Zero knowledge proof systems have found tremendous cryptographic utility in scaling blockchains, due to their ability to prove computational integrity, succinctly. However, despite recent advancements in ZKP R&D, their construction still requires special prover circuits. Their complexity is what gatekeeps zero knowledge technology to a select few astute teams. =nil; Foundation aims to challenge this status quo by providing an alternative through their zkLLVM circuit compiler and zk proof marketplace. By commoditising the production of custom proofs, =nil; Foundation unlocks an entire new range of applications employing zero knowledge technology.

We were joined by Misha Komarov, co-founder of =nil; Foundation, to discuss the use cases and challenges of building the first marketplace for (outsourced) zero knowledge proofs.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The vision behind =nil; Foundation
• Use cases for zk tech
• zkLLVM circuit compiler
• Homomorphic encryption, ZKPs & privacy solutions
• ZKP marketplace
• Why proof markets (currently) run on DBMS
• Marketplace actors
• Proof generators vs. PoW miners
• Infrastructure challenges
• Future roadmap

Episode links:

• Mikhail Komarov on Twitter
• =nil; Foundation on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/514

Apart from its numerous financial applications, blockchain technology could also disrupt the gaming industry, causing a paradigm shift towards true digital ownership, one that would create new incentive models for both players, as well as developers. Up until recently, technological barriers seemed cumbersome for most game developers, but the advancements of layer 2 scaling solutions made on-chain integrations viable. Immutable set out to create an all-in-one platform for developers, empowering them to create a lush gaming ecosystem to seamlessly onboard Web2 players.

We were joined by Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable, to discuss the state of Web3 gaming and Immutable's contribution to this paradigm shift.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Robbie’s background and founding Immutable
• The pitfalls of centralised in-game asset marketplaces
• Web3 game development challenges
• Onboarding the Web2 gaming scene
• Immutable’s value prop
• Integrating Polygon’s zkEVM with the STARK-powered Immutable X
• Immutable SDK & DevEx
• AppStore’s Web3 policies
• Immutable Passport
• Enforceable royalties
• $IMX

Episode links:

• Robbie Ferguson on Twitter
• Immutable on Twitter
• Gods Unchained on Twitter
• Guild of Guardians on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/511

Social media revolves around content creation, and while the content itself could be tokenised through NFTs, SocialFi aims to take it a step further. The recently released friend.tech app went to show that users might be interested in something more than just content - creator shares. This implicitly links back to handles and profiles, and we can slowly start to unveil the primitives of social media. Lens Protocol predates the friend.tech venture, in both timeline, as well as scope. While social media became synonymous with monopolistic central entities, Lens Protocol aims to build the decentralised bedrock for Web3’s social layer. These primitives would not only be interoperable with any Web3 application, but they would redefine content creation, feed generation and monetisation.

We were joined by Stani Kulechov, founder of Lens Protocol & Aave, to discuss decentralised social graphs and how to leverage smart contracts to build the primitives for Web3's social layer.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The vision behind Lens
• Lens V2 and smart contract capabilities
• Social media development platform
• Defining the Web3 social media primitive
• Feed generation algorithm on Lens
• Integrating on-chain and off-chain infrastructure
• The tragedy of the commons in decentralised social media
• Can a public good architecture also accommodate private goods?
• Growth model, sponsored transactions and monetisation
• Governance and decentralised social media

Episode links:

• Stani Kulechov on Twitter
• Lens Protocol on Twitter
• Aave on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/512

The maximal extractable value (MEV) problem, if left unchecked, could represent an existential threat to Ethereum’s core values. One might argue that it is a natural result of solving market inefficiencies, but it entices to centralisation and collusion in order to extract the highest amount of value. Additionally, through front-running and back-running, it creates unnecessary overhead, which caused up to 2.4% of the total network congestion back in DeFi summer of 2020 (according to Flashbots’ research). As current infrastructure cannot eliminate MEV altogether, Flashbots and other research groups have tried to come up with solutions to address its aftermath.

