Episode 188: Analyzing Osmosis & Preventing MEV with Sunny and Dev

In this week’s episode, Anna and Guille catch up with Joe Bonneau, Assistant Professor at NYU and Research Partner at a16z crypto research. They discuss the research Joe has been working on since he was last on the show in 2019, including Naysayer proofs, Zero-Knowledge Middleboxes, Sealed-Bid Auctions and other ZK-related research projects to date.

In this week’s episode Anna chats with Ismael Hishon-Rezaizadeh, Founder and CEO at Lagrange Labs and Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou, Head of Research at Lagrange and Co-Director of the Applied Cryptography Lab at Yale University.

They revisit the concepts of zk-powered coprocessors and dive into the work that Charalampos did previous to joining Lagrange on Verifiable SQL. They then explore how this is incorporated into the Lagrange coprocessor system, the work they are doing on Reckle Trees, future work and what all this enables for dApp developers. They discuss their new prover marketplace, the general state of infrastructure and how they are keen to bring more concepts from general computing into decentralized blockchain systems.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun sit down with Hart Lambur irl at EthCC week in Brussels. They start by exploring Hart’s project Across – a cross-chain interoperability solution and sister project to Uma. They explore Across’ construction, the tradeoff space and how this compares to other interop solutions. Then, in ZK Podcast tradition, the group shift gears with a few drinks and explore thoughtful observations on the week in Brussels.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun meet with Varun Srinivasan, co-founder of Farcaster. They explore the Farcaster project, discussing the ideas that prompted its inception and what separates it from existing social media networks. The conversation explores the design space that Farcaster opens up for devs and the kinds of applications that can be built on top of it.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Guille chat with Ying Tong Lai and Bryan Gillespie about their latest research and works to date. They get to dive into Ying Tong’s work on Zcash, Geometry Research and Halo2 before exploring Bryan’s journey into ZK via Zcash and current work at Inversed Tech.

After catching up, they dive into the pair’s recent work ‘SoK: Programmable Privacy in Distributed Systems’, exploring the classifications and frameworks being introduced.

In this week’s episode Anna and Nico chat with Alessandro Chiesa, Associate Professor at EPFL and Eylon Yogev, Professor at Bar-Ilan University. They discuss their recent publication; Building Cryptographic Proofs from Hash Functions, which provides a comprehensive and rigorous treatment of cryptographic proofs and goes on to analyze notable constructions of SNARGs based on ideal hash functions.