Zero Knowledge

By Zero Knowledge PodcastScience Technology Education Mathematics

Zero Knowledge episodes

October 07Exploring the Lasers that Power Quantum Computers
This week, Anna and Guillermo chat with Josh Yang, CEO and co-founder of Brightlight Photonics, about the lasers that power quantum computers. Josh explains how lasers are used in neutral atom and other atom-based quantum systems to cool and move atoms, manipulate qubit states and read out results. They explore why these systems require so many different lasers and how today’s bulky, expensive optical setups can become a bottleneck as quantum computers scale.
They also cover Brightlight’s work miniaturising the Ti:sapphire laser, a longstanding workhorse of quantum optics. Josh explains how integrated waveguides and semiconductor manufacturing techniques make this possible, the challenges of packaging and powering these tiny lasers, and how a more compact, versatile laser platform could better support quantum computing.
This one is a departure from the usual topics covered on the show, but we hope you find it as fascinating as we did.

Related Links
Brightlight Photonics
Josh Yang Google Scholar Profile
Episode 357: Quantum Engineering with Jelena Vučković
Stanford Report: Chip-scale titanium-sapphire laser puts powerful technology in reach
Titanium:Sapphire-on-insulator for broadband tunable lasers and high-power amplifiers on chip
Titanium:sapphire-on-insulator integrated lasers and amplifiers
Multi-dimensional data transmission using inverse-designed silicon photonics and microcombs
Brightlight Photonics Images shared by Josh Yang
Episode 400: Quantum Advances, Hybrid Signatures and SNARKs to the Rescue with Dan Boneh
Episode 402: The Quantum Question Panel – Live from zkSummit14
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Read transcript
1 hr 16 min
September 30JP Aumasson on Quantum Risk, AI Attacks and Too Much Crypto
This week, Anna, Tarun and Nico are joined by JP Aumasson, co-designer of BLAKE3, author of Serious Cryptography and cryptography engineer at Cloudflare. They revisit the quantum threat to cryptography, looking at recent advances in quantum attacks on RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography, and discuss why JP remains cautious about predictions of an imminent “Q-day.” They then explore how AI is changing cryptanalysis, from recent RSA factoring records to the growing divide between symmetric and asymmetric cryptography.
The conversation then turns to Poseidon and recent attacks that have challenged confidence in ZK-friendly hash functions, as well as China’s new NGCC competition, where AI is already being used to find weaknesses in candidate designs. JP shares his experiments using AI for cryptanalysis, why it could accelerate both the building and breaking of cryptographic systems, and a introduces a project exploring AI-driven attacks on hash functions.

Related Links
Too Much Crypto by Jean-Philippe Aumasson
Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations
Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations
Flock Challenge
POSEIDON: A New Hash Function for Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems (Updated Version)
Ngcc.dev
Chinese NGCC Algorithms: The First Week of AI Cryptanalysis
JP Aumasson Papers
Yukon.org
ZK Podcast Episode: The Quantum Question Panel – Live from zkSummit14!
ZK Podcast Episode: Quantum Advances, Hybrid Signatures and SNARKs to the Rescue with Dan Boneh
Sovright builds the critical infrastructure that preserves your right to choose. Discover more at sovright.com.

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Read transcript
58 min
September 23Auto Research on Yukon with Soubhik Deb
This week, Anna is joined by Soubhik Deb, Head of Research at EigenLabs, to explore Yukon, a platform for collaborative AI-powered research. Soubhik traces the project’s origins to ECDSA.fail, a competition launched in response to Google’s work on more resource-efficient quantum circuits for breaking secp256k1. They discuss how researchers and their AI agents build on one another’s submissions, turning traditional research into a multiplayer process that can iterate at machine speed.
The conversation then explores Yukon’s expansion into ZK proving, inference optimisation, coding theory and mathematics through challenges like SNARK.fast, better.codes, mlx.fast and lighter.fast. Soubhik explains the importance of well-defined problems and verifiers for AI-driven research, and shares Yukon’s vision for an “AI-native scientific institution” where humans and agents collaborate to accelerate discovery.

Related Links
Yukon.org
ECDSA.fail
Flock Challenge
The Proximity Prize (better.codes)
Mlx.fast
Darkbloom
Lighter Prover Challenge
ECDSA.Fail: Open Autoresearch for Optimizing Elliptic-Curve Point Addition in Shor’s Algorithm
Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms
Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations
ZK Podcast Episode: The Quantum Question Panel – Live from zkSummit14!
ZK Podcast Episode: Quantum Advances, Hybrid Signatures and SNARKs to the Rescue with Dan Boneh
Sovright builds the critical infrastructure that preserves your right to choose. Discover more at sovright.com.

