (DA) network works and what can be expected from their upcoming launch. They also chat about how Celestia aims to empower Sovereign chains - independent rollup chains that use Celestia as the DA and consensus layer - and how this Sovereign chain model compares with the Ethereum rollup architecture. Here are some additional links for this episode:Episode 208: Digging into Data Availability with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia A rollup-centric ethereum roadmap Introducing Rollkit: a modular rollup framework My first impressions of web3 Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo by visiting http://developer.aleo.org.You can also participate in Aleo’s incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate.For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on YouTube Read transcript

In this two-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo. Throughout these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical techniques in ZKPs that can be optimized for and the tricks and strategies that ZPrize competitors used to achieve these optimizations. In Part 2 of the series, Anna and Alex first interview Hamid Salehi and Swati Gupta from Xilinx AMD who contribute insights from the perspective of an FPGA manufacturer. Alex and Anna then interview competitor Niall Emmart, previously from NVIDIA. They discuss his previous work and what went into winning both the MSM for GPUs and MSM for Wasm competitions in ZPrize. Here is some additional information for this episode:Hardware/Board options:Varium C1100 board (targeted at accelerating blockchain applications).This board has been used to accelerate the following:Poseidon hash (used in the storage sealing process for Filecoin)NTT acceleration at ZPrizeStartups are using this to explore NTT and MSM accelerationOther boardsThe U55C in particular has been shown to provide a competitive and more power efficient alternative to GPUs for MSM acceleration in this study by Ingonyama called PipeMSM. There has been interest in U55C for NTT acceleration as well due to the high HBM capacity it provides (16GB).Research and documents on using FPGAs for ZK related implementation: pipeMSM CycloneMSM Hardcaml team’s Zprize webpage Projects using the C1100 board (These can be a good starting point for getting familiar with the hardware and tools):ZPrize submissions in the NTT categoryPoseidon hash implementation from the Adaptive Computing 2021 challenge conducted by Hackster.ioDocumentation on tools and boards:Vitis unified software tutorialAlveo debug guideAlveo usage documentationVitis for CUDA developersGitHub Repositories: NVIDIA CGBN Labs GitHub Xilinx Hyperledger Fabric GitHub ZPrize GitHub Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Ingonyama’s mission is to improve the performance of Zero-Knowledge Provers by designing hardware optimized for ZK computation. They are proud to introduce their latest project, ICICLE. For ideas and discussion around the code, visit the ICICLE channel in the Ingonyama discord server, where team members and fellow developers await. If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on YouTube Read transcript

In this 2-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo. Through these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical techniques in ZKPs that can be optimized for and the tricks and strategies that ZPrize competitors used to achieve these optimizations. In Part 1 of the series, Anna and Alex first interview Luke Pearson from Polychain Capital, who was an architect on the ZPrize. They then interview Ben Devlin and Rahul Yesantharao from Jane Street who were members of one of the winning teams, Hardcaml. Here are some additional links for this episode:ZPrize.ioHardcaml ZPrize Episode 221: Funding the Next Wave of Zero Knowledge Tech Zerocaf: Short ring signatures with Bulletproofs PLONK: Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge PlonKup: Reconciling PlonK with plookup GZKP: A GPU Accelerated Zero-Knowledge Proof System Pippenger’s Multiproduct and Multiexponentiation Algorithms Tweet referenced in the interview with Luke about Hardware & Sum-checks Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Ever wish you could use existing rust libraries in ZK? This is a friendly reminder from the team at RISC Zero that you can! To learn more, check out the RISC Zero video tutorials from the last ZK Hack at https://www.youtube.com/@risczero. Follow them on twitter @risczero to make sure you don’t miss their upcoming 1.0 launch and the alpha launch of the Bonsai Network.If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on Youtube Read transcript

