In this week’s episode, Anna explores the recent trusted setups for SNARK systems. She interviews Koh Wei Jie from the Ethereum Foundation, Thomas Walton-Pocock from Aztec Protocol, Brecht Devos from Loopring and Kobi Gurkan from the EF and cLabs. This episode covers the new generation of trusted setups and how these teams are learning from each other and at times, even sharing parts of the trusted set up itself.

In this episode, we chat with Mark Tyneway who is a contributor on the Handshake Protocol project – an experimental peer-to-peer root naming system. We learn about this decentralised, foundation-free project, the issues of DNS, how Handshake plans on fixing this, how it differs from ENS, their unique airdrop process, what an Urkel Trie is, and more.

In this week’s episode, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Akis Kattis, a PhD student at NYU & the co-author of Proof of Necessary Work: Succinct State Verification with Fairness Guarantees – a paper he co-wrote with Joseph Bonneau. They discuss the challenge of Proof of Useful Work, the unique properties that SNARKs have, such as puzzle hardness, that allow for PoNW to overcome these challenges, PoS SNARK systems, elastic block construction, and more.

In this week’s episode, Anna interviews three people from the Tezos community: Jacob Arluck (co-founders TQ ), Marc Beunardeau and Marco Stronati (both from Nomadic Lab). They chat about the Tezos origin story, the development of the PoS system, the governance of Tezos, and how they are incorporating zk proofs – and specifically Sapling from Zcash – into their system.

In this episode, we chat with Molly Mackinlay, Project Lead for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) at Protocol Labs. We talk about her journey to Protocol Labs, as well as take a deeper view into IPFS, LibP2P, Bitswap, Testground, the use cases and projects working with these tools, and the specific upgrades they have made with the recent 0.5 IPFS release. We also chat about the path to decentralisation and the importance of building bridges to the Web2 world.

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Kenny Paterson, Professor of Computer Science and Lead of Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich. The goal of the episode is to take a deeper look at DP-3T and privacy preserving contact tracing research in Europe generally. They cover his work at ETH Zurich, discuss how the DP-3T project came to be, look at risks facing contact tracing protocols generally, and discuss why putting privacy and decentralisation at the heart of these types of protocol is so important.