ZK Podcast
321 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 days ago - ★★★★★ - 90 ratingsThis community is built around the Zero Knowledge Podcast, a weekly show which goes deep into zk and blockchain topics and features interviews with top technical minds building decentralised tech and blockchain networks.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Episode 252: From Wireless to Blockchains with Pramod Viswanath
November 02, 2022 14:00In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Pramod Viswanath, Professor of Engineering at Princeton and co-founder of Witness Chain. They discuss Pramod’s early work on wireless networks and the introduction of adversarial thinking into his research, his move over to blockchain, how the incentives of blockchain could be used within the wireless industry The post Episode 252: From Wireless to Blockchains with Pramod Viswanath appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 251: Exploring RISC Zero with Brian Retford and Jeremy Bruestle
October 26, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with Brian Retford and Jeremy Bruestle from Risc0. They discuss their previous work in cloud infrastructure and how ZK offered unique solutions to long standing scaling problems. The post Episode 251: Exploring RISC Zero with Brian Retford and Jeremy Bruestle appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 250: What’s the Deal with Hash Functions?
October 19, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi Gurkan speak with Dmitry Khovratovich, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, Dusk Network, and ABDK Consulting and JP Aumasson, CSO at Taurus. The post Episode 250: What’s the Deal with Hash Functions? appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 249: Impact of Tornado Cash: a Builders Perspective
October 12, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna and Martin Köppelmann, Co-Founder of Gnosis discuss the OFAC sanctions against Tornado Cash and the impact this has had on builders in the community. The post Episode 249: Impact of Tornado Cash: a Builders Perspective appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 248: Revisiting FHE with Rand Hindi from Zama
October 05, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna revisits the topic of FHE with Rand Hindi, CEO at Zama. They cover the FHE landscape, what specific use cases it is ideal for, where the technology is at and how FHE differs from MPC and ZK. They explore some of the nuances of the different types of approaches to FHE to achieve this cryptographic environment where one can do computation in a truly private manner. The post Episode 248: Revisiting FHE with Rand Hindi from Zama appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 247: Exploring Penumbra with Henry de Valence
September 28, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo catch up with Henry de Valence from Penumbra. They discuss his thoughts on requirements for adoption of privacy systems and how these led to him to develop Penumbra. They explore how Penumbra aims to use privacy features not as ‘nice to haves' within the system, but rather as essential components that offer a new paradigm for how to think about DeFi in a Multichain Ecosystem. The post Episode 247: Exploring Penumbra with Henry de Valence appeared ...
Episode 241: Deconstructing Bridges with Vaibhav Chellani
August 17, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Vaibhav Chellani, a bridge builder and the co-founder of Socket. They explore what makes up the components of a bridge, the types of bridges, and then look at their framework for analysing the security trade-offs of different bridge architectures. This is an important topic, since at present, there are more and more bridges coming online to connect all the different chains together. And with these come a number of new bugs, hacks and exploits. This epi...
Episode 240: Composable Privacy with Manta Network
August 10, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with Shumo Chu, co-founder of Manta Network.They discuss the origin story of the project and how they aim to bring privacy to web3. They explore how the unique accessibility that Polkadot parachain enables, the work they do on building ZK tooling and libraries for the general ZK community. They then take a look at their plans for a multi-asset shielded pool and the future they have planned for Manta projects and more. The post Episode 240: Composa...
Episode 239: IST and Designing Stablecoins in Cosmos
August 03, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Zaki from Sommelier and Dean from Agoric. They check-in with the latest project news, recap about the UST collapse, and look into IST - Inter Stable Token - a project by the Agoric team that aims to become the Cosmos native multi collateral stablecoin. The post Episode 239: IST and Designing Stablecoins in Cosmos appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Bonus: Apply to zkSummit 8
July 29, 2022 00:00No full episode this week. Just a quick message to let you know about the upcoming zkSummit 8 - happening in Berlin Sept 15 2022. The post Bonus: Apply to zkSummit 8 appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 238: Aurora and Near with Alex and Illia
July 13, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna talks with Illia from Near and Alex from Aurora about the work they did that lead them to the Near ecosystem and what the connection is between the Aurora project and Near. They also cover what’s new at Near since the last time Illia and Anna spoke, Aurora+, the Rainbow Bridge, and future plans with Near’s sharding system. The post Episode 238: Aurora and Near with Alex and Illia appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 237: Exploring ZK Research with Jens Groth
July 06, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with guest Jens Groth, Director of Research at DFINITY and previously professor at Department of Computer Science, UCL. Jens Groth is a leading ZK researcher and is behind a number of advances in the field of ZK in the last few years such as the popular proving system Groth16. The conversation covers his earlier career, the cryptographic problems he tackled in his research, how he solved these, the results of this work as well as his move from resea...