This week, Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra dive back into the topic of ZK ML with guests Yi Sun, co-founder of Axiom, and Daniel Kang, Assistant Professor of computer science at UIUC. They discuss Yi and Daniel’s previous academic work and what led them to get interested in ZK topics and specifically ZK ML. They then dive into a discussion about 2 recent papers which examine the use of ZK within Machine Learning architectures. Here are some additional links for this episode:Episode 246: Adversarial Machine Learning Research with Florian Tramèr Trustless Verification of Machine LearningEfficient Verifiable Image Redacting based on zk-SNARKs ZK-IMG: Attested Images via Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Fight DisinformationScaling up Trustless DNN Inference with Zero-Knowledge ProofsYi Sun’s Profile Daniel Kang’s ProfileApply for ZK Hack Lisbon here: ZK Hack application Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo by visiting http://developer.aleo.org.You can also participate in Aleo’s incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate.For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on Youtube Read transcript

In this episode, Anna chats with Hadrien Charlanes from Sismo. They discuss his early experiences in blockchain development and DeFi, and how this led him to build Sismo, a decentralized identity product with privacy preserving properties. They also cover the ZK badge concept: how they're minted and what is happening under the hood as well as interesting emerging use cases using these zk-based on-chain instruments. Here are some additional links for this episode:Sismo.io What is Sismo? Sismo Governance Documentation Factory.sismo.io Hadrien Charlanes TwitterSismo’s Twitter Episode 260: ZK in 2023 with Kobi, Guillermo, and TarunZK HACK III - Introduction to ZK Badges and ZK Attesters - SismoWorldcoin Find out more about zkSummit9 here: zksummit.com.Apply for ZK Hack Lisbon here: ZK Hack application Anoma’s first fractal instance, Namada, is launching soon! Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy. Namada natively interoperates with fast-finality chains via IBC and with Ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge. Visit namada.net for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on Youtube Read transcript

This week, Anna catches up with Zaki Manian, co-founder of Iqlusion and Sommelier. They embark on a comprehensive recap of the history of Cosmos to-date, covering all ground since their last interview 2 years ago. They also dive into topics such as the IBC launch, Osmosis, how the ecosystem grew and accelerated up until the Luna crash and how it continues to recover in its next phase.They then chat about Sommelier and how it has evolved, as well as the concepts of emerging asset types, such as real world assets, and how ZKPs for privacy may finally find a product market fit that could build up real market adoption. You won’t want to miss this one!Here are some additional links for this episode:Episode 108: Catch up with Zaki Manian from TendermintEpisode 174: Through the Cosmos Stargate UpgradeEpisode 201: DeFi’s Multichain Future with Zaki Manian from Sommelier ATOM 2.0 Whitepaper ATOM 2.0 Forum DiscussioniqlusionSommelierApply for zkSummit9 here: zkSummit9 Ticket Application. Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo by visiting http://developer.aleo.org You can also participate in Aleo’s incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No sign-up is necessary to participate.For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on YoutubeHead to the ZK Community ForumSupport our Gitcoin Grant Read transcript

In this week's episode, Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan chat with Carl and Trent from the Ethereum Foundation, covering many topics such as their work on the KZG Ceremony and how this is different from the previous trusted setups we have covered. The group takes a deep dive into trusted setups, discussing what they are for, how they have been run and how the setup is going so far. They also discuss Proto-Danksharding and EIP-4844 - a novel way to organize data logistics for Ethereum.Here are some additional links for this episode:KZG Ceremony Episode 76: Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups & Elliptic Curve Cryptography Episode 133: Trusted Setup Ceremonies Explored Episode 137: Trusted Setup Bonus: Tornado CashProto-Danksharding EIP-4844 Powers-of-Tau to the People: Decentralizing Setup Ceremonies by Nikolaenko, Ragsdale, Bonneau, Dan Boneh, 2022Apply for zkSummit9 here: zkSummit9 Ticket Application. Aztec Network is building a next-generation encrypted blockchain powered by Ethereum. Aztec is now hiring engineers and cryptographers to build an execution layer enabling scale and privacy for crypto applications.Join the team making encrypted Ethereum a reality. Learn more by visiting: aztec.network/careers Anoma’s first fractal instance, Namada, is launching soon! Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy. Namada natively interoperates with fast-finality chains via IBC and with Ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge. Visit namada.net for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada. If you like what we do:Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree Subscribe to our podcast newsletterFollow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefmJoin us on TelegramCatch us on YoutubeHead to the ZK Community ForumSupport our Gitcoin Grant Read transcript