**If you like what we do:**
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Read transcript
1 hr 7 min
September 16Ron Rothblum on Fiat-Shamir Attacks, Flock and SNARK.fast
This week, Anna and Kobi are joined by Ron Rothblum, Professor of Computer Science at Technion and researcher at Succinct. They catch up on Ron’s move from theory into practice, including his work on the SP1 zkVM, Jagged Polynomial Commitments, and a recent Fiat-Shamir attack that exposed vulnerabilities in practical uses of GKR. Ron explains what the attack revealed about Fiat-Shamir’s security assumptions and why it prompted changes to deployed systems.

The conversation then explores Ron’s recent work on faster and more efficient proof systems, from Blaze, TensorSwitch, BOLT and Veil to Flock, a proof system for batch proving Boolean computations. They discuss how new approaches to polynomial commitments and error-correcting codes can improve prover performance, before turning to snark.fast and zkGolf, experiments using AI agents to optimise provers and circuits. Ron shares what these efforts reveal about AI-assisted research and engineering, and how pushing proving closer to the speed of ordinary computation could unlock entirely new applications for verifiable computation.

Related Links
Jagged Polynomial Commitments (or: How to Stack Multilinears)
The Random Oracle Methodology, Revisited
Blaze: Fast SNARKs from Interleaved RAA Codes
TensorSwitch: Nearly Optimal Polynomial Commitments from Tensor Codes
Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations
VEIL: Lightweight Zero-Knowledge for Hash-Based Multilinear Proof Systems
Bolt: Faster SNARKs from Sketched Codes
zkGolf Website
Proving as Fast as Computing: Succinct Arguments with Constant Prover Overhead
SNARK.fast Website
ZK Podcast Episode: Error Correcting Codes & Information Theory with Ron Rothblum
Fiat-Shamir via List-Recoverable Codes (or: Parallel Repetition of GMW is not Zero-Knowledge)
Delegating Computation: Interactive Proofs for Muggles
How to Prove False Statements: Practical Attacks on Fiat-Shamir
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Read transcript
1 hr 2 min
September 09The Evolution from ZKP2P to Peer with Richard Liang
This week, Anna catches up with Richard Liang from Peer, formerly ZKP2P. They trace the project’s evolution over the past two years, from their initial ZKP2P product that used ZK email proofs to connect Venmo payments with on-chain USDC, to their use of ZK TLS, and most recently, their move to using TEEs (trusted execution environments) and the rebrand to Peer. Richard breaks down what motivated each shift and how the team has navigated the trade-offs around privacy, speed, and UX.
The conversation then explores Peer’s current approach to connecting traditional payment platforms and stablecoins, including why “ephemeral privacy” makes TEEs a compelling fit for their use case and what the move away from ZK has unlocked. Richard and Anna also reflect on the broader evolution of ZK from an experimental technology into infrastructure that increasingly underpins real world applications. Finally, they discuss Peer’s expansion into payments, its ambitions to support more currencies and fintech platforms around the world, and how AI is changing both the team’s development process and the possibilities for agentic payments.

Related Links
Peer X Profile
Peer Pay X Profile
Peer Website
Announcement of ZKP2P becoming Peer
Peer Docs Repo
ZK Podcast: ZKP2P with Brian and Richard
ZK Hack Lisbon 2023
ZK Email
ZK Podcast: Is ZK dead? Or has it just begun? With the ZK Pod co-hosts
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Read transcript
46 min
August 05Minimmit, Multimmit and the New Consensus Frontier with Patrick O'Grady
This week, Anna and Guillermo are joined by Patrick O'Grady, founder of Commonware. They discuss his journey from Coinbase and Avalanche to building Commonware, a Rust library of composable primitives for blockchain development. They explore Commonware's "anti-framework" philosophy, why it gives developers control over every layer of the stack, and how its modular approach differs from traditional blockchain SDKs.

The conversation then turns to consensus research, examining how changing assumptions around Byzantine fault tolerance have unlocked faster consensus designs. Patrick explains the motivation behind Commonware's new protocols, Minimmit and Multimmit, discusses the influence of Simplex and Solana's Alpenglow, and shares how Commonware combines engineering, research, and cryptography to build the next generation of blockchain infrastructure.

Related Links
Commonware
Minimmit: Fast Finality with Even Faster Blocks
Commonware blog post announcing Minimmit
Simplex Consensus: A Simple and Fast Consensus Protocol
Commonware docs - Simplex Consensus
Patrick O’Grady’s X Post on Multimmit (July 2026)
Multimmit: Extending Blocks for Faster Finality (draft)
Alpenglow GitHub Progress Updates
Golden: Lightweight Non-Interactive Distributed Key Generation
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Read transcript
1 hr 13 min
July 29Private Information Retrieval (PIR) with Alex Hoover
In this episode, Anna and Kobi are joined by Alex Hoover, cryptographer and Assistant Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. They explore Private Information Retrieval (PIR)—a cryptographic primitive that lets users query public databases without revealing what they're looking for.

They trace PIR's evolution from its early theoretical foundations to modern, practical constructions, unpack key variants like batch and keyword PIR, and discuss emerging blockchain applications, from private state queries to Merkle proof generation. They also examine the latest research making PIR increasingly practical, and why it could become a core building block for privacy-preserving systems.

