This week, Anna chats with guests Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet & Robot Ventures), James Prestwich (cLabs) and Josh Cincinnati (previously Zcash Foundation). Throughout this conversation, they touch on topics like the state of zero knowledge applications, blockchain technology, privacy and DeFi. They also explore what we can expect in the near future.

Here are a few of the papers and links we mention in the show:

• Mina’s Testworld
• Barry’s Post Why you can’t build a private uniswap with ZKPs
• Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges
• Flashbots Project

If you like what we do:

• Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
• Join us on Telegram
• Catch us on Youtube
• Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit
• Give us feedback!
• Support our Gitcoin Grant
• Support us on the ZKPatreon

This week, Anna and Fredrik do a look back at 2020 and chat about some of their favourite ZKPodcast episodes and themes from this past year. This is also a notable episode, as it will be Fredrik's last as a regular co-host. And so they also take this time to reminisce and look back over 3 years of the Zero Knowledge Podcast and share some thoughts on how the space has developed.

Some of the 2020 episodes discussed:

• ZK & Games: Dark Forest with Brian Gu
• Isogenies with Luca De Feo
• ZKPs in Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin & Justin Drake
• Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham
• Proof of Necessary Work with Akis Kattis (NYU)
• Trusted Setup Ceremonies Explored
• A Tale of Sushi(Swap) with Tarun, Hasu and Anna - Part1
• Josh Cincinnati on Zcash, governance and leaving the Zcash Foundation

Some of the projects that had previously been on the zkPodcast that launched or were announced this year:

Zk-projects:

• Hermez Network
• Aleo
• MACI
• DeversiFi
• Loopring

L1s:

• Polkadot
• Near
• Filecoin
• Nucypher

Thanks to our sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting company known for their dedication to pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates, cryptographers who specialize in security audits, design specification reviews, and security-by-design.

Given that privacy is at the core of their work and mission, least authority recognizes the importance of privacy in DeFi and other decentralizing technologies and the role it plays in preserving balance of power.

Join their mailing list to connect and stay informed on the latest in Least Authority security audit reports, upcoming events, open source contributions and product development initiatives. Subscribe at leastauthority.com/newsletter

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This week, Anna chats with Matthew Finestone and Brecht Devos from Loopring about their zkrollup protocol, DEX and wallet. We explored the evolution of Loopring, how their zkrollup works, how they are bringing AMMs to L2 and what’s next for the project.

We mention Brecht’s previous episode as well the talk by Barry Whitehat at Devcon4

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Parity Technologies

Parity is a company building the core infrastructure to power Web 3.0. They strive to write the fastest, lightest, and safest core technology in blockchain and write lots of open-source code.

Parity is currently looking to fill a number of job positions

• Berlin office: experienced, creative and enthusiastic Content Marketing Manager.

• Remote: CI/CD Engineer to help automate an ever-growing set of open source repos in GitHub.

Interested or know someone? More details at parity.io/jobs

If you like what we do:

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Support our Gitcoin Grant -https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast-2

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This week, Anna chats with Eduardo Antuñia Díez - co-founder / project lead of DAppNode - about the importance of running your own node, the roll out of ETH2 and the role DAppNode aims to play in the future.

Here are some useful links:

STABLE Act

Jordi episode

DAppNode Discord

DAppNode Gaurdians of Ethereum DAO proposal

Zero Knowledge Gitcoin grant is eligible for Gitcoin's CLR matching - on now! Last chance to donate before the new year.

Thanks to this week’s sponsor O(1) Labs, the team incubating [Mina](minaprotocol.com) protocol.

Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants. And over the past 18 months, the community - alongside the core team at O(1) Labs - have been working on a rigorous testnet. And now they’re close to finding a mainnet candidate.

Signup for this adversarial testnet, Testworld. Signups open today, but is limited to the first 1000 participants. Go to minaprotocol.com/adversarial to secure your spot.

Also be sure to join their active technical community discord at bit.ly/minadiscord

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on Youtube

Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit

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Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

This week, Anna chats with Koh Wei Jie from the Ethereum Foundation about the MACI or Minimum Anti-Collusion Infrastructure. They chat about the challenges in voting digitally and in decentralised networks, how MACI uses zkps to solve this, and how it could be used in the context of quadratic voting.

They also do a step by step walkthrough of how a vote is cast and counted in MACI

Here are some helpful links:

https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/133

https://kohweijie.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKuNj_IQVYI

https://github.com/appliedzkp/maci

https://www.maxgrok.com/posts/clrfund

Check out the Zero Knowledge Podcast Gitcoin Grant here -> https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast

Thanks to this week's sponsor Parity Technologies

Parity is a company building the core infrastructure to power Web 3.0. And at the heart of the company is a genuine goal of empower developers to create better products and services through decentralized web technologies.

