In this week’s episode, Anna and Robert Habermeier chat with Pratyush Mishra, co-author of the Arkworks toolkit. Arkworks is a collection of Rust libraries designed to simplify development with SNARKs, both for developing high-level application circuits and building custom SNARK implementations.

Pratyush lays out what possibilities and trade-offs Arkworks offers, diving into the details of the Rust implementation and why it is the best language for developing cryptographic primitives. Anna, Rob and Pratyush then branch out into the philosophical and practical questions of open-source and blockchain development.

Here are a few links to Arkworks and the topics they discussed:

Arkworks GitHub page and Telegram group.

Pratyush’s GitHub, Twitter and Berkeley pages.

Bellman and Libsnark, some of the other libraries that are similar to Arkworks.

The Celo and Mina protocols, two major projects using Arkworks.

Here is a basic explainer of what projects like Arkworks are trying to do and why it’s useful, with a particular focus on ZoKrates, one of the languages Pratyush mentioned.

Intros to Circom, Leo and Zinc, some of the higher level languages.

An earlier episode with Robert Habermeier about the work he does on Polkadot.

Be sure to subscribe to the zkMesh Newsletter - a monthly rundown of the latest in decentralised privacy-preserving technologies, privacy protocol development and zero knowledge systems research. Put together by Anna & Mikerah (HashCloak).

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting and product development company known for pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates and cryptographers. They have developed an end-to-end encrypted cloud storage product that minimizes the collection of any data related to its users, called PrivateStorage.

PrivateStorage implements privacy and security by design, not by policy.

PrivateStorage is based on Tahoe-LAFS an open source distributed file store

PrivateStorage is launching in the second half of this year. Visit PrivateStorage.io to learn more and to sign up to be notified about its release.

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