In this episode, Anna Rose chats with Alex Pruden and Conor Deegan from Project 11. They revisit the topic of quantum computing and explore the threat it poses to cryptographic systems like blockchains. As blockchain technology becomes increasingly integrated into global financial infrastructure — especially through stablecoins and banking rails — the stakes for quantum security continue to rise. Alex and Conor break down which algorithms are most at risk, why simple network upgrades won’t be enough, and what users will need to do to protect their own funds. They also outline potential mitigation strategies, including how Project 11 is approaching the challenge with post-quantum signature schemes, secure vaults, and a global namespace to coordinate user migrations ahead of “Q-Day.”

The conversation also touched on how post-quantum thinking overlaps with zero-knowledge research, as hash- and lattice-based SNARKs offer resilience against future quantum attacks.

 

Related links:

 

ZK Podcast Previous Related Episodes on the topic:

 

 

ZK Whiteboard Sessions is an educational video series produced by ZK Hack in collaboration with Bain Capital Crypto.

It is focused on the building blocks of zero knowledge technology. Find season 3 of the Whiteboard Sessions as well as previous seasons here.

 

 

Check out the latest jobs in ZK at the ZK Podcast Jobs Board. 

 

 

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There is no episode this week, but we share some updates from the ZK Hack ecosystem.

Sign up here for ZK Mesh and find the latest module of ZK Whiteboard Season 3 here.

 

 

**If you like what we do:**

* Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree

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**Support the show:**

* Patreon

* ETH - Donation address

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* SOL - Donation address

 

In this episode, Anna Rose and Guillermo Angeris talk with Kevin Lacker, creator of Acorn, a theorem prover utilising AI. They explore what theorem provers are, their history, and how they're used today. Kevin shares how Acorn brings in AI to simplify the proving process, letting users naturally write mathematical statements while the system checks the correctness of those statements. It's built to feel more like natural math, unlike tools like Lean that demand every step.

They also explore the benefits of including AI in math, and also the challenges that come with it such as hallucinations, and how Acorn could speed up research in areas like zero-knowledge proofs. The dicussion also covers the history of mathematics, community building around Acorn and its open math library, acornlib.

 

Related links:

 

 

ZK Whiteboard Sessions is an educational video series produced by ZK Hack. It is focused on the building blocks of zero knowledge technology. Find season 3 of the Whiteboard Sessions as well as previous seasons here.

 

 

Check out the latest jobs in ZK at the ZK Podcast Jobs Board. 

 

 

**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

**Support the show:**

* Patreon

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In this episode, Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra catch up with Sid Gandhi and Calum Moore from Payy to discuss the Payy private payment system and the newly released Payy credit card. They explore their focus on building a user-friendly privacy focused product, how ZK tooling advancement makes this possible, and a walkthrough into how it works with the Visa remittance system. Sid and Cal explain Payy's design as a ZK Validium rollup on Polygon, using client-side proofs and a Merkle tree to ensure privacy and compliance.

The discussion also delves into the history and past challenges of self-sovereign payments; how self-sovereign money goals were overshadowed by speculation, why many new stablecoin projects feel like a step back to traditional finance, and how privacy-focused payments are making a comeback in 2025. 

Related links:

 

 

ZK Whiteboard Sessions is an educational video series produced by ZK Hack. It is focused on the building blocks of zero knowledge technology. Find season 3 of the Whiteboard Sessions as well as previous seasons here.

 

 

**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

**Support the show:**

* Patreon

* ETH - Donation address

* BTC - Donation address

* SOL - Donation address

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In this episode, Anna Rose chats with Théo Madzou and Michael Elliot from ZKPassport and Obsidion about their ZK-based identity solution. Théo shares his start in ZK through ZK Hack hackathons using Noir, while Mike shares his path from Bitcoin and MakerDAO to working on zkID systems. They explain how they teamed up to build ZKPassport, a non-profit public-good ZK identity solution project,and how they plan to bring it into Obsidion, a for-profit, privacy-focused fintech-style application that they’re working on.

They discuss Noir's evolution and their contribution to this accending zkDSL, how subcircuits and subproofs enable mobile proving, how ZKPassport differs from projects like Self and Rarimo, how they integrated ZKPassport in the wild with DevCon and Aztec, and their plans for better UX and user-friendly apps.

 

 

 

 

ZK Whiteboard Sessions is an educational video series produced by ZK Hack. It is focused on the building blocks of zero knowledge technology. Find season 3 of the Whiteboard Sessions as well as previous seasons here.

 

 

**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

 

**Support the show:**

* Patreon

* ETH - Donation address

* BTC - Donation address

* SOL - Donation address

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In this episode, Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan chat with Arnaud Brousseau and Jack Kearney from Turnkey about verifiable key management using trusted execution environments (TEEs). They share how their past work on custody and validators inspired them to build more sophisticated key management tools and some of the qualities TEEs enabled. 

The discussion covers a range of challenges and techniques: the role of remote attestation and reproducible builds in ensuring trust, strategies to prevent downgrade attacks, and the use of authorisation and policy layers to reduce misuse of keys while still enabling automation. 