Parity has the following job openings:

• Berlin office: looking for a passionate social media manager to maintain and grow the company’s social networks, and to activate customers and contributors. into advocates.

• Remote work: looking for a CI/CD Engineer to help automate an ever-growing set of open source repos in GitHub. Experience: Github Actions, Gitlab CI or similar, Linux, Compiler experience like Docker.

Find out more at parity.io/jobs

So thanks again Parity!

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In this week’s episode, we chat with Omer Shlomovits from ZenGo Wallet about MPC, threshold cryptography and how the research around this topic can be used in a blockchain context.

We reference the Zero Knowledge Podcast Episode 90 with Nigel Smart.

Here are some additional links to check out:

• ZenGo X
• Flaws Could Have Exposed Cryptocurrency Exchanges to Hackers presented at Blackhat USA
• Omer’s work on Diogenes
• Survey of threshold ECDSA
• MPC Alliance
• JugglingSwap: Scriptless Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps
• CryptoWills: How to Bequeath Cryptoassets

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Least Authority.

If you are skilled in the area of zero-knowledge protocols and other advanced cryptography for scalability and privacy enhancing tech, you should get in contact with them. They currently have an open security auditor position see more at leastauthority.com/careers

You can also find the Gitcoin grants here:

Least Authority’s Grant for the Moon Math Manual -> https://gitcoin.co/grants/543/the-moonmath-manual-to-zk-snarks

Zero Knowledge Podcast -> https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast

If you like what we do:

Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on Youtube

Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit

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Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:

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This week, Anna catches up with Illia Polosukhin, CTO and co-founder of NEAR, to talk about what's new in the network since last year. They go deeper on some of the topics they discussed last time - such as sharded vs non-sharded blockchains and data availability as well as discuss the long and rocky road to launching a new PoS network, building a validator community and where we might see privacy and zkp tech in Near.

Some episodes we reference in our chat.

• Ep 91: Near Protocol's focus on UX
• Ep 135: Look into Solana
• Ep 156: Stateless Validation with Alin Tomescu

Thank you to this week’s sponsor Trail of Bits.

Trail of Bits has published this guide for building secure contracts with their Crytic offering.

Crytic is a SaaS-based GitHub application created by Trail of Bits that continuously assures your Ethereum smart contracts are safe and functional. It reports build status on every commit and runs a suite of security analyses so you get immediate security feedback.

Check out this guide - which I have added to the show notes - for tips on how to build security into your dapps from the start and how to use the Trail of Bits suite of tools for automated vulnerability detection.

Thank you once again Trail of Bits

If you like what we do:

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In this week’s episode, Anna and Fredrik chat with Alin Tomescu, a post-doc researcher at VMWare Research Group, about the concept of stateless systems. Specifically, they explore his work on stateless validation, why this would be desirable and what is the state of the research around this topic.

Have a look at Alin’s previous zkStudy Club episodes: zkStudyClub: Alin Tomescu on authenticated dictionaries and cross-incremental proof (dis)aggregation & zkStudyClub: Aggregatable Subvector Commitments with Alin Tomescu (VMWare Research)

This episode is packed full of info and Alin shared an amazing list of resources to help navigate this :

RMCI17e, Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries, with Applications to Cryptocurrencies, Leonid Reyzin and Dmitry Meshkov and Alexander Chepurnoy and Sasha Ivanov

CPZ18, Edrax: A Cryptocurrency with Stateless Transaction Validation, 2018, Alexander Chepurnoy and Charalampos Papamanthou and Yupeng Zhang

BBF18, Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains, 2018, Dan Boneh and Benedikt Bünz and Ben Fisch

Tome20, How to Keep a Secret and Share a Public Key (Using Polynomial Commitments), 2020, Tomescu, Alin,

CFG+20, [Vector Commitment Techniques and Applications to Verifiable Decentralized Storage](https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/149], 2020, Matteo Campanelli and Dario Fiore and Nicola Greco and Dimitris Kolonelos and Luca Nizzardo

GRWZ20, Pointproofs: Aggregating Proofs for Multiple Vector Commitments, 2020, Sergey Gorbunov and Leonid Reyzin and Hoeteck Wee and Zhenfei Zhang

TAB+20e, Aggregatable Subvector Commitments for Stateless Cryptocurrencies, 2020, Alin Tomescu and Ittai Abraham and Vitalik Buterin and Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist and Dmitry Khovratovich

LGG+20, Aardvark: A Concurrent Authenticated Dictionary with Short Proofs, 2020, Derek Leung and Yossi Gilad and Sergey Gorbunov and Leonid Reyzin and Nickolai Zeldovich

AR20, KVaC: Key-Value Commitments for Blockchains and Beyond, 2020, Shashank Agrawal and Srinivasan Raghuraman

TXN20, Authenticated Dictionaries with Cross-Incremental Proof (Dis)aggregation, 2020, Alin Tomescu and Yu Xia and Zachary Newman

zkSummit6 is happening on Nov 23-24 2020 - grab your spot: https://www.zksummit.com/

Thanks to this week's sponsor Parity Technologies.

