Episodes

Episode 293: Exploring Security of ZK Systems with Nethermind’s Michał & Albert

On this week’s episode, Anna Rose interviews Michał Zając and Albert Garreta from the Nethermind team. They discuss the origin story of Nethermind and its role in the ecosystem today. They also delve into the cryptography research being done at Nethermind, including their work on proving the security of FRI-based protocols, identifying security issues with Fiat-Shamir, exploring topics like ZK malleability and aggregation, and building SNARKs over rings.

Episode 292: State of ZK – Live at zkSummit10!

In this special live episode, recorded at zkSummit10, host Anna Rose chats with regular co-hosts Tarun Chitra, Guillermo Angeris and Nico Mohnblatt about the state of ZK today.

They cover how the term ‘ZK’ has evolved, market trends that are relevant to the ZK community today and ZK ‘crossovers’ like ZKML or ZKFHE and their current status in the industry. They also discuss how the ZK space could grow in the future and share their predictions. Much of the conversation is fuelled by some great questions and comments from the live zk10 audience.

Episode 291: MEV, Mechanism Design & the Censorship Problem with Mallesh M Pai

On this week’s episode, Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra chat with Mallesh Pai, Associate Professor of Economics at Rice University. They explore mechanism design in an economic context and Mallesh’s work around MEV topics – specifically on censorship in an MEV context and within his Special Mechanism Group.

The discussion takes the team back into the topic of MEV, revisiting the proposer builder separation concept and the impact that this may have on the efficiency and censorship resistance of these systems.

Episode 290: Exploring, Teaching and Auditing ZK with David Wong

This week, Anna and Guillermo chat with David Wong, author of the Real-World Cryptography and a cofounder zksecurity.xyz – a ZK auditing firm. They chat about how he originally got interested in cryptography, his early work as a security consultant, his work on the Facebook crypto project and the Mina project, zksecurity.xyz, auditing techniques and their efficacy in a ZK context, what common bugs are found in ZK code, and much more.

Episode 289: Penumbra Catch Up with Finch, Erwan and Jen

This week, host Anna Rose chats with Finch, Erwan and Jen from the Penumbra team. They share an update about Penumbra and discuss how this zk-powered project works under the hood. Specifically, how Penumbra harnesses ZK to offer new paradigms for staking, voting and trading.

Episode 288: Quantum Cryptography with Or Sattath

This week, Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan chat with Or Sattath, Assistant Professor at the Ben-Gurion University in the Computer Science department. They deep dive into Or’s work on Quantum Cryptography. They begin by defining Quantum Computing and Quantum Cryptography, covering what this means for existing cryptography. They also explore how new discoveries in this field can interact with existing Proof-of-work systems and how Quantum computers could affect the game theory of mining in the future.

Bonus: Apply to zk10!

We are taking a pause on the show this week, but do be sure to get your application in for the upcoming Zero Knowledge Summit – zk10. Happening in London on Sept 20 – spots are limited!

Episode 287: Gnosis catch-up with Stefan George

This week, Anna Rose chats with Stefan George from Gnosis. They start with an update on the projects that have spun out of Gnosis – Safe, Zodiac, CoW Swap – as well as older experiments that the team had incubated. They then cover the evolution of Gnosis Chain from its origin as xDai, discuss the new aggregate bridge architecture Hashi and explore Gnosis Pay – an on-chain p2p payments product that fulfills some of the original motivations of Bitcoin. They discuss a range of relevant topics such as intents, prediction markets, account abstraction, ZK Bridges, decentralization and more.

Episode 286: Paris 2023 Recap with Uma, Zaki and Tarun

Join host Anna Rose and guests Uma Roy, Zaki Manian and Tarun Chitra as they recap all things EthCC Paris. This impromptu chat takes a look back at the topics, talks, parties and events of the Paris week and what really caught their attention. Expect some spicy takes, offtopic rambles, inside scoops and more.

Episode 285: Intents with Chris Goes from Anoma

This week, host Anna Rose and co-host Tarun Chitra catch up with Chris Goes from Heliax, the team behind Anoma and Namada. They dive into the concept of ‘intents’, exploring their origin, evolution, and discuss the intent-based systems that exist today. They then chat about the architectures enabled by a generalized intent-based infrastructure, the potential impacts on user experience, and the inherent trade-offs, particularly when zero-knowledge or privacy aspects are added to the mix.

Episode 284: Using Formal Verification on ZK Systems with Jon Stephens

This week Anna Rose chats with Jon Stephens, Computer Science Ph.D. student in the UToPiA group at UT Austin and co-founder of Veridise. Veridise is a blockchain auditing firm that audits smart contracts and ZK systems. They discuss what led Jon to work on system security, what tools are available to test the security of ZK systems and the process of performing formal verification on ZK systems. They also cover general ZK security, why this topic matters and ways we can incentivise ethical disclosures when bugs and vulnerabilities are found.

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