Introducing: the ZK Whiteboard Sessions!
July 06, 2022 12:14“What are the best resources for learning about zero knowledge?” is a question we hear often in the zk channels. […] The post Introducing: the ZK Whiteboard Sessions! appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Announcing zkSummit8!
July 04, 2022 16:29We return for the 8th addition of the zkSummit in Berlin. This one-day invite-only event will consist of a mixture […] The post Announcing zkSummit8! appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 236: Aztec Connect and Private DeFi with Charlie and Joe
June 29, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna checks in with Aztec, a ZK-based privacy L2 project. She speaks with Joe Andrews and Lead Engineer, Charles Julian. They discuss some of the team’s most important ZK research and implementations such as Plonk and how bringing privacy to Ethereum could truly change the way we do DeFi. They also discuss Aztec Connect and how it relates to zk.money, the Aztec roadmap with future projects like DSL Noir and Aztec 3, as well as a quick postmortem on the halted Aztec Co...
Episode 235: Mathematical Journeys & Sake with Guillermo Angeris
June 22, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode we return back to DevConnect in Amsterdam for a conversation between Anna and returning guest Guillermo Angeris of Bain Capital Crypto for a couple of shots of sake and math! They cover Guillermo’s personal journey into math, math history in general, consider how to bring more people into the space and the potential opportunities and downsides of bringing some kinds of math mainstream. The post Episode 235: Mathematical Journeys & Sake with Guillermo Angeris appeared ...
Episode 234: zkEVM with Scroll’s Ye Zhang and Haichen Shen
June 15, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Ye Zhang and Haichen Shen, the founders of Scroll - a native zkEVM Layer 2 Solution for Ethereum. They cover Scroll’s founding, the need to scale Ethereum, zkEVM philosophies, use cases and more. They wrap up with an exploration of how DApps and products on top of such as zkEVM may interact with the mainchain and with other applications. The post Episode 234: zkEVM with Scroll’s Ye Zhang and Haichen Shen appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 233: Through the Wormhole with Jump Crypto
June 08, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Rahul Magani, the applied zk lead at Jump Crypto, and Hendrik Hofstadt, project lead at Wormhole Crypto. They look at how Wormhole first came to be, the challenges of interoperability, the design decisions they made in balancing security, speed and functionality, the risks facing these types of solutions, including the famous Wormhole hack, what the future holds and how they aim to explore using zk in bridging. The post Episode 233: Through the Wormh...
Episode 232: Cutting Edge ZK Research with Mary Maller
June 01, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna and co-host Kobi Gurkan chat with Mary Maller, a ZK Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. They cover Mary’s journey into cryptography, her work on trusted setups, universal SNARKs, Plookup tables, the work she and Kobi did on aggregatable DKGs, her work at the EF and more. The post Episode 232: Cutting Edge ZK Research with Mary Maller appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 231: Argent’s Smart Contract Wallet Design with Julien Niset
May 25, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Julien Niset, co-founder of Argent, about crypto wallets. They explore the history of wallet design, the interfaces we use for the decentralized web, the importance of account abstraction, smart contract wallets and Argent’s bet on ZK rollups. The post Episode 231: Argent’s Smart Contract Wallet Design with Julien Niset appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 230: Designing Optimistic Interoperability with Nomad
May 18, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Anna Caroll and James Prestwich from Nomad. Together they explore the Nomad optimistic interoperability solution, how it first was developed, what lessons it takes from previous attempts at interoperability and cross-chain bridging, how the system works and more. The post Episode 230: Designing Optimistic Interoperability with Nomad appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 229: Going Cross-Chain with Polkadot’s XCM
May 11, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna dives back into the Polkadot world with friend and occasional co-host Rob Habermeier from Parity. They cover XCM - the Cross-Consensus Messaging format - and how XCM allows parachains to speak to one another, passing messages through the validators on the relay chain via XCMP Cross-Chain Message Passing. The post Episode 229: Going Cross-Chain with Polkadot’s XCM appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 228: Catch-up at DevConnect AMS with Tarun, Guillermo and Brendan
May 04, 2022 13:00In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Tarun, Guillermo and Brendan at DevConnect Amsterdam to cover a range of interesting and random topics like how blockchain and AI thinking differs, where it could intersect and how ZK tech could be implemented, how science could benefit from more adversarial testing, why peer review is broken, math theory, takeaways from DevConnect and more! The post Episode 228: Catch-up at DevConnect AMS with Tarun, Guillermo and Brendan appeared first on ZK P...
