In this week’s episode, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Akis Kattis, a PhD student at NYU & the co-author of Proof of Necessary Work: Succinct State Verification with Fairness Guarantees – a paper he co-wrote with Joseph Bonneau. They discuss the challenge of Proof of Useful Work, the unique properties that SNARKs have, such as puzzle hardness, that allow for PoNW to overcome these challenges, PoS SNARK systems, elastic block construction, and more.

In this week’s episode, Anna interviews three people from the Tezos community: Jacob Arluck (co-founders TQ ), Marc Beunardeau and Marco Stronati (both from Nomadic Lab). They chat about the Tezos origin story, the development of the PoS system, the governance of Tezos, and how they are incorporating zk proofs – and specifically Sapling from Zcash – into their system.

In this episode, we chat with Molly Mackinlay, Project Lead for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) at Protocol Labs. We talk about her journey to Protocol Labs, as well as take a deeper view into IPFS, LibP2P, Bitswap, Testground, the use cases and projects working with these tools, and the specific upgrades they have made with the recent 0.5 IPFS release. We also chat about the path to decentralisation and the importance of building bridges to the Web2 world.

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Kenny Paterson, Professor of Computer Science and Lead of Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich. The goal of the episode is to take a deeper look at DP-3T and privacy preserving contact tracing research in Europe generally. They cover his work at ETH Zurich, discuss how the DP-3T project came to be, look at risks facing contact tracing protocols generally, and discuss why putting privacy and decentralisation at the heart of these types of protocol is so important.

In this week’s episode, we go deep on Consensus Algorithms and HotStuff with Ittai Abraham from VMware Research. We chat about the evolution of consensus algorithms, BFT, and how these early ideas have become the backbone of blockchain tech. We cover PBFT, Tendermint and Ittai’s research into SBFT, HotStuff, and the improvements he has been working on since HotStuffs incorporation into Facebook’s Libra protocol.

In this week’s episode, we chat with Henry de Valence from the Zcash Foundation. We discuss what makes for a strong crypto library, some of the work he has been doing at the ZF and he shares an update about the Zebra Zcash client. We also learn about the TCN Coalition, a group he is working with that aims to build and evaluate privacy-preserving contact tracing protocols – an important tool in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

In this episode, Anna catches up with Claudia Diaz, professor at KU Leuven and the Chief Science Officer at Nym Technology to learn about mixnets, the history of privacy technology and how there may be some opportunities for new privacy tech to emerge in this post-pandemic world.

In this episode, we chat with Flavio Bergamaschi from IBM research about his work on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). FHE allows for computation on encrypted data. First developed in 2009 at IBM, this tech has long been the considered only theoretically possible. However, as we learn in the interview, there have been strides made in the last few years and we are starting to see FHE technology being used in some real world applications.

In this episode, we catch up with Sean Bowe and Daira Hopwood from the Electric Coin Company (ECC) to chat about Halo, a recursive proof composition that doesn’t require a trusted setup. We cover the efficiency techniques used in Halo such as “nested amortization”, how the protocol was developed, what some of the key findings are, and how it fits in with the other recent SNARK-based protocols.

In this week’s episode, we chat with Benjamin Perez from Trail of Bits about the evolution of the crypto tech auditing business, the new challenges that emerge in zero knowledge proof systems regarding security, some of the recent bugs and vulnerabilities found in zkp systems and more!

In this episode, we meet with Galen Wolf-Pauly from the Tlon Corporation to discuss the project Urbit. Urbit is an encrypted peer-to-peer network comprised of a deterministic operating system (Urbit OS / Arvo) and a secure, global identity layer (Urbit ID / Azimuth). The Urbit contributors have created new stack, built from the ground up as an integrated system with a focus on user experience.

In this episode, we catch up with Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin from the Ethereum Foundation to chat about how zero knowledge proof systems are being used throughout the Eth1x and Eth2.0 stacks. We look at their applications for privacy and scalability throughout layers 1, 1.5 and 2, as well as explore some other emerging applications.