Episodes

Episode 114: Exploring the Fractal transparent SNARK construction

This week, we explore the Fractal transparent SNARK construction with its authors Dev Ojha and Nick Spooner – both students of Alessandro Chiesa at UC Berkeley. In this episode, We explore how Fractal works, how it improves on some of the earlier work on Sonic and Marlin, how it borrows from but differentiates itself from STARKs, as well as what they discovered while working on this paper about recursive SNARKs and what makes that property possible.

Episode 112: Dive into Plonk!

In this week’s episode, we learn more about Plonk with Ariel Gabizon and Zac Williamson from Aztec. PLONK is an efficient, universal SNARK construction. We explore what distinguishes Plonk from some other other new constructions including their focus on Lagrange-bases to deconstruct complex problem statements into simple polynomial identities.

Episode 111: Mixers with Tornado.cash

In this week’s episode, we chat with Roman Storm and Roman Semanov from Tornado.cash all about mixers. We explore what they are used for and how they work, how Zero Knowledge can be incorporated to provide more privacy, what the challenges are and what the future holds for the Tornado.Cash project.

Episode 110: So long 2019! What’s next?

In this end of year episode, we chat about what we’ve learned in 2019, some of our favourite episodes, this year’s explosion in ZK research and what we are looking forward to in 2020!

Episode 109: Exploring use-cases for zkps and zk standards with QEDIT

In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with Daniel Benarroch and Aviv Zohar from QEDIT – a privacy software startup focused on bringing Zero Knowledge to enterprise customers. We chat about the goals of the company, some of the emerging use cases and the zkproof standardisation efforts.

Episode 108: Catch up with Zaki Manian from Tendermint

This week we catch up with Zaki Manian, Director at Tendermint and co-founder of the Iqlusion Validator. We chat about the blockchain scene in Silicon Valley, SF’s love of DeFi, the challenge of balancing pragmatism and regulation with the decentralised ideology, the nuances of working on a live PoS system, the wins of 2019 and what is on the horizon!

Episode 107: Centrifuge and zkSNARKs in action with Lucas Vogelsang

In this week’s episode, we catch-up our friend Lucas Vogelsang from Centrifuge. Centrifuge is an open, decentralised platform to connect the global financial supply chain. We chat about the journey Lucas took to co-founding this company, how privacy plays a role in his thinking and we discover what it means to be a project building with zkSNARKs today.

Episode 106: IPFS, Libp2p & Filecoin with Juan Benet

In this week’s episode, we chat with Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, about IPFS, Libp2p, and the much anticipated incentivised decentralised storage protocol Filecoin. We dig into the history of the Filecoin project, the gap in the “market” they are trying to fill, the challenges they have found in the development of the Filecoin protocol and the latest tech they are exploring.

Episode 105: Alan Szepieniec on Hash Functions & Supersonic SNARKs

In this week’s episode, we catchup with Alan Szepieniec, a researchers at Nervos and co-author of the Supersonics paper & the Marvellous family of Hash Functions (which specify the Vision/Rescue cyphers). We chat about his past work in cryptography, how the Supersonics paper came to be, and dive into the new generation of hash functions emerging, including the Marvelous universe.

Episode 104: Exploring Kusama, the Canary Chaos Network

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Fredrik and Nicole Zhu, Developer at Parity Technologies, about the experimental Polkadot Canary Network they call Kusama. We cover how Kusama was developed, the goals of this format and what launching a Chaos Canary Network is all about.

Episode 103: Exploring VDFs with Joseph Bonneau

In this week’s episode, we sit down with Joseph Bonneau, Assistant Professor at NYU and co-author on the Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) paper. We discuss VDFs, what they are, how they were developed and what they can be used for.

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