This week, host Anna Rose chats with Finch, Erwan and Jen from the Penumbra team. They share an update about Penumbra and discuss how this zk-powered project works under the hood. Specifically, how Penumbra harnesses ZK to offer new paradigms for staking, voting and trading.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Episode 247: Exploring Penumbra with Henry de Valence
• Penumbra Storage
• Penumbra GitHub
• ZK8: How to build a private DEX - Henry de Valence - Penumbra
• ZK8: Tiered Merkle Topiary in Rust – finch – Penumbra Labs
• Plaidfinch (Penumbra) - Interchain Private Trading with Penumbra
• Privacy in Cosmos Live: Finch (Penumbra)- Full-Stack Private Protocol Design
• A pure-Rust implementation of group operations on Ristretto and Curve25519
• curve25519-dalek Github
• Replicating Market Makers by Angeris, Evans, Chitra
• SecureDrop

Further reading;

• Penumbra’s DEX Arrives From The Future
• How to See in the Dark: Navigating Penumbra
• Private Governance on Penumbra
• Bringing Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Penumbra
• Introducing Poseidon377, our instantiation of a SNARK-friendly hash
• Testnet #4: Shielded Staking Is Here

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form

Check out the ZK Jobs Board

The MASP circuit's latest update enables shielded set rewards directly in the shielded set, a novel feature that funds privacy as a public good.

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 Rose and Kobi Gurkan chat with Or Sattath, Assistant Professor at the Ben-Gurion University in the Computer Science department. They deep dive into Or’s work on Quantum Cryptography. They begin with definitions of Quantum Computing and Quantum Cryptography, covering what these will mean for existing cryptography. They also explore how new discoveries in this field can interact with existing Proof-of-work systems and how Quantum computers could affect the game theory of mining in the future.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• On the insecurity of quantum Bitcoin mining by Sattath
• Strategies for quantum races by Lee, Ray, and Santha
• Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer by Shor
• Shor’s Algorithm
• Grover’s Algorithm
• A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search by Grover
• Bell’s Theorem

More in-depth resources recommended by Or Sattath:

• A recommended smbc-comics about the power of quantum computing, authored by Zack Weinersmith (the usual cartoonist) and Scott Aaronson (a quantum computing expert)
• For an in-depth introduction to quantum computing, I recommend Ronald de-Wolf's lecture notes
• The Bitcoin backbone protocol with a single quantum miner, by Cojocaru et al
• The fingerprint of quantum mining slightly below 16 minutes by Nerem-Gaur
• Some estimates regarding timelines, which we didn't discuss, are available here and here
• The insecurity of quantum Bitcoin mining, and the need to change the tie-breaking rule.
• The work by Lee-Ray-Santh that analyzes the equilibrium strategy for multiple quantum miners, as a simplified one-shot game.

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form.

Polygon 2.0 and all of our ZK tech is open-source and community-driven. Reach out to the Polygon community on Discord to learn more, contribute, or join in and build the future of Web3 together with Polygon!

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

We are taking a pause on the show this week, but do be sure to get your application in for the upcoming Zero Knowledge Summit - zk10.

Happening in London on Sept 20 - spots are limited!

Apply here -> https://www.zksummit.com/

This week, Anna Rose chats with Stefan George from Gnosis. They start with an update on the projects that have spun out of Gnosis - Safe, Zodiac, CoW Swap - as well as older experiments that the team had incubated. They then cover the evolution of Gnosis Chain from its origin as xDai, discuss the new aggregate bridge architecture Hashi and explore Gnosis Pay - an on-chain p2p payments product that fulfills some of the original motivations of Bitcoin. They discuss a range of relevant topics such as intents, prediction markets, account abstraction, ZK Bridges, decentralization and more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

Previous Podcast Eps

• Episode 65: Bridges, xDai and Burner Wallets with Igor & Austin
• Episode 183: CowSwap & DAO Tech with Gnosis’s Martin Köppelmann
• Episode 255: Verifying Consensus On-Chain with Succinct
• Episode 285: Intents with Chris Goes from Anoma

Papers

• Why sharding is great: demystifying the technical properties
• Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto

Websites

• Gnosis Pay Website
• DXdao Website
• xDai Website
• EigenLayer Website

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form.

Polygon 2.0 and all of our ZK tech is open-source and community-driven. Reach out to the Polygon community on Discord to learn more, contribute, or join in and build the future of Web3 together with Polygon!

Visit https://r0.link/ZKpodcast to learn more and sign up today for the Bonsai waitlist.