We were joined by Stephane Gosselin, co-founder of Flashbots and Frontier Research, to discuss the MEV landscape, what research breakthroughs have been recorded and how they impact DevEx and UX.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Reflecting on ‘Frontrunning the MEV crisis’
• Decentralising the MEV ‘supply chain’
• The vision behind Frontier Research
• Request-for-Quotation (RFQ) explained
• Block building
• Uniswap X and how it might impact LPs & block building
• Decentralising block building
• Proposer-builder separation (PBS)
• MEV burn
• How MEV influenced different applications’ UX
• Intents

Episode links:

• Stephane Gosselin on Twitter
• Frontier Research
• Frontier Research on Twitter
• Flashbots

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/511

From the very beginning, Cosmos set out to provide an alternative to the monolithic blockchain architecture proposed by Ethereum. Cosmos SDK was the cornerstone of this vision, as it allowed developers to spin up blockchains effortlessly. Its modularity enabled custom, self-sovereign chains to become a reality. And, instead of being a jack of all trades, those chains were centred around a sole purpose, thus transforming them into appchains. In turn, as the ecosystem grew, appchains had to be interoperable with one another, but this was already a core feature of Cosmos, via IBC. Before Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap, appchains were thought to be a much-needed scaling solution. However, with the advancements of zero knowledge technology, the Cosmos SDK now faces another set of challenges as it navigates the market demand for L2 scaling solutions.

We were joined by Marko Baricevic, Cosmos SDK product lead, to discuss the development philosophy behind the Cosmos Hub and how appchains evolved over time.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Marko’s background
• Cosmos SDK’s history and high-level overview
• Cosmos SDK modules and VMs
• Ethereum’s & Cosmos’ development philosophies
• Cosmos SDK value prop and use cases
• Cosmos SDK vs. other frameworks (e.g. Substrate)
• Token value accrual and the fragmentation dilemma
• Using the Cosmos SDK to build rollups
• Cosmos SDK vs. Avalanche’s HyperSDK
• Adoption of fraud proofs and validity proofs by the Cosmos SDK

Episode links:

• Marko Baricevic on Twitter
• Cosmos on Twitter
• Cosmos SDK on Twitter
• Interchain Foundation on Twitter
• Binary Builders on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/510

What started out as Matic Network, in 2017, and later rebranded to Polygon, in 2021, it is now facing another major milestone: Polygon 2.0. Apart from a tokenomics update, their plans include building an aggregation layer for every scaling solution that will settle on Ethereum. This will not only provide crucial rollup interoperability, but it will also further offload Ethereum by recursively combining multiple proofs into a single one.

We were joined by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, for a fascinating discussion on Polygon’s future revamp, their views on infrastructure decentralisation and interoperability.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Sandeep’s background and the vision behind Matic
• Polygon 2.0
• ZK rollup vs. Validium
• Multi-purpose sharding
• Tokenomics
• Staking decentralisation
• Interoperability
• The multi-chain future outlook
• Blockchain adoption and use cases

Episode links:

• Sandeep Nailwal on Twitter
• Polygon on Twitter
• Polygon Labs on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/509

After a 2021 frothy bull market, NFTs are currently experiencing the depression phase of the market cycle. However, despite the fact that only NFT art has truly found its product-market fit, NFTs in general represented the consumerist moment for crypto. In addition, they also provided a solution for tokenising real world assets (RWA) and intangibles, potentially penetrating markets worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. Moreover, similar to digital art, the advent of AI poses a challenge when it comes to establishing provenance, but this represents another utility for NFTs, as they can be traced back to their origin, given the public nature of blockchains.

