Episode 322: Definitions, Security and Sumcheck in ZK Systems with Justin Thaler

In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo catch up with Justin Thaler, Associate Professor at Georgetown and Research Partner at a16z.

The group dive into a handful of points from Justin’s ‘17 Misconceptions about SNARKs’ article, discussing if his views have changed since it was published back in 2023 and whether some points have become common knowledge since the article first rippled through the ZK community. They then dive into his new zkVM Jolt, which was initially described along with Lasso in 2023, but has now been implemented and is open to contributions from the community.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

17 misconceptions about SNARKs (and why they hold us back) by Justin Thaler

ZK Hack Discord: contains Study Club, Thaler Book Club and more

Approaching the 'lookup singularity': Introducing Lasso and Jolt

Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

zkStudyClub - Lasso/Jolt (Justin Thaler, Georgetown University/a16z)

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Book

Episode 103: Exploring VDFs with Joseph Bonneau

Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Justin Thaler

Episode 261: Proofs, Arguments, and ZKPs with Justin Thaler

The MoonMath Manual by Least Authority

ZK Hack Whiteboard Sessions

Unlocking the lookup singularity with Lasso by Setty, Thaler and Wahby

Jolt: SNARKs for Virtual Machines via Lookups by Arun, Setty and Thaler

Justin Thaler a16z Articles

Episode 293: Exploring Security of ZK Systems with Nethermind’s Michał & Albert

Fiat-Shamir Security of FRI and Related SNARKs by Block, Garreta, Katz, Thaler, Tiwari and Zając

Fiat-Shamir Transformation of Multi-Round Interactive Proofs by Attema, Fehr and Klooß

Caulk: Lookup Arguments in Sublinear Time by Zapico, Buterin, Khovratovich, Maller, Nitulescu and Simkin

Spartan: Efficient and general-purpose zkSNARKs without trusted setup by Srinath Setty

Stwo Prover: The next-gen of STARK scaling is here

The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com

Launching soon, Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 blockchain focused on multichain, asset-agnostic privacy, via a unified shielded set. Namada is natively interoperable with fast-finality chains via IBC, and with Ethereum using a trust-minimised bridge.

Follow Namada on Twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/

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