In this week’s episode, we chat with Omer Shlomovits, co-founder of Zengo & Zengo X, about MPC, threshold cryptography and how the research around this topic can be used in a blockchain context.

This week, Anna catches up with Illia Polosukhin, CTO and co-founder of NEAR, to talk about what’s new in the network since last year. They go deeper on some of the topics they discussed last time – such as sharded vs non-sharded blockchains and data availability as well as discuss the long and rocky road to launching a new PoS network, building a validator community and where we might see privacy and zkp tech in Near.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Fredrik chat with Alin Tomescu, a post-doc researcher at VMWare Research Group, about the concept of stateless systems. Specifically, they explore his work on stateless validation, why this would be desirable and what is the state of the research around this topic.

In this week’s episode, we revisit the topic of Consensus Algorithms with Ren Zhang, a researchers at Nervos and previously at imec-COSIC (KU Leuven). We chat about an earlier work he did on evaluating PoW consensus protocols security and explore his more recent work on NC-Max – a consensus protocol that breaks the throughput limit and enables the full utilization of the nodes’ bandwidth in confirming transactions

In this week’s episode, Anna spoke with Nolan Smith and Locke Brown, co-founders at NuID – a zero knowledge authentication solution. They explore the use-case of zero knowledge powered password management and how this relates to Identity.

In this week’s episode, we chat with Dan Robinson, a Research Partner at Paradigm. We talk about the world of crypto VC and revisit of the topic of the Ethereum mempool. We then hear Dan’s story about how he and some colleagues tried to save a transaction from the monsters that lurk in the mempool as told in his blog post entitled “Ethereum is a Dark Forest”.