 

 

 

ZK Whiteboard Sessions is an educational video series produced by ZK Hack. It is focused on the building blocks of zero knowledge technology.  Find season 3 of the Whiteboard Sessions as well as previous seasons here.

 

 

**If you like what we do:**

* Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree

* Subscribe to our podcast newsletter

* Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm

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**Support the show:**

* Patreon

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In this episode, Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt catch up with Ian Miers from the University of Maryland, starting with his work on seminal ZK blockchain research, Zerocoin and Zerocash and the creation of the first zk-focused blockchain project Zcash. They then explore the history of trusted setups, including the trusted setup bug discovery in Zcash, and subsequent improvements like Powers of Tau. Ian also discussed his work on ZEXE, a system that has inspired the formation of Aleo, and his more recent works: zk-creds for building flexible anonymous credentials from existing identity signals like passports, and zk-promises for supporting anonymous reputation, moderation, and callbacks in decentralized systems. They also touch on broader topics like post-quantum security considerations, sybil resistance, and the need for programmable privacy tools.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**If you like what we do:**

* Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree

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In this episode, Anna Rose chats with David Z and Oleksandr (Sasha) from Privado ID and Billions Network about the evolution of ZK-based identity systems, tracing their roots back to iden3 in 2018, one of the earliest projects to pioneer ZK for on-chain identity.

They discuss their origin as the iden3, their creation of the influential Circom DSL, the move into Polygon ID, the spin-out as Privado ID with a focus on B2B privacy tools and verifiable credentials, and the recent launch of Billions Network, which aims to build a scalable network of humans and AI agents with mobile-first verification and progressive proofs.

They compare their broad, composable approach to projects like Self, Rarimo, and ZK Email, while highlighting future plans for reputation layers, on-chain economies, and AI agent identities to enable accountable interactions in a decentralised world.

Related links:

 

 

ZK Whiteboard Sessions is an educational video series produced by ZK Hack. It is focused on the building blocks of zero knowledge technology. Find season 3 of the Whiteboard Sessions as well as previous seasons here.

 

 

**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

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**Support the show:**

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In this episode, Anna Rose and Guillermo Angeris speak with Bobbin Threadbare and Gaylord Warner from Miden to explore their zkVM and edge blockchain architecture. The group also reminisces on how they've each been a part of the ZK Whiteboard Sessions over the years.

 

Bobbin shares Miden's earliest beginnings from Winterfell at Facebook through its development within Polygon to the recent spin-out as an independent project. The team discusses their custom ISA designed for blockchain use cases, and the multi-stage compilation pipeline that supports it. The conversation also covers Miden's pragmatic approach to privacy implementation, their plans for gradual decentralization starting with a centralized L2, and how they incentivize users to keep state off-chain through multidimensional fee structures.

 

Related links:

ZK Whiteboard

Episode 373: Ethproofs, zkVM Benchmarks & the Unstoppable Rise of ZK with Justin Drake

Episode 369: Ligero for Memory-Efficient ZK with Muthu

Episode 367: Local-First with grjte and Goblin Oats

Episode 365: ZK in Sui & zkAt with Kostas Kryptos

Episode 210: The Road to STARKs and Miden with Bobbin Threadbare

The Miden Compiler v0.4.0 – A Major Milestone

ZK Whiteboard Sessions - Module Four: SNARKs vs STARKs with Bobbin Threadbare

ZK13: Lifted FRI: A uniform multi-domain polynomial commitment scheme

ZK Study Club - STARKs overview - Session 4 

ZK Hack Berlin

Winterfell

Fruity Friends

Gaylord's X post that inspired the interview!

 

 

Check out the NEW ZK Whiteboard Season 3 here.

 

 

**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

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**Support the show:**

* Patreon

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Read transcript

In this episode, Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra chat with Huijia (Rachel) Lin from the University of Washington to explore indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), often described as the 'holy grail of cryptography'. iO is a powerful primitive that, if fully realised, could have profound implications for privacy tech as a whole. Rachel helps break down the concept for listeners who may already be familiar with ZK, FHE and TEEs, clarifying how iO differs but also some of the similarities in the assumptions upon which it is based. Rachel also explains how it differs from similar concepts: garbled circuits and functional encryption.

 

The discussion covers the evolution of iO research in her work over the last decade, how the cryptographic assumptions have hardened since that time, and what iO can offer in terms of precise, controlled information revelation.

 

Related links:

Indistinguishability obfuscation from well-founded assumptions

Indistinguishability Obfuscation from DDH-like Assumptions on Constant-Degree Graded Encodings

On Lattices, Learning with Errors, Random Linear Codes, and Cryptography

How to Use Indistinguishability Obfuscation: Deniable Encryption, and More

Functional Encryption for Quadratic Functions, and Applications to Predicate Encryption

Garbled circuit

 

 

ZK Whiteboard Season 3 just kicked off with our first Module all about Hash Functions! In this, we have host Nico and guest JP Aumauson walk us through how to build a Hash Function. JP was also previously on the show to discuss the topic, you can see his episode here!

See all Whiteboard Sessions including previous seasons here.

  

 

**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

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**Support the show:**

* Patreon

* ETH - Donation address

* BTC - Donation address

* SOL - Donation address

Read transcript