We were joined by Stephen Young and Storm from NFTFi, to discuss the general state of the NFT market, future prospects for NFT development and how their P2P NFT lending platform unlocks new sources of liquidity in this bear market.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Stephen’s & Storm’s backgrounds and what allured them to NFT finance
• NFT market overview
• Tokenised real world assets (RWA)
• NFTFi’s peer-to-peer vs. peer-to-pool models
• How other DeFi derivatives apply to the NFT market
• NFT vs. fungible token market size
• Blur’s Blend
• NFT royalties
• NFT lending protocols differences
• How escrow contracts affect NFT ownership and utility
• NFTFi roadmap
• Interest rates for different collections
• NFT art market
• AI art
• Collateralizing RWA

Episode links:

• Stephen Young on Twitter
• Storm on Twitter
• NFTFi on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/508

Ethereum scaling solutions often resort to tradeoffs, sacrificing security or decentralisation in favour of scalability. However, zk rollups hold the potential of increasing throughput, while also inheriting the layer 1’s security. This is achieved through zero knowledge validity proofs, which are published on Ethereum mainnet. The final hurdle remains the sequencer decentralisation. zkSync was designed around EVM-compatibility, offering custom scaling solutions through its hyperchain architecture.

We were joined by Alex Gluchowski, co-founder & CEO of Matter Labs, to discuss the zk rollup landscape, its bottlenecks, and what makes zkSync stand apart as the most popular rollup.

Topics covered in this episode:

• High-level overview of zero knowledge proofs
• ZK rollups
• zkSync Era
• ZK ecosystem taxonomy
• Rollup performance: bottlenecks & tradeoffs
• Bridging between zkSync hyperchains
• Data availability. Validium vs. Volition
• Governance & security layers
• Sequencer decentralisation

Episode links:

• Alex Gluchowski on Twitter
• zkSync on Twitter
• Matter Labs on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/507

The recent history of L2s has shown that there doesn’t need to be ‘one chain to rule them all’ or an ‘ETH killer’. Instead, a healthier approach would be to find the best solution for a specific need, taking into consideration any potential tradeoffs. Avalanche has done just that, focusing from the get-go on delivering high transaction throughput, using their unique subnet architecture, consensus protocol and warp messaging. HyperSDK continues this conviction, offering a framework for developers to spin up customisable, high performance virtual machines.

We were joined by Patrick O’Grady, VP of Engineering at Ava Labs, to discuss HyperSDK and how it enables building customisable, high performance VMs on Avalanche subnets.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Patrick’s background
• Avalanche’s consensus protocol
• Subnets
• AvalancheGo design concepts
• Warp messaging
• Staking and subnet validators
• HyperSDK
• HyperSDK vs. Cosmos SDK
• Avalanche throughput parameters
• Custom solutions for developers

Episode links:

• Patrick O'Grady on Twitter
• Ava Labs on Twitter
• Avalanche on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/506

We couldn’t miss EthCC 6 and we got to sit down with Vitalik Buterin to discuss hot topics from the Ethereum ecosystem: MEV, staking derivatives, privacy, decentralisation and future interoperability. Ethereum’s merge to proof-of-stake brought with it the emergence of liquid staking derivatives (LSD). Similarly to mining pools in proof-of-work consensus models, staking pools could pose a risk to Ethereum’s decentralisation. In terms of privacy preserving solutions, the advances in zero knowledge research were a big breakthrough, especially as EVM-compatibility became possible. Maximal extractable value (MEV) remains a pressing matter, but hopes are that the upcoming proposer-builder separation (PBS) will alleviate it.

Topics covered in this episode:

• EthCC 6 updates and development across Ethereum’s ecosystem
• MEV and proposer-builder separation (PBS)
• Liquid staking derivatives (LSD), governance and decentralisation
• Privacy
• ZK proofs and decentralised identifiers (DID)
• Ecosystem interoperability
• Cross-chain bridge security
• Conclusions

Episode links:

• Vitalik Buterin
• Ethereum Foundation on Twitter
• EthCC on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Friederike Ernst & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/505