Episode 169: Arkworks SNARK libraries with Pratyush Mishra

In this week’s episode, Anna and Robert Habermeier chat with Pratyush Mishra, co-author of the Arkworks toolkit. Arkworks is a collection of Rust libraries designed to simplify development with SNARKs, both for developing high-level application circuits and building custom SNARK implementations.

Pratyush lays out what possibilities and trade-offs Arkworks offers, diving into the details of the Rust implementation and why it is the best language for developing cryptographic primitives. Anna, Rob and Pratyush then branch out into the philosophical and practical questions of open-source and blockchain development.

Here are a few links to Arkworks and the topics they discussed:

Arkworks GitHub page and Telegram group.

Pratyush’s GitHub, Twitter and Berkeley pages.

Bellman and Libsnark, some of the other libraries that are similar to Arkworks.

The Celo and Mina protocols, two major projects using Arkworks.

Here is a basic explainer of what projects like Arkworks are trying to do and why it’s useful, with a particular focus on ZoKrates, one of the languages Pratyush mentioned.

Intros to Circom, Leo and Zinc, some of the higher level languages.

An earlier episode with Robert Habermeier about the work he does on Polkadot.


Be sure to subscribe to the zkMesh Newsletter – a monthly rundown of the latest in decentralised privacy-preserving technologies, privacy protocol development and zero knowledge systems research. Put together by Anna & Mikerah (HashCloak).


Thank you to this week’s sponsor Least Authority.

Least Authority is a security consulting and product development company known for pushing the limits on how to build privacy-respecting solutions. They are a team of security researchers, open source developers, privacy advocates and cryptographers. They have developed an end-to-end encrypted cloud storage product that minimizes the collection of any data related to its users, called PrivateStorage.

PrivateStorage implements privacy and security by design, not by policy.

PrivateStorage is based on Tahoe-LAFS an open source distributed file store

PrivateStorage is launching in the second half of this year. Visit PrivateStorage.io to learn more and to sign up to be notified about its release.


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Previous Episodes

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.

Episode 339: TEEs with Andrew Miller

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun catch up with Andrew Miller. They cover his early work on consensus, ZK and MPC before switching focus to the topic of his current work: TEEs. They map his evolving opinion on TEEs and explore why they could be seen as an optimal solution to many of the blockchain challenges.

Episode 338: On Trust Infrastructure with Arnaud Schenk

This week Anna and Nico chat with Arnaud Schenk, one of the original co-founders of Aztec and creator of the Polaris Fellowship. They discuss Arnaud’s recent blog post ‘On Trust Infrastructure’, exploring the down sides of a trustless system, the need to make online community building more possible and how programmable cryptography may play a role in these solutions. They explore the history of computer culture, the rejection of institutions by mid-90s internet culture and how the seeds for this were set by the 60s counterculture.

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