Episode 200: SNARK Research & Pedagogy with Alessandro Chiesa

In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan check in on the state of ZK today. They discuss recent ZK applications and tooling as well as developments from the last 6 months. They review new use cases such as ZK for off-chain computations and dive into research breakthroughs, trends, security and much more. Finally, they introduce the concept of zkpod.ai which will be covered fully in next week’s episode.

In today’s episode, Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt interview Srinath Setty, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of notable works such as Spartan, Nova, SuperNova, and HyperNova. This discussion covers Setty’s early work and how this led to him working on SNARKs, folding schemes and sumcheck protocols, as well as his views on the future trajectory of the ZK space.

Given the current chatter around Nova-style accumulation schemes, this interview offers a chance to explore the perspective of a key contributor behind these developments.

In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with Yi Sun, co-founder of Axiom. Yi was recently on the show to discuss ZK ML’s, however this time they take a closer look at the Axiom project and what it means to be a ZK coprocessor for Ethereum. During the interview they also explore what problems Axiom are trying to solve, how ZKPs are used to help bring historic data into smart contracts and what new use cases this architecture can support.

In this week’s episode, Anna Rose chats with Scroll co-founders Ye Zhang and Sandy Peng, delving into updates about their zkEVM L2, the progress they have made over the past year and what it really means to build in public. They discuss the challenges and rewards of founding a fully remote organization and how the team navigates the ever changing ZK landscape.

This week, Anna and Ariel Gabizon cover the SNARK trilogy; a history of pairing-based SNARKs in 3 acts. Starting from Jens Groth’s early works on SNARKs, Ariel takes us on a journey through key moments and breakthroughs in SNARKs over the last decade. They also dive into the emerging accumulation research streams on folding schemes and Ariel’s latest work surrounding lookup tables! This is an episode you won’t want to miss.

In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose sits down with Zac Williamson, the CEO of Aztec. Anna and Zac dive deep into the history of Plonk, one of the most important proving systems to emerge in the last 5 years. Zac explains how the initial ideas came to be, how it was developed with co-author Ariel Gabizon, and how the system has evolved over time, branching out into many different iterations of Plonk, leading up to his recent work on Goblin Plonk.

The conversation also touches on Aztec’s cutting-edge technology stack, including their Noir zkDSL and their planned private programmable L2, Aztec 3. Zac shares his insights on the state of ZK applications and folding schemes, and provides a glimpse into the future of the ZK space.

This week, Anna Rose interviews Avery Ching, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Aptos Labs. They cover Avery’s working history, including his time working on Meta’s Blockchain project, what this experience meant to him and how this led to the creation of Aptos. They discuss Aptos as it stands today, Avery’s experience of building in the current market and the unique qualities of the Aptos project.

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.