A quick note: Alex mentioned during the interview that preprocessing in SimplePIR is independent of the database. But it is in fact independent of the queried index, and does depend on the database. He asked us to highlight this correction

Related Links
One Server for the Price of Two: Simple and Fast Single-Server Private Information Retrieval
Don’t be Dense: Efficient Keyword PIR for Sparse Databases
The two papers that introduced client-side preprocessing:
PPY18
CK20
Piano: Extremely Simple, Single-Server PIR with Sublinear Server Computation

Simple and Practical Amortized Sublinear Private Information Retrieval using Dummy Subsets

Plinko: Single-Server PIR with Efficient Updates via Invertible PRFs (builds on Piano and RMS)

Doubly Efficient Private Information Retrieval and Fully Homomorphic RAM Computation from Ring LWE (LMW23)

Lower Bounds for PIR with Preprocessing from Blackbox Cryptography

**If you like what we do:**
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Read transcript
1 hr 5 min
July 15Alex Ozdemir on where Theorem Provers and ZK meet
This week, Anna and Nico are joined by Alex Ozdemir, Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, to explore the intersection of formal verification and zero knowledge. They begin by revisiting the evolution of the ZK DSL landscape since Alex's last appearance, discussing the rise of ZKVMs, new language tooling, and how his compiler infrastructure project, CirC, has evolved.
The conversation then dives into formal verification and theorem proving, covering SMT solvers, Lean, and zkPi, the first zkSNARK for proofs expressed in Lean. They also discuss compiler correctness, the challenges of verifying cryptographic systems, and why verifiable software will become increasingly important as the industry matures.

Related Links
zkPi: Proving Lean Theorems in Zero-Knowledge
CirC: Compiler infrastructure for proof systems, software verification, and more
Kevin Lacker on AI-Assisted Theorem Proving and Acorn
Building ZK-Powered AI Guardrails with Wyatt Benno
lean Ethereum Part 6: Formal Verification with Alex Hicks
Groth16, IVC and Formal Verification with Nexus
lean Ethereum
ZK Podcast and Alex Ozdemir
ZK languages with Alex Ozdemir
zkSessions: Alex Ozdemir - The Taxonomy of Circuit Languages
zkStudyClub: Collaborative zkSNARKs (Alex Ozdemir, Stanford University)
zkStudyClub: Unifying Compiler Infrastructure for SNARKs, SMTs, & More w/ Alex Ozdemir (Stanford)
ZK HACK - Introduction to Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) - Alex Ozdemir
**If you like what we do:**
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Read transcript
1 hr 2 min
July 08Sergey Gorbunov on TEEs and the Arc Privacy Sector
This week, Anna speaks with Sergey Gorbunov, Engineer at Circle, about Arc, Circle’s new EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, and its approach to a TEE based on-chain privacy. They begin by revisiting Sergey’s journey from Axelar to Circle, reflecting on the evolution of cross-chain infrastructure, the aftermath of the Terra collapse, and how Circle’s acquisition of Interop Labs led to the development of Arc.
The conversation then turns to Arc’s architecture, including its privacy layer, known as the Privacy Sector, and the decision to build it around Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) rather than ZKPs or FHE. Sergey explains the design trade-offs, discussing privacy, composability, enterprise infrastructure, and why he believes TEEs are currently the most practical foundation for programmable private execution.
Related Links
Axelar Network
Arc Privacy Sector: Keeping Blockchain State, Transactions, and Accounts Private and Quantum Safe
Circle’s Post-Quantum Security Roadmap
Arc Documentation
Arc: An open Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin finance
Sergey’s X Post on the Arc Privacy Sector paper
Ian Mier’s X Response to the Arc Privacy Sector works
**If you like what we do:**
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Read transcript
1 hr 8 min
July 01 zkMesh+ Exclusive Clip – Benedikt Bünz on the threat of AI
Last week on the show, we interviewed Benedikt Bünz, Chief Scientist at Espresso Systems and Professor at NYU.
The conversation ran long, so we're releasing some of the extra material as an exclusive clip for zkMesh+ subscribers. We've also included the first five minutes here. In this segment, Anna, Kobi, and Benedikt discuss whether AI poses a genuine threat to the foundations of cryptography.
They explore the 'immune system' metaphor for AI's dual role in security: it can uncover bugs and vulnerabilities, while also strengthening defenses through tools like formal verification. The conversation closes with the question of whether AI could ever break fundamental cryptographic primitives—or even invent new physics to do it.
To hear the full discussion, head to https://zkmesh.substack.com/subscribe and become a paid subscriber.
7 min

About Zero Knowledge

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Zero Knowledge is a podcast which goes deep into the tech that will power the emerging decentralised web and the community building this. Covering the latest in zero knowledge research and applications, the open web as well as future technologies and paradigms that promise to change the way we interact — and transact — with one another online.