In this episode, we speak with Matthew Di Ferrante of the smart contract auditing firm Zero Knowledge Labs about security in the blockchain. Specifically we discuss how he first got interested in security and blockchain technology, some of the cases that have happened in the last few years and how the Ethereum security team responds to a security event.

If you want to learn more from Matt you can follow him here

This week's episode went long, so we are including this link to a bonus piece on governance

In this episode, we sit down with Howard Wu to explore zkSNARKs, the challenges in the application of this awesome technology, the new ideas emerging for how to scale them and his latest work on DIZK.

This is the 2nd in our ongoing series about Zero Knowledge technologies. To get a good sense of Zero Knowledge Proofs, please listen to our introduction to the topic in Episode 21.

Howard Wu is an early member of Blockchain at Berkeley, the co-author of Libsnark, and a managing partner of Dekrypt Capital.

Links:

• libsnark - https://github.com/scipr-lab/libsnark
• libsnark-tutorial - https://github.com/howardwu/libsnark-tutorial
• DIZK paper - https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/691
• DIZK library - https://github.com/scipr-lab/dizk

In this episode, we sit down with Raul & Preston from Prysmatic Labs to discuss sharding, the evolution of the spec, Ethereum 2.0, what happens to a side chain during a hard fork, and whats coming up for this important scaling solution.

Prysmatic Labs is building a sharding solution in Go and the Ethereum 2.0  side chain that is set to combine PoS + Sharding.

Links:

• https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/how-to-scale-ethereum-sharding-explained-ba2e283b7fce
• https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/ethereum-sharding-biweekly-development-update-9-prysmatic-labs-f2b1ad55e825

In this episode, we speak with Eric Tang from Livepeer about the need for off-chain computation, what scenarios make sense for off-chain and which can work on-chain, how Livepeer sees its role in the ecosystem and how they aim to help more people livestream in a decentralised way.

Read more about Livepeer here

If you want to get involved with the project, you can do so here

Check out this paper by Jacob Eberhardt about off-chain computation. http://www.ise.tu-berlin.de/fileadmin/fg308/publications/2017/2017-eberhardt-tai-offchaining-patterns.pdf

In this episode, we sit down with Ethan (Bucky) Buchman, co-founder & CTO of Tendermint, to talk about testnets. We look into what they are, what purpose they serve and cover examples from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos and Polkadot.

Links

• Testnets on Karl.tech
• The latest gossip on BFT consensus
• Bitcoin Testnet
• Ropsten Testnet
• Kovan Testnet
• Rinkeby Testnet
• Join the Cosmos testnet
• Join the Polkadot testnet

In this episode, we dig into what the term smart contract means with our guest James Prestwich. First introduced in 1994 by Nick Szabo, smart contracts have inspired whole ecosystems of companies and projects to start thinking about blockchain in much bigger terms.

We explore what the term 'smart contract' means, where it comes from, some use cases and some of the new challenges that come along with it.

Follow James on twitter @_prestwich

In this episode we sit down with Ele and Alexis from OSCoin to talk about what they are building and the general problem of open source incentivization. We dig into the incentivization and governance models they imagine for the Open Source world as well as some technical aspects of the platform they intend to build.

Links:

• OScoin
• Social Architecture - Building On-line Communities
• Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure
• Elinor Ostrom
• Radical Markets Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
• Open Source Without Maintainers

In this week's episode, we cover the Zcon0 conference in Montreal. In our interviews with some of the participants, we explore the zcash community, projects actually implementing zero knowledge proofs, and some of the most exciting ideas to be generated at the event!

See the talks here

Links:

• Bolt
• Coda
• Dekrypt Capital
• Antonie Hodge
• Peter Van Valkenburgh
• Liz Steininger
• J Ayo Akinyele
• Rachel Rose O'leary
• Awa Sun Yin
• Hudson Jameson
• Benedikt Bünz
• Agoric
• Str4d
• Nicola Greco
• Zooko

In this introductory episode, we discuss what makes up blocks and block headers. We also cover a bit about state vs history, what exactly makes up a transaction and do a quick intro to a Merkle Tree.

For more, please check out these resources:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_160oMzblY8
• https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/268/ethereum-block-architecture
• https://www.coursera.org/lecture/cryptocurrency/bitcoin-blocks-I5uc7
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkletree

In this episode, we speak with Jack du Rose and Aron Fischer from Colony about governance and open organizations.

Colony is building an infrastructure based on the Ethereum blockchain that aims to revamp the way projects and organizations collaborate, promising to make HR and project management more open, fair and efficient.

We discuss different ways in which the ideas around colony could be used to created shared and open organisations, how reputation is built as well as discuss their thougths around the general ideas of governance and some of the biggest challenges this creates.

For more about Colony - have a look at their site or follow them on twitter!