Episode 90: MPC systems with Nigel Smart

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.