Episodes

Episode 244: Journey to Blockchain with David Tse

In this episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with David Tse about his career and research spanning from early Networking, Mobile Networking, P2P, all the way up to his work on formalizing Blockchain systems.

Along the way, they touch on topics like David’s paper ‘The Price of Anarchy’, the Prism work, his work with the Ethereum Foundation and his new project Babylon.

Episode 243: Dive Back into MEV with Alex Stokes and Chris Hager

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun revisit the topic of MEV with Chris Hager from Flashbots & Alex Stokes from the EF. In this episode, they tease out more of the nuances around MEV, what the MEV space could look like after the Merge, the PBS (Proposer Builder Separation) concept, what each role in the MEV landscape will do and the MEV-Boost architecture. They also chat about using cryptographic solutions to prevent some kinds of MEV and some recent work that Tarun released on the topic of MEV, as well as future ideas around MEV aim to democratize or even share the searchers rewards.

Episode 242: Halo 2 with Daira Hopwood and Str4d

In this week’s episode, Anna explores Halo 2 with Daira Hopwood and Str4d, cryptographic engineers at Electric Coin Company. They explored what new ideas Halo introduced and how Halo 2 built on these ideas, adding optimisations such as adding Plonk-ish arithmetization to take what was a breakthrough to a production ready proving system.

Episode 241: Deconstructing Bridges with Vaibhav Chellani

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Vaibhav Chellani, a bridge builder and the co-founder of Socket. They explore what makes up the components of a bridge, the types of bridges, and then look at their framework for analysing the security trade-offs of different bridge architectures. This is an important topic, since at present, there are more and more bridges coming online to connect all the different chains together. And with these come a number of new bugs, hacks and exploits. This episode gives us an overview on how to think about bridges.

Episode 240: Composable Privacy with Manta Network

In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with Shumo Chu, co-founder of Manta Network.They discuss the origin story of the project and how they aim to bring privacy to web3. They explore how the unique accessibility that Polkadot parachain enables, the work they do on building ZK tooling and libraries for the general ZK community. They then take a look at their plans for a multi-asset shielded pool and the future they have planned for Manta projects and more.

Episode 239: IST and Designing Stablecoins in Cosmos

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Zaki from Sommelier and Dean from Agoric. They check-in with the latest project news, recap about the UST collapse, and look into IST – Inter Stable Token – a project by the Agoric team that aims to become the Cosmos native multi collateral stablecoin.

Bonus: Apply to zkSummit 8

No full episode this week. Just a quick message to let you know about the upcoming zkSummit 8 – happening in Berlin Sept 15 2022.

Episode 238: Aurora and Near with Alex and Illia

In this week’s episode, Anna talks with Illia from Near and Alex from Aurora about the work they did that lead them to the Near ecosystem and what the connection is between the Aurora project and Near. They also cover what’s new at Near since the last time Illia and Anna spoke, Aurora+, the Rainbow Bridge, and future plans with Near’s sharding system.

Episode 237: Exploring ZK Research with Jens Groth

In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with guest Jens Groth, Director of Research at DFINITY and previously professor at Department of Computer Science, UCL. Jens Groth is a leading ZK researcher and is behind a number of advances in the field of ZK in the last few years such as the popular proving system Groth16. The conversation covers his earlier career, the cryptographic problems he tackled in his research, how he solved these, the results of this work as well as his move from research into industry and what he works on today.

Episode 236: Aztec Connect and Private DeFi with Charlie and Joe

In this week’s episode, Anna checks in with Aztec, a ZK-based privacy L2 project. She speaks with Joe Andrews and Lead Engineer, Charles Julian. They discuss some of the team’s most important ZK research and implementations such as Plonk and how bringing privacy to Ethereum could truly change the way we do DeFi. They also discuss Aztec Connect and how it relates to zk.money, the Aztec roadmap with future projects like DSL Noir and Aztec 3, as well as a quick postmortem on the halted Aztec Connect launch.

Episode 235: Mathematical Journeys & Sake with Guillermo Angeris

In this week’s episode we return back to DevConnect in Amsterdam for a conversation between Anna and returning guest Guillermo Angeris of Bain Capital Crypto for a couple of shots of sake and math! They cover Guillermo’s personal journey into math, math history in general, consider how to bring more people into the space and the potential opportunities and downsides of bringing some kinds of math mainstream.

Episode 234: zkEVM with Scroll’s Ye Zhang and Haichen Shen

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Ye Zhang and Haichen Shen, the founders of Scroll – a native zkEVM Layer 2 Solution for Ethereum. They cover Scroll’s founding, the need to scale Ethereum, zkEVM philosophies, use cases and more. They wrap up with an exploration of how DApps and products on top of such as zkEVM may interact with the mainchain and with other applications.

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