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.

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.