In this week’s special episode, we flip the script and invite our friend Alexandra Heller to ask ZKPodcast co-hosts Anna & Fredrik some questions from the audience. It’s a bit of a different format, so hope you will enjoy!
In this week’s episode, Anna and Fredrik catch up with Jordi Baylina, co-founder of Iden3, the creator of Circom & SnarkJS. They chat about his work in the ecosystem, building zk circuits and the recently announced Hermez, a new zkrollup with a novel proof-of-donation mechanism that will redistribute 40% of earnings to Ethereum-based community projects.
In this episode, we invite Howard Wu back to the show to share more about his new project Aleo – a privacy-focused blockchain that enables fully private applications. We chat about why you need programming languages for SNARKs, what it is like to switch from VC/Academia to being a founder and the two important things missing in web services, high programmability and true user privacy. The project enables private applications with both data privacy and functional privacy – where the nature of the program running and all activity remains private. It is based on the ZEXE protocol and Proof-of-Succinct-Work.
In this episode, we chat with Josh Cincinnati, the former executive director of Zcash Foundation. We cover Josh’s career before Zcash, his work at the foundation and the foundation’s trajectory. We also discuss his decision to leave the foundation, Zcash foundation’s philosophy of transparency, his hopes for the future of the Zcash community, his next steps and why he thinks people in crypto may wanna take themselves a bit less serious and remember to have some fun!
In this episode, Anna and Georgios chat with Hasu, an independent crypto researcher focused on economics and security, about elastic block size proposals in both Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In this week’s episode, we chat with Brian Gu, a student at MIT and creator of the Dark Forest game. We chat about education in the space, blockchain based games and how Dark Forest was inspired. We then dig into how this game creates an incomplete information game space by using zkSNARKs to create a “cryptographic fog of war” and more!
In this week’s episode, Anna and guest-host / frequent guest Tarun catch up with Alex Evans, researcher at Placeholder Capital. They dive into the latest in DeFi, a topic that we don’t cover too often, but is hard to ignore. Specifically they discuss the emergence of liquidity farming, the difference between the zero knowledge Research space and the DeFi space, some emerging concepts like AMM and staking derivatives, and cover a recent report Tarun and Alex published together on the impact of staking derivatives on the security of PoS systems.
This week, we catch up with Benedikt Bunz and Ben Fisch, PhD students at Stanford, once again. In this episode, we dive deeper into Findora, a project that was co-founded by Ben (who is also the CTO) and where Benedikt works as the Head of Research. We look at what the Findora project is, discuss the “selective disclosure” concept at the heart of their constructions, explore the balance between transparency and privacy and describe what problems Findora aims to solve.
In this episode, we will be exploring StarkWare + DeversiFi’s collaboration – a Layer 2 Stark powered exchange for Ethereum assets. Guests Tom Brand, product manager at Starkware, and Will Harborne, co-founder of DeversiFi, discuss the project, how it works under the hood, how this Validium solution differs from the layer 2 scaling solutions that have come before (including Plasma, Optimistic rollup and zkRollup) the tradeoffs between these solutions and give us a glimpse into what they have planned for the future.
In this week’s episode, Anna follows up on the trusted setup survey she did in her previous episode on the topic with this bonus interview with Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash’s trusted setup, held in May 2020, was the largest to date with over 1000 participants.
This week, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Yan Zhang, professor at SJSU, about math competitions, math education, how crypto is like alchemy and the Gasper paper – work Yan and his students collaborated on with the Ethereum Foundation.
This week, Anna and guest host Georgios Konstantopoulos chat with Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana network. They learn about this system and discuss the innovations that allow them to achieve high performance without sharding.