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, host Anna Rose and guests Uma Roy, Zaki Manian and Tarun Chitra recap all things EthCC Paris. This impromptu chat takes a look back at the topics, talks, parties and goings-on of the Paris week and what really caught their attention. Expect some spicy takes, offtopic rambles, inside scoops and more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

EthCC Links

• EthCC Website
• EthCC Side Events
• EthCC Mary Maller - How can we use Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Ethereum?
• EthCC Vitalik Buterin - a history of account abstraction
• EthCC6 After Movie
• EthCC6 Main Playlist

Modular Summit Talks

• Modular Summit
• Modular Summit Day 1 - Fourier Stage
• Modular Summit Day 2 - Fourier Stage
• Modular Summit Day 1 - Galois Stage
• Modular Summit Day 2 - Galois Stage

Other Talks and Links

• Episode 285: Intents with Chris Goes from Anoma
• Gnosis Pay
• DeFi Security Summit
• ZK Paris ZK Validator <> Geometry Tweet
• Research Day 2023 Playlist
• Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks by Georgios Konstantopoulos
• Ethereum DeFi Protocol Beanstalk Hacked for $182 Million—What You Need to Know
• Another $103M Disappears From Multichain in Potential ‘Rug Pull’

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form. Speaker applications close this Friday!

Polygon 2.0 and all of our ZK tech is open-source and community-driven. Reach out to the Polygon community on Discord to learn more, contribute, or join in and build the future of Web3 together with Polygon!

For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.

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, host Anna Rose and co-host Tarun Chitra catch up with Chris Goes from Heliax, the team behind Anoma and Namada. They start with a quick retrospective about IBC, a project he formerly worked on, and how the protocol has evolved since it launched.

They dive into the concept of 'intents', exploring their origin, evolution, and discuss the intent-based systems that exist today. As well, they chat about the architectures enabled by a generalized intent-based infrastructure, the potential impacts on user experience, and the inherent trade-offs, particularly when zero-knowledge or privacy aspects are added to the mix.

Further reading for this episode:

Papers/Docs

• Cosmos Whitepaper
• Anoma: Undefining Money Versatile commitments to value by Christopher Goes, Awa Sun Yin and Adrian Brink
• Differential Privacy in Constant Function Market Makers by Tarun Chitra, Guillermo Angeris and Alex Evans
• Wyvern Protocol Documents

Websites

• SUAVE and the Future Opportunities and Challenges of MEV: Part I
• CoW Swap
• Zcash GitHub - Nullifiers
• Map of Zones Website

Talks/YouTube

• Realizing Intents with a Resource Model - Christopher Goes at Research Day
• The Edge of MEV Switching Costs and the Slow Game - Christopher Goes at Research Day
• ZK8: Namada: asset-agnostic interchain privacy - Chris Goes - Anoma
• Christopher Goes - Anoma: an intent-centric
• Are Intents, SUAVE, Account Abstraction, & Cross-Chain Bridging all the same thing? - Uma Roy at Research Day

Podcast Eps

• Episode 115: Cosmos, IBC and ZKPs with Chris Goes
• Episode 184: Anoma’s Adrian Brink on Validity Predicates, Ferveo DKG & More
• Episode 253: A look into Namada and Anoma with Awa Sun Yin

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form

Polygon 2.0 and all of our ZK tech is open-source and community-driven. Reach out to the Polygon community on Discord to learn more, contribute, or join in and build the future of Web3 together with Polygon!

For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.

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 Rose chats with Jon Stephens, Computer Science Ph.D. student in the UToPiA group at UT Austin and co-founder of Veridise. Veridise is a blockchain auditing firm that audits smart contracts and ZK systems. They discuss what led Jon to work on system security, what tools are available to test the security of ZK systems and the process of performing formal verification on ZK systems. They also cover general ZK security, why this topic matters and ways we can incentivise ethical disclosures when bugs and vulnerabilities are found.

• SmartPulse: Automated Checking of Temporal Properties in Smart Contracts by Stephens, Ferles, Mariano, Lahiri, and Dillig
• Certifying Zero-Knowledge Circuits with Refinement Types by J. Liu, Kretz, H. Liu, Tan, Wang, Sun, Pearson, Miltner, Dillig, and Feng
• Practical Security Analysis of Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits by Wen, Stephens, Chen, Ferles, Pailoor, Charbonnet, Dillig and Feng
• Episode 67: Formal Verification with Martin Lundfall
• Episode 70: Digging into DAI with Rune Christensen from Maker
• Episode 255: Verifying Consensus On-Chain with Succinct
• Boogie: An Intermediate Verification Language
• Circom-lib
• How Coders Hacked Back to ‘Rescue’ $208 Million in Ethereum

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form

Polygon 2.0 and all of our ZK tech is open-source and community-driven. Reach out to the Polygon community on Discord to learn more, contribute, or join in and build the future of Web3 together with Polygon!

The MASP circuit's latest update enables shielded set rewards directly in the shielded set, a novel feature that funds privacy as a public good.

