In this week’s episode Anna and Nico chat with Alessandro Chiesa, Associate Professor at EPFL and Eylon Yogev, Professor at Bar-Ilan University. They discuss their recent publication; Building Cryptographic Proofs from Hash Functions, which provides a comprehensive and rigorous treatment of cryptographic proofs and goes on to analyze notable constructions of SNARGs based on ideal hash functions.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Building Cryptographic Proofs from Hash Functions by Chiesa and Yogev
• Episode 200: SNARK Research & Pedagogy with Alessandro Chiesa
• Barriers for Succinct Arguments in the Random Oracle Model by Chiesa and Eylon Yogev
• STIR: Reed–Solomon Proximity Testing with Fewer Queries by Arnon, Chiesa, Fenzi and Eylon Yogev
• ZK Podcast Episode 321: STIR with Gal Arnon & Giacomo Fenzi
• Computationally Sound Proofs by Micali
• Tight Security Bounds for Micali’s SNARGs by Chiesa and Yogev
• Interactive Oracle Proofs by Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, and Spooner
• Summer School on Probabilistic Proofs: Foundations and Frontiers of Probabilistic Proofs in Zürich, Switzerland
• Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Thaler
• ZK HACK Discord and Justin Thaler Study Club
• Justin Thaler Study Club by ZK HACK on YouTube
• Subquadratic SNARGs in the Random Oracle Model by Chiesa and Yogev
• ZK Learning Course

ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here.

Launching soon, Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 blockchain focused on multichain, asset-agnostic privacy, via a unified shielded set. Namada is natively interoperable with fast-finality chains via IBC, and with Ethereum using a trust-minimized bridge.

Follow Namada on Twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/.

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

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Sims Gautam and Liam Eagen from Alpen Labs. They dive into the world of Bitcoin L2s and focus on how ZK can be used to incorporate strong connections between Bitcoin and new execution environments. The group then explores BitVM, covenants, the distinction between the Bridge Operators and sequencers in this model and how this differs from how these actors work in Eth L2s. They then dive into SNARKnado, including what is happening under the hood, the ways in which this system offers round-based fraud games mixed with ZK and which agent provides DA and more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Bulletproofs++: Next Generation Confidential Transactions via Reciprocal Set Membership Arguments by Eagen, Kanjalkar, Ruffing, Nick
• Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More by Bünz, Bootle, Boneh, Andrew, Wuille, and Maxwell
• Zcash Website
• Protogalaxy: Efficient Protostar-style folding of multiple instances by Eagen and Gabizon
• cq: * Cached quotients for fast lookups by Eagen, Fiore and Gabizon
• Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin by Miers, Garman, Green and Rubin
• Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (extended version) by Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, Garman, Green, Miers, Tromer and Virza
• Monero Ring Signatures
• Blockstream Whitepapers
• Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity by Ben-Sasson, Bentov, Horesh and Riabzev
• Ordinal Theory by Casey Rodarmor
• BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin by Robin Linus
• BitVM 2
• BitVM Website
• Jeremy Rubin Blog on Lamport Signatures
• Introducting SNARKnado by Alpen Labs

ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here.

Gevulot is the first decentralized proving layer. With Gevulot, users can generate and verify proofs using any proof system, for any use case.

Gevulot is offering priority access to ZK Podcast listeners, register on gevulot.com and write “Zk Podcast” in the note field of the registration form!

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/.

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

In this week’s episode Anna chats with Shumo and Yi from NEBRA. They discuss how NEBRA UPA, or Universal Proof Aggregation, can mitigate the high price of putting ZKPs on-chain. They cover what it takes to incorporate proving systems into NEBRA UPA as well as the benefits that these systems will bring, how developers are meant to interact with them, and future integrations to enable seamless cross-zkRollup applications. They cover prover marketplaces, verification aggregation systems, and the design space that these systems open up.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• NEBRA
• NEBRA UPA Demo
• NEBRA Docs
• UPA Gas Costs by NEBRA
• MIT Bitcoin Club
• fflonK: a Fast-Fourier inspired verifier efficient version of PlonK by Gabizon and Williamson
• UniPlonK: PlonK with Universal Verifier by Chu, Gomes, Iglesias, Norton and Tebbs

The next edition will be happening in Berlin from Aug 19-21! You can head over to web3summit.com to apply, learn more and grab your tickets today.

Launching soon, Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 blockchain focused on multichain, asset-agnostic privacy, via a unified shielded set. Namada is natively interoperable with fast-finality chains via IBC, and with Ethereum using a trust-minimized bridge.

Follow Namada on Twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/

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

There is no episode this week, but wanted to highlight the upcoming ZK Hack Montreal event, happening Aug 9-11 2024. This is the 4th IRL zk-focused hackathon produced by ZK Hack. Apply now to attend ZK Hack Montreal as a hacker and jump into zk.

