This week, Anna and Nico take a look back at some of the ZK Events produced in 2024 by the ZK Podcast, ZK Hack and other adjacent projects. Starting with the live ZK Jargon Decoder hosted in January and spanning the 10 months since, Anna and Nico share behind-the-scenes anecdotes, highlight key talks from the events and share some insight into how the programs for the zkSummit events are created. They wrapped with a summary of some of the themes in ZK that got them talking this year and are tracking going forward.

Don’t forget, this is the last episode of ZK Podcast before we take a pause in weekly shows for the rest of 2024 – but don’t worry we will be back!

This week Anna chats with Mikerah Quintyne-Collins from HashCloak and Stoffel Labs. They discuss how Mikerah got her start in the crypto space and then dive into the work she did at ChainSafe and eventually at HashCloak. They cover Mikerah’s work on privacy preserving tech like ZK, TEE and MPC and learn about what drives her tweet game and the wisdom she has picked up over the years as a technical founder, driven by curiosity… and memes.

This week Anna catches up with Zac Williamson & Ariel Gabizon from Aztec. They cover what each has been working on over the last year, Zac shared updates about the development of Aztec and the finalization of their underlying ZK system: MegaPlonk. Ariel discussed his latest research on IVC with his publications of the ProtoGalaxy and Stackproofs works and how properties of this systems brought him and Zac to start working together again.

This week Anna and Nico chat with Lukas Helminger and Ais Connolly from TACEO. They discuss Lukas & Ais’ early work in cryptography and privacy preserving technologies, the founding of TACEO and their recent work on coSNARKs – or Collaborative SNARKs – that combine MPC and ZK. They explore how these coSNARKs are created, their coCircom language, the characteristics of these systems as well as how they can be applied in the real world.

This week Anna and Zaki Manian dive into the Cosmos ecosystem and ask the question: is Cosmos Dead? They explore key events, teams and players who worked on Cosmos during different eras before teasing out the strengths and structural flaws that made the project what it is today. The conversation wraps with a discussion around new initiatives aimed at reviving the ecosystem and aligning factions in Cosmos together towards a central goal.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun catch up with Andrew Miller. They cover his early work on consensus, ZK and MPC before switching focus to the topic of his current work: TEEs. They map his evolving opinion on TEEs and explore why they could be seen as an optimal solution to many of the blockchain challenges.

This week Anna and Nico chat with Arnaud Schenk, one of the original co-founders of Aztec and creator of the Polaris Fellowship. They discuss Arnaud’s recent blog post ‘On Trust Infrastructure’, exploring the down sides of a trustless system, the need to make online community building more possible and how programmable cryptography may play a role in these solutions. They explore the history of computer culture, the rejection of institutions by mid-90s internet culture and how the seeds for this were set by the 60s counterculture.

In this week’s episode Anna and Tarun chat with Naveen Durvasula about his recent work ‘Robust Restaking Networks’. They discuss Naveen’s early work on matching markets and how this led him to work on mechanism design before exploring how the concepts of restaking were first presented, and how both Naveen and Tarun have been working to better model the mechanisms underpinning restaking, to understand how they work and how they can be optimized.

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Connor O’Hara from Celestia. After discussing the latest ZK Hack Montréal event where Connor was a judge, they dive into his professional background, the ecosystems he has been a part of and what led him to work on Celestia. They then discuss various ZK-focused initiatives within the Celestia ecosystem.

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Jens Groth and Daniel Marin from Nexus. They catch up on all things Groth16 with the author himself before diving into a variety topics, such as formal verification in the context of ZKPs, the Nexus architecture, the benefits and challenges of building a system from the ground up, folding and IVC plus the properties these offer in a zkVM context and much more.