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, host Anna Rose and co-host Kobi Gurkan chat with Yohei Nakajima, General Partner at Untapped Capital and creator of BabyAGI. They cover a wide variety of topics from the world of AGIs and agents to building no-code software in public. They kick-off with a chat about how Yohei’s interest in NFTs led him down the AI ‘rabbit hole’ and how he started to build out experiments in public that have inspired a new group of AI tools and projects.

They wrap up with a discussion about the possible impacts of some of this AI tech, how ZK may help mediate the challenges it introduces and more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode;

• ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models by Yao and Cao
• Episode 279: Intro to zkpod.ai with Anna and Kobi
• Bonus: zkpod.ai & Attested Audio Experiment with Daniel Kang
• BabyAGI GitHub
• Auto-GPT
• PixelBeasts
• Stable Diffusion
• DALL·E 2
• Midjourney
• OpenAI
• Playground AI
• LangChain
• LlamaIndex
• Dust
• Universal Paperclips: the game by Frank Lantz
• AI and the Paperclip Problem

Check out the Modular Summit here: https://modularsummit.dev/

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> zkSummit 10 Application Form

Anoma’s first fractal instance, Namada, is launching soon!

Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy. Namada natively interoperates with fast-finality chains via IBC and with Ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge.

For privacy, Namada deploys an upgraded version of the multi-asset shielded pool (MASP) circuit that allows all assets (fungible and non-fungible) to share a common shielded set – this removes the size limits of the anonymity set and provides the best privacy guarantees possible for every user in the multichain.

The MASP circuit's latest update enables shielded set rewards directly in the shielded set, a novel feature that funds privacy as a public good.

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, host Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt chat with Ron Rothblum, Professor of Computer Science at Technion. They explore information theory and ZK, diving into the weeds on multiple topics including error correcting codes, FRI, FFTs, Reed-Solomon encoding, Fiat-Shamir and more.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Fiat-Shamir via List-Recoverable Codes (or: Parallel Repetition of GMW is not Zero-Knowledge) by Holmgren, Lombardi and Rothblum
• Proving as Fast as Computing: Succinct Arguments with Constant Prover Overhead by Ron-Zewi and Rothblum
• Faster Sounder Succinct Arguments and IOPs by Holmgren and Rothblum
• The Random Oracle Methodology, Revisited by Canetti, Goldreich and Halevi
• Linear-Time Arguments with Sublinear Verification from Tensor Codes by Bootle, Chiesa and Groth
• Testudo: Linear Time Prover SNARKs with Constant Size Proofs and Square Root Size Universal Setup by Campanelli, Gailly, Gennaro, Jovanovic, Mihali and Thaler
• Reed-Solomon Codes
• Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem
• Guy Rothblum Publications
• Episode 274: SNARKs: A Trilogy with Ariel Gabizon

zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> https://9lcje6jbgv1.typeform.com/zkSummit10

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

Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo that enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of ZKPs to deploy decentralized exchanges, hidden information games, regulated stablecoins, and more. Visit http://developer.aleo.org.

For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord.

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, host Anna Rose chats with Chhi'mèd Künzang and François Garillot from Lurk Labs about all things Lurk, Lisp and zk languages.

They discuss the history of the Lurk project, from its beginnings with Protocol Labs (the team that built Filecoin), to its emergence as a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zkSNARKs.

They discuss Lurk’s relationship with Lisp, what Lisp is, and how developers familiar with that family of languages would be able to interact with Lurk. They then discuss how Lurk compares to other zkDSLs and the new innovations this Lisp-based language brings to the table.

Here’s some additional links for this episode:

Programming Languages

• Circom
• Arkworks GitHub
• Leo by Aleo
• SnarkyJS
• Noir

Lurk Links

• LURK: Lambda, the Ultimate Recursive Knowledge by Amin, Burnham, Garillot, Gennaro, Künzang, Rogozin and Wong
• Lurk Lab
• Lurk Lab Twitter
• Lurk Language
• Lurk GitHub

Additional Reading/Listening

• A Sloth-based Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) evaluator and SNARK prover GitHub
• Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I by John McCarthy, April 1960
• Using ZK Proofs to Fight Disinformation By Trisha Datta and Dan Boneh
• Common Lisp
• Episode 172: ZK languages with Alex Ozdemir
• zkSessions: The ZK Languages Rundown
• zkSummit4 Videos - check the playlist for individual talks!

Ever feel like developing zero-knowledge proofs is a daunting task?

The team at RISC Zero is here to remind you that it doesn't have to be that way. Their out-of-the-box tooling allows developers to access the magic of ZK proofs from any chain without needing to learn custom languages or building custom zk circuits.

Bonsai, RISC Zero’s most anticipated product, is a proving marketplace that enables any protocol or application to leverage fast ZKProofs in languages like Rust, Go, C++.

Visit https://r0.link/ZKpodcast to learn more and sign up today for the Bonsai waitlist.

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