No full episode this week! Just a little update.

This week, Anna & Tarun catch up with Georgios Konstantopoulos from Paradigm – a key crypto VC. They chat about his move to CTO at the firm, the team he has built and what they are working on. Then they dive into Foundry – a fast, portable, modular testing toolkit for Ethereum app dev written in Rust. They discuss the tooling landscape, why Foundry is making a bet on solidity, the different types of testing that developers are doing and other open questions in the field.

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Jill Gunter and Ben Fisch from Espresso Systems. Espresso has been in stealth mode for a couple of months, but recently went public with their Proof of Stake L1, developed with flexible private applications and ZK rollups in mind. They explore the founding and development of the project, the Espresso base chain and the CAPE-wrapped privacy smart contract application that they’ve built. They walk through the programming model, the evolution of privacy technology, what configurable or flexible privacy means and Espresso roadmap up and more.

This week Anna dives into the state of funding in the ZK space. She chats with a number of different groups who are all funding zero knowledge technology from different angles. She kicks off the conversation with her colleague from ZKValidator Susannah Evans and Gubsheep from 0xPARC about the Gitcoin side round they are leading which is focused on funding the next wave of ZK tech projects. She then chats with Arjun Karlsy, VP of Growth at Polygon about their massive commitment of 1 billion into ZK through investments, acquisitions, and grants. Following this, she catches up with Alex Pruden, CEO at Aleo to talk about their soon to launch grant program – Zprize, an industry-wide effort to accelerate zero knowledge technology. And lastly, she speaks with Alistair Stewart from the Web3 Foundation about a newly announced ZK component of the Polkadot Pioneers Prize.

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 Dean Tribble, co-founder and CEO of Agoric. Dean walks us through the landscape of programming languages and Agoric’s philosophy behind building a blockchain that has Hardened JS as its smart contract language. We hear about the two big challenges in using JavaScript in blockchain development, malleability and non-deterministic, and how Agoric addresses these. Dean explains the security implications of many popular blockchain languages and how this led them to build Agoric’s smart contract infrastructure allowing JavaScript functions to run with specific access control – leaving the money management to the larger framework. We touch on what to expect from the upcoming development phases of Agoric, various bridging partnerships to come, and last but not least – if, when and how they envision ZK roll-ups getting implemented into the stack.

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Sreeram Kannan, Associate Professor at University of Washington where he runs the UW Blockchain Lab. In this episode, they look at how information theory and blockchain intersect and map the progression of Bitcoin security. They discuss Sreeram’s early work on P2P mobile networks and how this evolved to work on consensus and fair sequencing. Sreeram takes us through his philosophical reasoning of shifting from genomic research to blockchain research and the two major areas in P2P systems that he focuses on: maximum throughput and low latency.

This week, Anna chats with Dean Eigenmann and Edgar Aroutiounian from Project Blanc, a team building bots and developing MEV strategies. They revisit the topic of MEV, what it is and how teams like Project Blanc work to capture it. They also dive into the concept of re-orgs, accelerationism as a philosophy and get a look at what goes on in the Dark Forest.