This week, Anna checks in with co-hosts & friends, Tarun Chitra, James Prestwich, Josh Cincinnati and Guillermo Angeris, for a retrospective look at 2021 and a look forward to 2022. Enjoy this conversation full of blasphemous hot takes, bad 2022 predictions and dad jokes.

While we decided not to release a full episode this week, Anna did get a chance to catch up with Kobi Gurkan, one of the co-organizers of ZK Hack and someone who was very missed in the last episode about the event!

This week, Anna hosts a special 5-part interview with a roundup of perspectives from ZK Hack. First, she chats with puzzle hackers who share what it was like to solve these real-world cryptography bugs and learn complex concepts in real time. They discuss how they got started learning in this space and the resources and tools that helped them. Next, Anna speaks with the puzzle builders on the challenges of designing and building these novel zk puzzles. They discuss the state of the community and how the community could work together to create learning resources to enable its growth. Last but not least, there is a chat with part of the ZK Hack organizing team on what they thought of the event and what’s to come next!

This week, Anna chats with Bobbin Threadbare about his project Miden, a STARK-based roll-up which was recently purchased by Polygon. We recap the differences between STARKs and SNARKs and the increasingly blurred line between these two proving systems. We then map Bobbin’s journey to Miden VM (now Polygon Miden), how it originated from his earlier project Distaff VM and now incorporates the Winterfell prover from his days at Facebook.

This week Anna and Tarun chat with Vasiliy Shapovalov from Lido and Felix Lutsch of Chorus One about liquid staking on the ETH2 Proof of Stake consensus chain. Vasiliy explains Ethereum’s unique PoS validator setup and how liquid staking behaves on this network. They also talk about how liquid staking behaves on other live PoS, the inevitability of liquid staking and how to best design these systems. Lastly, they chat about navigating control and decision making in liquid staking protocols, touching on topics of decentralisation and governance.

This week Anna chats with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia about how and why they’re focusing on building a data availability-first L1 blockchain. Ismail takes us through how data availability can be a problem, primarily with light clients and breaks down the components necessary to understanding the data availability problem such as state changes, the separation of consensus from execution and how Celestia aims to be a pluggable consensus layer.

This week, Anna chats with Billy Rennekamp about the Cosmos Hub ecosystem, ICF and some of the latest innovations he is watching. They discuss his early experiments with NFTs that led to the Clovers Network and his move into the Cosmos ecosystem. Through this, they cover how the space has evolved and the game changing potential of the IBC paradigm. Billy explains how the Cosmos Hub aims to support innovative modular development and shares the latest research into Interchain security, bridges, governance and much more.

This week, Anna catches up with Guillermo Angeris, Alex Evans and Tarun. The conversation charts their research on CFMMs, AMMs and related primitives and explores the goals and methodology of this work. They also revisit the topic of private AMMs and specifically their recent work on using differential privacy to achieve a more private system.

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with MP, Trent and Sam from JPG about this on-chain NFT curation protocol. They walk through what the JPG team wanted out of this decentralized curation protocol and how to bring in voices that aren’t always heard in the traditional art world. They also explore the idea of rethinking the mechanism of curation, indexing and permissionless access in order to bring a crypto native approach to NFT art culture.

This week, Anna catches up on what has been happening in the Kusama network ecosystem with Will Pankiewicz, Raul Romanutti, and Bruno Skvorc. First up, Will, the Master of Validators at Parity, takes us through the fundamentals of Kusama, how it differs from Polkadot and some future predictions for the ecosystem and its parachains. Next, Raul, Community Manager and council member, breaks down how Kusama’s governance and council functions. Last but not least, we learn about RMRK founded by Bruno, an NFT project on Kusama which started as a hack to support basic NFTs without smart contracts and grew into full-blown NFT ecosystem on Kusama.

This week Anna speaks with Adam Gągol and Matthew Niemerg about Aleph Zero – an L1 project mixing ZKPs and MPCs with a DAG consensus algorithm. They explore their underlying DAG structure and their privacy solutions that leverage zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) and Secure Multiparty Computation (sMPC).