Episode 147: Oasis Labs & Privacy with Vishwanath Raman

In this episode, we catch up with Vishwanath Raman, Privacy Architect at Oasis Labs where he works on privacy and confidentiality technologies for Direct to Consumer and Business to Business use cases. His interest and experience span formal methods, applied machine learning, security, and privacy. Vishwa got his PhD in Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz followed by postdoctoral work at Carnegie Mellon.

The Oasis Network is a privacy-enabled blockchain platform for responsible data use. Using a combination of secure computing and privacy technologies, the Oasis Network enables data owners to take control of their data and treat their data as a digital asset via data tokenization. They provide privacy as a service and use secure enclaves and differential privacy in order build a platform for a responsible data economy.

We dive into the way the Oasis system is architected for privacy, who the ideal customers are and what the use cases for this protocol is. We also chatted about some of the tradeoffs in using SGX as well as the recent Binance-led CryptoSafe Alliance announcement where Oasis is the primary infrastructure builder.

Here are some of the papers and links that we discuss:
Oasis Labs at zkSummit ZK0x02
Chorus: Differential Privacy via Query Rewriting
Towards Practical Differential Privacy for SQL Queries
Problems with machine learning and privacy (one of many)
Towards Practical Differentially Private Convex Optimization

One small correction: Vishwa mentions the number of Validators on Oasis as numbering in the hundreds, but upon checking, we were informed that the number of validators that will participate in the consensus committee at mainnet launch is 70-100. More details in the following blog post: https://docs.oasis.dev/oasis-network-primer/token-metrics-and-distribution


Thank you to this week’s sponsor Trail of Bits.

Trail of Bits has recently published a new guide for building secure contracts with their Crytic offering.

Crytic is a SaaS-based GitHub application created by Trail of Bits that continuously assures your Ethereum smart contracts are safe and functional. It reports build status on every commit and runs a suite of security analyses so you get immediate security feedback.

Check out this guide for tips on how to build security into your dapps from the start and how to use the Trail of Bits suite of tools for automated vulnerability detection.

Thank you once again Trail of Bits

Join their Slack channel (#crytic) for support, and follow Crytic on Twitter @CryticCI


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Previous Episodes

Episode 346: ZK in Review: Decoding 2024 & Predicting 2025

This week, Anna catches up with cohosts, Tarun, Nico and Guillermo to do a look back at the zk research and applications that came out in 2024. They go on to discuss the challenges facing the ecosystem. And they wrap with a brief look forward, covering what to expect in ZK in 2025.

This will be the last ep of 2024, thank you for joining us this year!

Episode 345: Latest ZK Research with Dan Boneh

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Dan Boneh, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University. They discuss the focus of his research today, covering new ZK research problems and themes. This includes work on lattice-based SNARKs, ZK for content provenance, ZK in the FHE context, updates on ZK in ML and more!

Episode 344: ZK Events 2024 Recap

This week, Anna and Nico take a look back at some of the ZK Events produced in 2024 by the ZK Podcast, ZK Hack and other adjacent projects. Starting with the live ZK Jargon Decoder hosted in January and spanning the 10 months since, Anna and Nico share behind-the-scenes anecdotes, highlight key talks from the events and share some insight into how the programs for the zkSummit events are created. They wrapped with a summary of some of the themes in ZK that got them talking this year and are tracking going forward.

Don’t forget, this is the last episode of ZK Podcast before we take a pause in weekly shows for the rest of 2024 – but don’t worry we will be back!

Episode 343: Mastering MPC & Memes with Mikerah

This week Anna chats with Mikerah Quintyne-Collins from HashCloak and Stoffel Labs. They discuss how Mikerah got her start in the crypto space and then dive into the work she did at ChainSafe and eventually at HashCloak. They cover Mikerah’s work on privacy preserving tech like ZK, TEE and MPC and learn about what drives her tweet game and the wisdom she has picked up over the years as a technical founder, driven by curiosity… and memes.

Bonus: ZK Whiteboard Sessions Season 2 and a ZK Pod Pause!

Just sharing 2 updates:
1) The ZK Whiteboard sessions are BACK with a 2nd season! These videos will be released every 2 weeks for the next 3 months.
2) The Zero Knowledge Podcast will take a pause on the weekly cadence of the show starting Oct 16th until the end of 2024.

Episode 342: Catch up with Zac and Ariel

This week Anna catches up with Zac Williamson & Ariel Gabizon from Aztec. They cover what each has been working on over the last year, Zac shared updates about the development of Aztec and the finalization of their underlying ZK system: MegaPlonk. Ariel discussed his latest research on IVC with his publications of the ProtoGalaxy and Stackproofs works and how properties of this systems brought him and Zac to start working together again.

Episode 341: coSNARKs with Ais and Lukas from TACEO

This week Anna and Nico chat with Lukas Helminger and Ais Connolly from TACEO. They discuss Lukas & Ais’ early work in cryptography and privacy preserving technologies, the founding of TACEO and their recent work on coSNARKs – or Collaborative SNARKs – that combine MPC and ZK. They explore how these coSNARKs are created, their coCircom language, the characteristics of these systems as well as how they can be applied in the real world.

Episode 340: Is Cosmos Dead? A critical look with Zaki Manian

This week Anna and Zaki Manian dive into the Cosmos ecosystem and ask the question: is Cosmos Dead? They explore key events, teams and players who worked on Cosmos during different eras before teasing out the strengths and structural flaws that made the project what it is today. The conversation wraps with a discussion around new initiatives aimed at reviving the ecosystem and aligning factions in Cosmos together towards a central goal.

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