Episode 227: Move & Sui with Sam Blackshear from Mysten Labs
April 27, 2022 13:30In this week’s episode, [Anna](https://twitter.com/annarrose) chats with [Sam Blackshear](https://twitter.com/b1ackd0g), co-founder and CTO at Mysten Labs. Sam has a background in programming language research and is one of the authors of the Move language, a language that can be used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. They chat about Mysten’s concept of programmable objects and what properties are necessary to make this functional for a blockchain context. They also cover...
Episode 228: Move & Sui with Sam Blackshear from Mysten Labs
April 27, 2022 13:30In this week’s episode, [Anna](https://twitter.com/annarrose) chats with [Sam Blackshear](https://twitter.com/b1ackd0g), co-founder and CTO at Mysten Labs. Sam has a background in programming language research and is one of the authors of the Move language, a language that can be used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. They chat about Mysten’s concept of programmable objects and what properties are necessary to make this functional for a blockchain context. They also cover...
Episode 226: Interoperability with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar
April 20, 2022 13:00This week, Anna catches up with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar and revisits the topic of bridges. They chat about what led Sergey to work on interoperability, the problems these solutions try to solve, how it compares to existing solutions, and what's next for the project. They also chat about some of the challenges of a multi bridge landscape and the fragmentation of liquidity. The post Episode 226: Interoperability with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 227: Interoperability with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar
April 20, 2022 13:00This week, Anna catches up with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar and revisits the topic of bridges. They chat about what led Sergey to work on interoperability, the problems these solutions try to solve, how it compares to existing solutions, and what's next for the project. They also chat about some of the challenges of a multi bridge landscape and the fragmentation of liquidity. The post Episode 227: Interoperability with Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 225: Dark Forest and 0xPARC with Gubsheep
April 13, 2022 13:00This week, Anna catches up with Gubsheep from 0xPARC. They chat about Dark Forest – a decentralized zk-based RTS game, built on Ethereum. They cover how it has evolved in the past 2 years and what’s upcoming in the Dark Forest’s community, governance and experiments. They recap the recent Gitcoin GR13 ZK Tech side round, review some moonshot ideas for ZK projects of the future and discuss potential avenues of funding in the ZK space. Lastly, they dive deeper into the 0xPARC ecosystem by expl...
Episode 226: Dark Forest and 0xPARC with Gubsheep
April 13, 2022 13:00This week, Anna catches up with Gubsheep from 0xPARC. They chat about Dark Forest – a decentralized zk-based RTS game, built on Ethereum. They cover how it has evolved in the past 2 years and what’s upcoming in the Dark Forest’s community, governance and experiments. They recap the recent Gitcoin GR13 ZK Tech side round, review some moonshot ideas for ZK projects of the future and discuss potential avenues of funding in the ZK space. Lastly, they dive deeper into the 0xPARC ecosystem by expl...
Bonus: Jump into ZK
April 07, 2022 17:00No full episode this week! Just a little update. The post Bonus: Jump into ZK appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 224: Foundry with Georgios Konstantopoulos
March 30, 2022 13:00This week, Anna & Tarun catch up with Georgios Konstantopoulos from Paradigm - a key crypto VC. They chat about his move to CTO at the firm, the team he has built and what they are working on. Then they dive into Foundry - a fast, portable, modular testing toolkit for Ethereum app dev written in Rust. They discuss the tooling landscape, why Foundry is making a bet on solidity, the different types of testing that developers are doing and other open questions in the field. The post Episode 2...
Episode 223: Connecting Cosmos and Ethereum with Gravity Bridge
March 23, 2022 14:00This week, Anna chats with Deborah Simpier and Justin Kilpatrick, co-founders of Althea and the team working on Gravity Bridge. They start with the history of the Althea project and how they aim to build an open marketplace for independent entities to create their own ISPs, providing bandwidth to users in under-connected areas. They then dive into the larger topic of bridges and the work being done on Gravity Bridge – a bridge that links Ethereum with IBC and the Cosmos ecosystem. They touch...
The Zero Knowledge Summit 7
March 17, 2022 18:33We’re excited to announce The Zero Knowledge Summit 7 application to attend is officially now live! This one-day invite-only event […] The post The Zero Knowledge Summit 7 appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 222: Something Brewing with Jill Gunter and Ben Fisch from Espresso Systems
March 16, 2022 14:00This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Jill Gunter and Ben Fisch from Espresso Systems. Espresso has been in stealth mode for a couple of months, but recently went public with their Proof of Stake L1, developed with flexible private applications and ZK rollups in mind. They explore the founding and development of the project, the Espresso base chain and the CAPE-wrapped privacy smart contract application that they've built. They walk through the programming model, the evolution of privacy techn...
ZK Hack Mini Finale + ZK Jobs Fair
March 15, 2022 10:03Spring’s here. And as ZK Hack Mini host Kobi Gurkan announced at the start of the event, there was something […] The post ZK Hack Mini Finale + ZK Jobs Fair appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 221: Funding the Next Wave of Zero Knowledge Tech
March 09, 2022 14:00This week Anna dives into the state of funding in the ZK space. She chats with a number of different groups who are all funding zero knowledge technology from different angles. She kicks off the conversation with her colleague from ZKValidator Susannah Evans and Gubsheep from 0xPARC about the Gitcoin side round they are leading which is focused on funding the next wave of ZK tech projects. She then chats with Arjun Karlsy, VP of Growth at Polygon about their massive commitment of 1 billion i...
Episode 220: The Road to Plonky2 with Brendan and Daniel from Polygon Zero
March 02, 2022 14:00This week, Anna chats with Brendan Farmer and Daniel Lubarov from Polygon Zero, formerly known as Mir, about their early experiments with different proving systems, their work combining PLONK and Halo called Plonky - as well as the more recent combination of PLONK plus FRI (a technique that is borrowed from STARKs) which makes up Plonky2. The post Episode 220: The Road to Plonky2 with Brendan and Daniel from Polygon Zero appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 219: Scaling Ethereum with Polygon’s Mihailo Bjelic
February 23, 2022 14:00This week, Anna chats with Mihailo Bjelic one of the co-founders of Polygon. Mihailo takes us through the evolution of Polygon and how the promise of web3 has led them to betting big on ZK-focused technologies. We learn about their approach to the two main challenges within their mission to scaling Ethereum – security and data availability; and how their suite of products aims to tackle these. Lastly, we hear about what’s next on the Polygon roadmap to onboarding the first billion to Ethereu...
Episode 218: Hardened JS and the Architecture of Agoric with Dean Tribble
February 16, 2022 14:00This week, Anna chats with Dean Tribble, co-founder and CEO of Agoric. Dean walks us through the landscape of programming languages and Agoric’s philosophy behind building a blockchain that has Hardened JS as its smart contract language. We hear about the two big challenges in using JavaScript in blockchain development, malleability and non-deterministic, and how Agoric addresses these. Dean explains the security implications of many popular blockchain languages and how this led them to buil...
Episode 217: Information Theory & Blockchain with Sreeram Kannan
February 09, 2022 14:00This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Sreeram Kannan, Associate Professor at University of Washington where he runs the UW Blockchain Lab. In this episode, they look at how information theory and blockchain intersect and map the progression of Bitcoin security. They discuss Sreeram’s early work on P2P mobile networks and how this evolved to work on consensus and fair sequencing. Sreeram takes us through his philosophical reasoning of shifting from genomic research to blockchain research and th...
Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc
February 02, 2022 14:00This week, Anna chats with Dean Eigenmann and Edgar Aroutiounian from Project Blanc, a team building bots and developing MEV strategies. They revisit the topic of MEV, what it is and how teams like Project Blanc work to capture it. They also dive into the concept of re-orgs, accelerationism as a philosophy and get a look at what goes on in the Dark Forest. The post Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 215: Charting Zodiac & DAOs with Nathan Ginnever and Auryn Macmillan
January 26, 2022 14:00This week Anna chats with Nathan Ginnever, an applied cryptographer and contributor to Zodiac, and Auryn Macmillan, a product manager and Solidity dev at Gnosis Guild, about the modules and components that make up Zodiac’s suite of composable DAO tooling. In the conversation, they explore the DAO landscape and the lessons they’ve gathered from earlier tools like the Gnosis Safe and SafeSnap. As well as run-through the components that make up the Zodiac standard, new upcoming innovations, the...
