Episode 83: From Warp Sync to SPREE with Polkadot’s Rob Habermeier

In this episode, Anna chats with Robert Habermeier, one of the co-founders of Polkadot and an engineer at Parity Technology, about his early experience with Rust and cryptography, as well as the work he did at Parity on Warp Sync and Lightclients. We then discuss how this helped inspire some of the concepts and design of the Polkadot protocol. We also chat about some of the exciting concepts that he is discovering along the way – such as new architectures to promote interchain security, Trust Wormholes and more!

For more about what we discussed, check out these links:

Polkadot: https://polkadot.network/about/
Warp sync: https://wiki.parity.io/Warp-Sync
Lightclient https://www.parity.io/what-is-a-light-client/


Special thanks to this week's sponsor: Trail of Bits

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Previous Episodes

Episode 269: Auctions with Kshitij Kulkarni, Matheus V. X. Ferreira and Tarun

In this week’s episode Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra explore the topic of auctions with guests Kshitij Kulkarni, PHD student at Berkeley’s EECS department and Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

They discuss the history of auctions, both in the real world and in blockchain, and go on to cover more recent blockchain uses, such as MEV and NFT auctions. They review the incentives of both auction holders and the participants as well as how this incentive design can influence the effectiveness of the auctions themselves.

Episode 268: A Rollup-Centric Future & Sovereign Chains with Mustafa Al-Bassam

In this week’s episode Anna Rose interviews Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia. They cover where Celestia as an idea emerged from, how its rollup-centric data availability (DA) network works and what can be expected from their upcoming launch. They also chat about how Celestia aims to empower Sovereign chains – independent rollup chains that use Celestia as the DA and consensus layer – and how this Sovereign chain model compares with the Ethereum rollup architecture.

Episode 267: ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 2

In this two-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo. Throughout these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical techniques in ZKPs that can be optimized for and the tricks and strategies that ZPrize competitors used to achieve these optimizations.

Episode 266: ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 1

In this 2-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo. Through these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical techniques in ZKPs that can be optimized for and the tricks and strategies that ZPrize competitors used to achieve these optimizations.

Episode 265: Where ZK and ML intersect with Yi Sun and Daniel Kang

This week, Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra dive back into the topic of ZK ML with guests Yi Sun, co-founder of Axiom, and Daniel Kang, Assistant Professor of computer science at UIUC. They discuss Yi and Daniel’s previous academic work and what led them to get interested in ZK topics and specifically ZK ML. They then dive into a discussion about 2 recent papers which examine the use of ZK within Machine Learning architectures.

Episode 264: On-Chain Reputation & Identity Building with Sismo

In this episode, Anna chats with Hadrien Charlanes from Sismo. They discuss his early experiences in blockchain development and DeFi, and how this led him to build Sismo, a decentralized identity product with privacy preserving properties. They also cover the ZK badge concept: how they’re minted and what is happening under the hood as well as interesting emerging use cases using these zk-based on-chain instruments.

Episode 263: Cosmos, Sommelier and Emerging Assets with Zaki Manian

This week, Anna catches up with Zaki Manian, co-founder of Iqlusion and Sommelier. They embark on a comprehensive recap of the history of Cosmos to-date, covering what has happened since their last interview 2 years ago. They also dive into topics such as the IBC launch, Osmosis, how the ecosystem grew and accelerated up until the Luna crash and how it continues to recover in its next phase. They then chat about Sommelier and how it has evolved, as well as the concepts of emerging asset types, such as real world assets, and how ZKPs for privacy may finally find a product market fit that could build up real market adoption. You won’t want to miss this one!

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