This week, Anna and Ariel Gabizon cover the SNARK trilogy; a history of pairing-based SNARKs in 3 acts. Starting from Jens Groth’s early works on SNARKs, Ariel takes us on a journey through key moments and breakthroughs in SNARKs over the last decade. They also dive into the emerging accumulation research on folding schemes and Ariel’s latest work surrounding lookup tables! This is an episode you won’t want to miss. Here are some additional links for this episode: Relevant Jens Groth Papers Short Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Jens Groth Short Pairing-based Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Arguments by Jens Groth On the Size of Pairing-based Non-interactive Arguments by Jens Groth Zero-knowledge Argument for Polynomial Evaluation with Application to Blacklists by Stephanie Bayer and Jens Groth PLONK-Relative Papers PLONK: Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge by Gabizon, Williamson, Ciobotaru HyperPlonk: Plonk with Linear-Time Prover and High-Degree Custom Gates by Chen, Bünz, Boneh and Zhang Proposal: The Turbo-PLONK program syntax for specifying SNARK programs by Gabizon and Williamson Lookup-Relative Papers plookup: A simplified polynomial protocol for lookup tables by Gabizon and Williamson Caulk: Lookup Arguments in Sublinear Time by Zapico, Buterin, Khovratovich, Maller, Nitulescu and Simkin A Close Look at a Lookup Argument - Mary Maller at The 13th BIU Winter School on cryptography cq: Cached quotients for fast lookups by Eagen, Fiore, and Gabizon Additional Resources Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation by Parno, Howell, Gentry and Raykova Sonic: Zero-Knowledge SNARKs from Linear-Size Universal and Updateable Structured Reference Strings by Maller, Bowe, Kohlweiss, and Meiklejohn Perpetual Powers of Tau GitHub Delegating Computation: Interactive Proofs for Muggles by Goldwasser, Kalai and Rothblum Efficient Zero-Knowledge Arguments for Arithmetic Circuits in Discrete Log Setting by Bootle, Cerulli, Chaidos, Groth and Petit Nova: Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments from Folding Schemes by Kothapalli, Setty and Tzialla Episode 232: Cutting Edge ZK Research with Mary Maller ZK Whiteboard Sessions - Module Six: Lookup Tables for Performance Optimisation Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. 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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on YouTube

In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose sits down with Zac Williamson, the CEO of Aztec. Anna and Zac dive deep into the history of Plonk, one of the most important proving systems to emerge in the last 5 years. Zac explains how the initial ideas came to be, how it was developed with co-author Ariel Gabizon, and how the system has evolved over time, branching out into many different iterations of Plonk, leading up to his recent work on Goblin Plonk. The conversation also touches on Aztec's cutting-edge technology stack, including their Noir zkDSL and their planned private programmable L2, Aztec 3. Zac shares his insights on the state of ZK applications and folding schemes, and provides a glimpse into the future of the ZK space. Here’s some additional links for this episode: StarkWare Sessions 23 | Privacy Preserving Smart Contract Architectures | Zac Williamson High Level Overview of Goblin Plonk: lazy recursive proof composition by Zac Williamson Spec for Goblin Plonk: lazy recursive proof composition by Zac Williamson Goblin Plonk Slides by Zac Williamson Episode 75: Exploring Aztec with Zac Williamson Episode 112: Dive into Plonk! Episode 176: Zk-zk-rollup & zk.money with Zac and Joe from Aztec Episode 236: Aztec Connect and Private DeFi with Charlie and Joe Episode 237: Exploring ZK Research with Jens Groth Episode 242: Halo 2 with Daira Hopwood and Str4d ZK Whiteboard Sessions – Interview with Ariel Gabizon on The PLONK Origin Story and Roadmap ZK8: Hyperplonk: PLONK without FFTs and with high degree gates - Benedikt Bünz Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. Find your next job working in ZK! 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 that enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of ZKPs to deploy decentralized exchanges, hidden information games, regulated stablecoins, and more. Visit http://developer.aleo.org. 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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on YouTube

This week, Anna Rose interviews Avery Ching, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Aptos Labs. They cover Avery’s working history, including his time working on Meta’s Blockchain project, what this experience meant to him and how this led to the creation of Aptos. They discuss Aptos as it stands today, Avery’s experience of building in the current market and the unique qualities of the Aptos project. Here are some additional links for this episode: HotStuff: BFT Consensus with Linearity and Responsiveness by Maofan Yin, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Guy Golan Gueta and Ittai Abraham Narwhal and Tusk: A DAG-based Mempool and Efficient BFT Consensus by George Danezis, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Alberto Sonnino, Alexander Spiegelman Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs. 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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on Youtube

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 confession ZK Hack Lisbon closing ceremony ZK Hack Lisbon Winner's list Twitter post ZK Hack Lisbon projects & website zkSummit video playlist (including part of the zkSummit9 videos - more coming soon!) zkpod.ai announcement tweet from Kobi Gurkan Anna's reaction to zkpod.ai Check 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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on YouTube

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 Twitter Sunscreen 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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on Youtube

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 Chitra Credible, Optimal Auctions via Blockchains by Kulkarni, Ferreira and Chitra Optimal Strategic Mining Against Cryptographic Self-Selection in Proof-of-Stake by Kulkarni, Ferreira and Chitra Credible Auctions: A Trilemma by Akbarpour and Li Credible, 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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on YouTube

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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on YouTube

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 ZPrize Startups are using this to explore NTT and MSM acceleration Other boards The 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 category Poseidon hash implementation from the Adaptive Computing 2021 challenge conducted by Hackster.io Documentation on tools and boards: Vitis unified software tutorial Alveo debug guide Alveo usage documentation Vitis for CUDA developers GitHub 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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on YouTube

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.io](Zprize.io) Hardcaml 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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on Youtube

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 Learning Efficient Verifiable Image Redacting based on zk-SNARKs ZK-IMG: Attested Images via Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Fight Disinformation Scaling up Trustless DNN Inference with Zero-Knowledge Proofs Yi Sun’s Profile Daniel Kang’s Profile 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 newsletter Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm Join us on Telegram Catch us on Youtube