Check out Polkadot Decoded happening on December 3rd.

This free online event is the Polkadot community conference and the first Polkadot gathering since the multi-chain network’s launch and decentralization.

Featuring a full program of talks on all aspects of Polkadot by the teams building the network’s core technology, as well as those building ecosystem parachains, applications, and cross-network bridges Whether you’re new to Polkadot or an experienced Polkadot community member, be sure to learn the latest and future developments in the Polkadot ecosystem and connect with the Polkadot community.

Check out the full program for Polkadot Decoded and register for free at decoded.polkadot.network

Thanks again Parity Technologies!

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In this week’s episode, we revisit the topic of consensus algorithms with Ren Zhang, a researchers at Nervos and previously at imec-COSIC (KU Leuven). We chat about an earlier work he did on evaluating PoW consensus protocols security and explore his more recent work on NC-Max - a consensus protocol that breaks the throughput limit and enables the full utilization of the nodes’ bandwidth in confirming transactions

Here are a few of the links we mention in the interview:

• 
  
• Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham
• 
  
• 
  
• Majority is not Enough:Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable
• 
  
• 
  
• FruitChains: A Fair Blockchain
• 
  
• 
  
• RSK technology
• 
  
• 
  
• Subchains: A Technique to Scale Bitcoin and Improve the User Experience
• 
  
• 
  
• Lay Down the Common Metrics: Evaluating Proof-of-Work Consensus Protocols' Security by Ren Zhang & Bart Preneel
• 
  
• 
  
• NC-Max: Breaking the Throughput Limit of Nakamoto Consensus by Ren Zhang, Dingwei Zhang, Quake Wang, Jan Xie and Bart Preneel
• 
  
• 
  
• SquirRL - A recent paper extending the "Lay Down the Common Metrics" paper
• 
  
• 
  
• Markov decision process on Wikipedia
• - Monsters in the Mempool with Dan Robinson from Paradigm
• 
  
• Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits
• 
  
• 
  
• Alan Szepieniec on Hash Functions & Supersonic SNARKs
• 
  

More on Nervos:

For the UTXO Programming Model of Nervos, the best starting point is Ren’s colleague Xuejie Xiao's blog.

An explanation of Nervos DAO

An introduction of the Virtual Machine and smart contract support

Thanks to our sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting company known for their dedication to pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates, cryptographers who specialize in security audits, design specification reviews, and security-by-design.

Given that privacy is at the core of their work and mission, least authority recognizes the importance of privacy in DeFi and other decentralizing technologies and the role it plays in preserving balance of power. Least Authority is supporting this through a growing list of security reviews, building distributed systems and regular contributions to open source software projects.

To find out about their work, visit leastauthority.com to check out their security audit reports.

And get in touch at [email protected] if you want to talk about the security of your DeFi project.

If you like what we do:

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In this week’s episode, Anna spoke with Nolan Smith and Locke Brown, co-founders at NuID - a zero knowledge authentication solution. They explore the use-case of zk-powered password management and how this relates to Identity.

Here are a few of the articles mentioned in the episode:

-Universally Composable Direct Anonymous Attestation by Jan Camenisch , Manu Drijvers , and Anja Lehmann

-Practical UC-Secure Delegatable Credentials with Attributes and Their Application to Blockchain by Jan Camenisch , Manu Drijvers , and Anja Lehmann

-Privacy-Preserving User-Auditable Pseudonym Systems by Jan Camenisch & Anja Lehmann IBM Research – Zurich

Find out more at the NuID developer portal https://portal.nuid.io

Thanks to this week’s sponsor Aleo

Aleo is the first platform for fully private applications. It uses blockchain and zero-knowledge cryptography to deliver a web experience that is both personal and private. With Aleo, developers can write private applications, without a background in blockchains or expertise in cryptography.

Aleo has released Developer Preview I, an early peek at what the future of the web will look like. The release introduces a new programming language called Leo, a new community-driven package manager for Leo, and a new development environment or IDE called Aleo Studio.

We recently had Howard Wu, a co-founder of Aleo, on the show for an interview - you can find that episode here. Learn more about Aleo at https://aleo.org/

Thanks again Aleo!

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