Episode 214: Emin Gün Sirer on Avalanche and its Formation
January 19, 2022 14:00This week Anna chats with Emin Gün Sirer - CEO Ava Labs and Founder of Avalanche. They chat about the experiences that led him to become interested in distributed systems research and his work as a professor at Cornell that led to the development of Avalanche. They then dig into their novel consensus mechanism which uses the sub-sampling technique, the architecture of the network with the 3 distinct components: X-Chain, C-Chain and P-Chain, bridges and more. The post Episode 214: Emin Gün...
Episode 213: zk-SNARKs meets Optimistic Rollup with Zkopru
January 12, 2022 14:00This week Anna chats with Wanseob an Applied ZKP Developer in the Privacy & Scaling Exploration Team at the Ethereum Foundation and one of the authors of the Zkopru protocol. They explore how Zkopru uses optimistic rollups and zero knowledge proofs to create a privacy-focused Layer 2. Wanseob walks us through the transaction process and how the protocol is built to circumvent high gas fees. We also hear a little about what’s to come in the Zkopru ecosystem from merchandising to private excha...
Episode 212: 2021 < 2022 with Co-hosts & Friends
January 05, 2022 14:00This week, Anna checks in with co-hosts & friends, Tarun Chitra, James Prestwich, Josh Cincinnati and Guillermo Angeris, for a retrospective look at 2021 and a look forward to 2022. Enjoy this conversation full of blasphemous hot takes, bad 2022 predictions and dad jokes. The post Episode 212: 2021 < 2022 with Co-hosts & Friends appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Bonus ZK Hack Wrap with Kobi!
December 31, 2021 19:00While we decided not to release a full episode this week, Anna did get a chance to catch up with Kobi Gurkan, one of the co-organizers of ZK Hack and someone who was very missed in the last episode about the event! The post Bonus ZK Hack Wrap with Kobi! appeared first on ZK Podcast.
Episode 211: It’s a wrap! ZK Hack Takeaways & What’s Next!
December 22, 2021 14:00This week, Anna hosts a special 5-part interview with a roundup of perspectives from ZK Hack. First, she chats with puzzle hackers who share what it was like to solve these real-world cryptography bugs and learn complex concepts in real time. They discuss how they got started learning in this space and the resources and tools that helped them. Next, Anna speaks with the puzzle builders on the challenges of designing and building these novel zk puzzles. They discuss the state of the community...
Episode 210: The Road to STARKs and Miden with Bobbin Threadbare
December 15, 2021 14:00This week, Anna chats with Bobbin Threadbare about his project Miden, a STARK-based roll-up which was recently purchased by Polygon. We recap the differences between STARKs and SNARKs and the increasingly blurred line between these two proving systems. We then map Bobbin’s journey to Miden VM (now Polygon Miden), how it originated from his earlier project Distaff VM and now incorporates the Winterfell prover from his days at Facebook. The post Episode 210: The Road to STARKs and Miden wit...
Episode 209: Liquid Staking with Lido and Chorus One
December 08, 2021 14:00This week Anna and Tarun chat with Vasiliy Shapovalov from Lido and Felix Lutsch of Chorus One about liquid staking on the ETH2 Proof of Stake consensus chain. Vasiliy explains Ethereum’s unique PoS validator setup and how liquid staking behaves on this network. They also talk about how liquid staking behaves on other live PoS, the inevitability of liquid staking and how to best design these systems. Lastly, they chat about navigating control and decision making in liquid staking protocols,...
Episode 208: Digging into Data Availability with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia
December 01, 2021 14:00This week Anna chats with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia about how and why they’re focusing on building a data availability-first L1 blockchain. Ismail takes us through how data availability can be a problem, primarily with light clients and breaks down the components necessary to understanding the data availability problem such as state changes, the separation of consensus from execution and how Celestia aims to be a pluggable consensus layer. The post Episode 208: Digging into Data Availabi...