https://www.zkmontreal.com/

Find out more about ZK Hack as well at https://zkhack.dev/

In this week’s episode Anna and Kobi chat with Muthu Venkitasubramaniam and Carmit Hazay from Ligero. They discuss their work on MPC and ZK for the last 20 years and how the research has evolved. They then dive into a nuanced conversation on how MPC & ZK are interrelated. The discuss Ligero, what led to the project and the early phases, as well as the new Ligetron system and how they plan on getting this technology into the wild.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Ligero
• Ligero: Lightweight Sublinear Arguments Without a Trusted Setup by Ames, Hazay, Ishai and Venkitasubramaniam
• Ligetron by Ligero
• Ligetron: Lightweight Scalable End-to-End Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Post-Quantum ZK-SNARKs on a Browser by Wang, Hazay and Venkitasubramaniam
• ℓ-Diversity: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity by Machanavajjhala, Gehrke, Kifer and Venkitasubramaniam
• Efficient RSA Key Generation and Threshold Paillier in the Two-Party Setting by Hazay, Mikkelsen, Rabin, Toft and Nicolosi
• MeshCal.com
• Zero-Knowledge from Secure Multiparty Computation by Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky and Sahai
• Introduction to MPC-in-the-Head by Carmit Hazay
• ZKBoo: Faster Zero-Knowledge for Boolean Circuits by Giacomelli, Madsen and Orlandi
• Episode 322: Definitions, Security and Sumcheck in ZK Systems with Justin Thaler
• Communication complexity of secure computation by Franklin and Yung

ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/

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

In this week’s episode Anna chats with Tracy Livengood, co-founder of Pluto; an applied cryptography org building developer tools which add verifiable data from web data to an on-chain application, using ZK.

They discuss Tracy’s move from being an engineer in Web2, what prompted his move into the decentralized web and how he eventually found his way into the ZK space. He shares the concept of ‘Web Proofs’, and how Pluto can use some of the TLSNotary stack to bring private web data into on-chain applications as well as a future tool set he hopes to develop with the project.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Pluto.xyz
• Pluto Telegram Channel
• Docs.Pluto.xyz
• 0xParc
• Signal vs. Noise: How LLMs Broke the Internet and How ZK Proofs Are Going to Fix It by Tracy Livengood

Sign up for zkMesh here!

Gevulot is the first decentralized proving layer. With Gevulot, users can generate and verify proofs using any proof system, for any use case.

Gevulot is offering priority access to ZK Podcast listeners, register on gevulot.com and write “Zk Podcast” in the note field of the registration form!

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

This week, Anna and Nico catch up with Antonio Sanso, Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and Youssef El Housni, Engineer at ConsenSys and builder of Linea.

They discuss Antonio and Youssef’s new work, Families of prime-order endomorphism-equipped embedded curves on pairing-friendly curves and dive into Elliptic Curve cryptography, Bandersnatch and Verkle Tries amongst much more, before dissecting what terms in the title of this paper truly mean. After getting into the weeds of cryptographic technicalities, the group explores where this work could be used and what it would enable.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• zkSummit: A new optimized elliptic curve for one layer proof composition - Youssef El Housni (EY)
• ZK7: Pairings in a SNARK - Youssef El Housni - ConsenSys
• ZK Study Club - ZEXE reading pt 1 (of 3)
• ZK Study Club - ZEXE reading pt 2 (of 3)
• ZK Study Club - ZEXE reading pt 3 (of 3)
• Introducing Bandersnatch: a fast elliptic curve built over the BLS12-381 scalar field by Masson and Sanso
• Verifiable Delay Functions from Supersingular Isogenies and Pairings by De Feo, Masson, Petit and Sanso
• Episode 117: Isogenies with Luca De Feo
• Families of prime-order endomorphism-equipped embedded curves on pairing-friendly curves
• C∅C∅: A Framework for Building Composable Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Kosba, Zhao, Miller, Qian, Chan, Papamanthou, Pass, Shelat and Shi
• Constructing Elliptic Curves with Prescribed Embedding Degrees by Barreto, Lynn and Scott
• Welcome/Opening + Invited Talk by Nadia Heninger (PKC 2024)
• SafeCurves: choosing safe curves for elliptic-curve cryptography

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

The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, there’s still time to join at zkkrakow.com.

Namada is the shielded asset hub rewarding you to protect the multichain.

Built to give you full control over sharing your personal information, Namada brings data protection to existing assets, applications, and networks. Namada ends the era of transparency by default, enabling shielded transfers and shielded cross-chain actions to protect your data even when interacting with transparent chains.

Learn more and follow Namada mainnet launch at namada.net.

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

This week, Anna and Tarun catch up with Georgios Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm and long-standing friend of the ZK Pod!

First they cover the work Georgios has been doing since he last appeared on the show, covering everything from updates on Foundry to the more recent work on Reth. They then dig into what makes it different, what inspires its design, where it is heading and the eventual end goals of the project. They also chat about the general client node landscape, from the ETH 2.0 research days to present day, before diving into discussing different clients from different teams, how this diversity can protect a chain and how each client can differ.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Georgios’ GitHub
• Introducing Reth by Paradigm
• Reth GitHub
• Episode 224: Foundry with Georgios Konstantopoulos
• Loom Network
• CryptoZombies
• Geth: Ethereum
• Full BSC Node Guide: How to Run BNB Smart Chain Nodes
• GitHub: flashbots:mev-geth
• Arbitrum
• The Definitive Guide to Sequencing by James Prestwich
• Verkle Trees for Statelessness

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

The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com.

o1Labs is excited to announce the v1 release of o1js, THE fastest way to build zkApps and

deploy to the Mina blockchain.

After 2 years and 70,000 downloads, o1js v1 is the enterprise-grade

Typescript zkDSL the community has been waiting for.

Are you ready to build the next killer zkApp? Then visit o1js.org and get started today.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/

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