Episode 133: Trusted Setup Ceremonies Explored

In this week's episode, Anna explores the state of trusted setups with 4 of the people who have recently coordinated and run trusted setups for different SNARK systems. She interviews Koh Wei Jie from the Ethereum Foundation, Thomas Walton-Pocock from Aztec Protocol, Brecht Devos from Loopring and Kobi Gurkan from the EF and cLabs. This episode covers the new generation of trusted setups and how the teams working on these are learning from each other and at times, even sharing parts of the trusted set up itself.

As a primer, Trusted Setups are those events or ceremonies that one needs to perform to generate the parameters that can kick off SNARK based systems. It is an MPC – or multiparty computation – that involves a number of participants sequentially downloading software, running a computation that includes some randomness that they generate and re-uploading their result to be folded into the next participants computation. At the end of this process, there is a hidden parameter that is used to create the keys that are used to create proofs for private transactions, and to verify those proofs. These keys prove that a transaction is correct.

Here are some helpful links about all the various trusted setups we mention:

Zcash's Trusted Setups
https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/50 – Zooko speaks about the trusted set up at timecode 17:45
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/ceremony
https://z.cash/technology/paramgen/

EF's Perpetual Powers of Tau
https://github.com/weijiekoh/perpetualpowersoftau

Semaphore
Semaphore blog post
Semaphore Phase 2 Multi-Party Trusted Setup Participant Guide

MACI (upcoming)
https://github.com/appliedzkp/maci

Aztec Protocol
https://www.aztecprotocol.com/ignition/
https://ignition.aztecprotocol.com/

Loopring
https://loopring.org/#/post/loopring-starts-trusted-setup-multi-party-computation-ceremony

Tornado Cash
https://medium.com/@tornado.cash/the-biggest-trusted-setup-ceremony-in-the-world-3c6ab9c8fffa
https://ceremony.tornado.cash/

cLabs (upcoming)
https://github.com/celo-org/snark-setup


Check out the Zero Knowledge Youtube Channel and be sure to subscribe to get the latest videos from the Podcast, zkSummit and zkStudyClub!


Signup for zkMesh Newsletter – a monthly newsletter focused on sharing resources about decentralised privacy-preserving technologies, privacy protocol development and zero knowledge systems research.

Signup to get this delivered directly into your inbox –>> https://zkmesh.substack.com/


If you like what we do:
Follow us on Twitter – @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Give us feedback! https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A
Support our Gitcoin Grant
Support us on the ZKPatreon

Or directly here:
ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a
BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz
ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Previous Episodes

Episode 291: MEV, Mechanism Design & the Censorship Problem with Mallesh M Pai

On this week’s episode, Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra chat with Mallesh Pai, Associate Professor of Economics at Rice University. They explore mechanism design in an economic context and Mallesh’s work around MEV topics – specifically on censorship in an MEV context and within his Special Mechanism Group.

The discussion takes the team back into the topic of MEV, revisiting the proposer builder separation concept and the impact that this may have on the efficiency and censorship resistance of these systems.

Episode 290: Exploring, Teaching and Auditing ZK with David Wong

This week, Anna and Guillermo chat with David Wong, author of the Real-World Cryptography and a cofounder zksecurity.xyz – a ZK auditing firm. They chat about how he originally got interested in cryptography, his early work as a security consultant, his work on the Facebook crypto project and the Mina project, zksecurity.xyz, auditing techniques and their efficacy in a ZK context, what common bugs are found in ZK code, and much more.

Episode 289: Penumbra Catch Up with Finch, Erwan and Jen

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.

Episode 288: Quantum Cryptography with Or Sattath

This week, 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 by defining Quantum Computing and Quantum Cryptography, covering what this means 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.

Bonus: Apply to zk10!

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!

Episode 287: Gnosis catch-up with Stefan George

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.

Episode 286: Paris 2023 Recap with Uma, Zaki and Tarun

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

Episode 285: Intents with Chris Goes from Anoma

This week, host Anna Rose and co-host Tarun Chitra catch up with Chris Goes from Heliax, the team behind Anoma and Namada. They dive into the concept of ‘intents’, exploring their origin, evolution, and discuss the intent-based systems that exist today. They then 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.

Zk white

Subscribe

Subscribe to Zero Knowledge podcast on these links:

Join the conversation:

Newsletters:

Support: