Episode 194: zkEVM with Jordi & David from Hermez
Anna chats with Jordi Baylina and David Schwartz about their recently announced zkEVM design.
25 Aug 2021
Anna chats with Jordi Baylina and David Schwartz about their recently announced zkEVM design.
In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Jordi Baylina, OG Ethereum contributor and Polygon zkEVM Technical Lead. They cover what Jordi has been working on since he was last on the show in 2021. Back then, zkEVMs were still just an idea. Now that many of these systems have launched, they have a chance to look at how these fit into the general L2 landscape.
They cover Jordi’s view on engineering decentralized systems and how these are rolled out, and the recent research from Polygon, including their AggLayer proposal. They wrap up on what inspires him to keep contributing in the space.
This week, Anna chats with ZK Podcast regular Guillermo Angeris, Head of Research at BCC and Nicolas Mohnblatt, Researcher and Cryptographer at Geometry. This was recorded on April 3rd 2023, the day between the ZK Hack Lisbon hackathon and the zkSummit9 event.
In this episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with David Tse about his career and research spanning from early Networking, Mobile Networking, P2P, all the way up to his work on formalizing Blockchain systems.
Along the way, they touch on topics like David’s paper ‘The Price of Anarchy’, the Prism work, his work with the Ethereum Foundation and his new project Babylon.
In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Ye Zhang and Haichen Shen, the founders of Scroll – a native zkEVM Layer 2 Solution for Ethereum. They cover Scroll’s founding, the need to scale Ethereum, zkEVM philosophies, use cases and more. They wrap up with an exploration of how DApps and products on top of such as zkEVM may interact with the mainchain and with other applications.
This week, Anna chats with Brendan Farmer and Daniel Lubarov from Polygon Zero, formerly known as Mir, about their early experiments with different proving systems, their work combining PLONK and Halo called Plonky – as well as the more recent combination of PLONK plus FRI (a technique that is borrowed from STARKs) which makes up Plonky2.
This week, Anna chats with Mihailo Bjelic one of the co-founders of Polygon. Mihailo takes us through the evolution of Polygon and how the promise of web3 has led them to betting big on ZK-focused technologies. We learn about their approach to the two main challenges within their mission to scaling Ethereum – security and data availability; and how their suite of products aims to tackle these. Lastly, we hear about what’s next on the Polygon roadmap to onboarding the first billion to Ethereum – for the products themselves and the ecosystem as a whole.
This week Anna chats with Nathan Ginnever, an applied cryptographer and contributor to Zodiac, and Auryn Macmillan, a product manager and Solidity dev at Gnosis Guild, about the modules and components that make up Zodiac’s suite of composable DAO tooling. In the conversation, they explore the DAO landscape and the lessons they’ve gathered from earlier tools like the Gnosis Safe and SafeSnap. As well as run-through the components that make up the Zodiac standard, new upcoming innovations, the emerging trends in DAO management and more.
This week Anna chats with Emin Gün Sirer – CEO Ava Labs and Founder of Avalanche. They chat about the experiences that led him to become interested in distributed systems research and his work as a professor at Cornell that led to the development of Avalanche. They then dig into their novel consensus mechanism which uses the sub-sampling technique, the architecture of the network with the 3 distinct components: X-Chain, C-Chain and P-Chain, bridges and more.
This week, Anna chats with Bobbin Threadbare about his project Miden, a STARK-based roll-up which was recently purchased by Polygon. We recap the differences between STARKs and SNARKs and the increasingly blurred line between these two proving systems. We then map Bobbin’s journey to Miden VM (now Polygon Miden), how it originated from his earlier project Distaff VM and now incorporates the Winterfell prover from his days at Facebook.
