In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico chat with Chelsea Komlo, Chief Scientist for the Zcash Foundation and member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy lab at the University of Waterloo.

They discuss what sparked Chelsea’s interest in cryptography research, starting with her work contributing to Tor, to her move to Zcash and her PhD work on Threshold Signature Schemes. They define some important terms around different signature schemes and discuss possible optimizations that can be used to make these more performant. They then dive into her work on the FROST Threshold Signature Scheme plus some new upcoming work.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• EdSIDH: Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange on Edwards Curves by Azarderakhsh, Lang, Jao and Koziel
• Efficient Signature Generation by Smart Cards by Schnorr
• FROST: Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures by Komlo and Goldberg
• Episode 316: Alin Tomescu on Distributed On-chain Randomness and Keyless Accounts
• Episode 295: Return to MPC with Nigel Smart
• On the insecurity of ROS by Benhamouda, Lepoint, Loss, Orru and Raykova
• Re-Randomized FROST by Gouvea and Komlo
• Frostsnap
• CFRG GitHub Repository for FROST
• Arctic: Lightweight and Stateless Threshold Schnorr Signatures by Komlo and Goldberg

zkSummit11 is happening next week, head to the zkSummit website to apply for a waitlist spot now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

Check out the ZK Jobs Board

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

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Niraj Pant and Anish Agnihotri from Ritual. They kick off by revisiting the AIxCrypto intersection before diving into the Ritual product and its goals around developing open access AI infrastructure. They explore the opportunities that open up when you bring ML to smart contracts.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc
• Episode 246: Adversarial Machine Learning Research with Florian Tramèr
• Episode 314: Succinct’s Platform, Prover Network and SP1
• FrenRug Website
• Mistral 7B by Jiang, Sablayrolles, Mensch, Bamford, Chaplot, De Las Casas, Bressand, Lengyel, Lample, Saulnier, Lavaud, Lachaux, Stock, Le Scao, Lavril, Wang, Lacroix, El Sayed
• docs.ritual.net
• Infernet by Ritual
• ML Quickstart Guide by Ritual
• Web3 Quickstart Guide by Ritual

zkSummit11 happens in 2 weeks, if you haven’t got your tickets yet head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

Check out the ZK Jobs Board

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

Quick reminder about our upcoming zkSummit 11 event. Happening in Athens on April 10th, we will be bringing together the top researchers and engineers working in zk to share their latest research and new findings.

Apply at zksummit.com

If you have already applied, please remember to buy your ticket! Email summit [at] zeroknowledge.fm if you have questions about your application or haven't received a response yet.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico chat with Alin Tomescu, founding team member and Head of Cryptography at Aptos Labs. They discuss Alin’s journey to Aptos and his work on distributed on-chain randomness as well as the new Aptos Keyless project. They cover the Keyless accounts architecture, how the flow works for the user and some of the subtleties in the approach they have taken.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 302: ZK for web2 interop with zkLogin & ZK Email
• Episode 156: Stateless Validation with Alin Tomescu
• Episode 227: Move & Sui with Sam Blackshear from Mysten Labs
• Aptos Developer Documentation
• OpenPubkey: Augmenting OpenID Connect with User held Signing Keys by Heilman, Mugnier, Filippidis, Goldberg, Lipman, Marcus, Milano, Premkumar and Unrein
• Aptos Keyless Accounts slides
• Aptos Improvement Proposal (AIP) on Keyless Accounts
• Aptos Randomness API in Move slides
• Aptos Randomness API in Move slides presented by Alin Tomescu
• Aptos Improvement Proposal (AIP) on the Move Randomness APIs

Check out the ZK Jobs Board

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

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

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’s episode is a little different from the usual and is split into two parts with Anna and Kobi exploring the history of ZK Hack, its origins and how the event has evolved into what it is today, including current activity in the ZK Hack ecosystem. The second half of the show splits off into Anna and Nico chatting the top 3 hackers from ZK Hack IV Online, which wrapped back in February. Each mini interview catches up with one of the winners and dives into what it was like to hack on the puzzles, which their favourites were and how they can be improved in the future.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• ZK Jobs Board
• ZK Hack Website
• Episode 211: It’s a wrap! ZK Hack Takeaways & What’s Next!
• ZK HACK IV - Overview & Workshop Introductions: map featured at 1m28s
• ZK Hack Discord
• ZK Hack Whiteboard Sessions
• Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Justin Thaler
• ZK Hack Whiteboard Session 1 - What is a SNARK? with Dan Boneh
• ZK Hack Whiteboard Session 2 - Building a SNARK (Part I) with Dan Boneh
• ZK Hack Whiteboard Session 3 - Building a SNARK (Part II) with Dan Boneh
• Groth16 Malleability by Geometry
• Episode 309: ZK Jargon Decoder with Nico Mohnblatt
• Zellic Wins Second Place in ZK Hack IV Blog
• SSTIC
• Techiepriyansh GitHub
• Sampritipanda GitHub
• Niooss-ledger GitHub

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

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 catch up with Uma Roy, CEO and cofounder of Succinct. They dive into Succinct’s developments over the last year ranging from the work they did on the ZK bridge infrastructure to the Succinct platform, the Succinct prover network and their most recent release of SP1. They discuss connections between these products, how their development evolved, the competitive landscape, the future for the project and much more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Introducing Blobstream by Celestia
• Succinct Labs SP1 GitHub
• ZK Jobs Board
• Episode 255: Verifying Consensus On-Chain with Succinct
• Episode 286: Paris 2023 Recap with Uma, Zaki and Tarun
• Alpha Succinct
• Hugging Face AI
• Episode 296: Zeth, Bonsai and RISC Zero with Brian and Jeremy
• Episode 251: Exploring RISC Zero with Brian Retford and Jeremy Bruestle
• Understanding Lasso and Jolt, from theory to code by Ragsdale, Zhu and Thaler

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

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

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 Omer Shlomovits and Yuval Domb from Ingonyama. They go back to the start of the project, exploring Ingonyama’s initial vision for what ZK Hardware could be, how the field has evolved and how they are accelerating ZK Hardware today. The group discuss hardware product cycles, the hardware and algorithmic components, how a ZK ASIC is developed, they review some of the latest research from Ingonyama and more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 158: Threshold Cryptography with Omer Shlomovits from ZenGo
• Episode 258: Ultrasound Money & VRFs with Justin Drake
• The first ever SNARK proving ASIC tweet by drakefjustin
• Episode 266: ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 1
• Episode 267: ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 2
• ZK10: ZPU: The Zero-Knowledge Processing Unit - Yuval Domb
• Supranational Website
• Accseal Twitter
• Episode 311: The Launch of Celestia and Beyond
• Episode 308: Avail’s Approach to DA with Prabal Banerjee
• Episode 301: EigenLayer @ Devconnect
• ICICLE GitHub by Igonyama
• Lazzo + Jolt by a16z
• HyperPlonk: Plonk with Linear-Time Prover and High-Degree Custom Gates by Chen, Bünz, Boneh and Zhang E
• The Sum-Check Protocol over Fields of Small Characteristic by Thaler
• Episode 303: A Dive into Binius with Ulvetanna
• Sumcheck 201 Paper by Ingonyama

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

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 interview Brian Weickmann & Richard Liang from the ZKP2P project. They cover the opportunities and challenges of building ZK applications with the current tools available, as well as revisit the topic of ZK Email and explore how this lies at the heart of the current version of ZKP2P. They also discuss the goals of ZKP2P, what’s happening under the hood, the types of experiments and initiatives the project is running, how a user can already use the existing product and the opportunities systems like ZKP2P open up.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• ZKP2P
• zkSummit11
• Axiom’s Halo2 library
• Episode 302: ZK for web2 interop with zkLogin & ZK Email
• ZK Email
• 0xPARC
• 0xPARC Videos - Introduction to Circom
• ZKP2P - FAQ on UPI
• India: the frontier of payments innovation
• ZK Hack Whiteboard Sessions
• Fibonacci Sequence
• ZK Regex Website
• Gnosis Pay
• TLSNotary
• Plaid

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

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

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 Guillermo chat with Yaz Khoury and Ismail Khoffi from Celestia. They share how the team prepared for the launch of the Celestia mainnet and what has been happening at Celestia since. They revisit the topic of DA (Data Availability) and explore how rollups and dApp developers can already use the Celestia DA layer. The group discusses Blobstream, which brings the benefits of Celestia to Ethereum and helps to scale the network, as well as community building, the modular thesis and much more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 151: John Adler on Optimistic vs ZK Rollup and the data availability problem
• Episode 208: Digging into Data Availability with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia
• Episode 268: A Rollup-Centric Future & Sovereign Chains with Mustafa Al-Bassam
• Ismail Khoffi of Celestia (Sovereign Radio)
• Celestia Improvement Proposal GitHub
• Introducing the Celestia Improvement Proposal Process
• Introduction to Arbitrum rollups with Celestia as DA
• Introducing Blobstream: streaming modular DA to Ethereum
• Raspberry Pi Foundation
• Succinct Network
• Episode 308: Avail’s Approach to DA with Prabal Banerjee
• Episode 217: Information Theory & Blockchain with Sreeram Kannan
• Cosmos Hub
• Modular Summit Website

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

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 Noam Nisan, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Principle Researcher at StarkWare Industries and one of the pioneers in the field of Algorithmic Game Theory. They cover his extensive research and academic background, starting with his work on complexity theory as well as Algorithmic Game Theory and his current work on blockchains and Tokenomics at StarkWare.

They discuss his recent blog post; Simple Tokenomics for a Proof-of-Stake Utility Token, comparing the measurable Tokenomic outcomes of different live PoS systems and explore how Noam aimed to better communicate best practices for those designing these systems, plus much more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Simple Tokenomics for a Proof-of-Stake Utility Token by Noam Nisan
• Algorithmic Game Theory by Nisan, Roughgarden, Tardos and Vasirani
• The Elements of Computing Systems by Nisan and Schocken
• Game Theory, Alive by Karlin and Peres
• Algorithmic VS Mechanism Design
• The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Combinatorial agency by Babaioff, Feldman, Nisan and Winter
• Noam Nisan Google Scholar
• From Nand to Tetris Part 1

Applications to attend zkSummit11 are now open, head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.

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