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.
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.
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.
This week, host Anna Rose and co-host Kobi Gurkan chat with Yohei Nakajima, General Partner at Untapped Capital and creator of BabyAGI. They cover a wide variety of topics from the world of AGIs and agents to building no-code software in public. They kick-off with a chat about how Yohei’s interest in NFTs led him down the AI ‘rabbit hole’ and how he started to build out experiments in public that have inspired a new group of AI tools and projects.
They then discuss the possible impacts of some of this AI tech, how ZK may help mediate the challenges it introduces and more.
This week, host Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt chat with Ron Rothblum, Professor of Computer Science at Technion. They explore Ron’s wealth of experience around the theory of cryptography and ZK, tapping into his experience to get into the weeds on multiple topics including error correcting codes, FRI, FFTs, Reed-Solomon encoding, Fiat-Shamir and more.
In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose chats with Chhi’mèd Künzang and François Garillot from Lurk Labs about all things Lurk, Lisp and zk languages.
They discuss the history of the Lurk project, from its beginnings with Protocol Labs (the team that built Filecoin), to its emergence as a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zk-SNARKs.
They discuss Lurk’s relationship with Lisp, what Lisp is, and how developers familiar with that family of languages would be able to interact with Lurk. They then discuss how Lurk compares to other zkDSLs and the new innovations this Lisp-based language brings to the table.
In this week’s episode, Anna Rose dives back into accumulation schemes with Benedikt Bünz and Binyi Chen from Espresso Systems. They discuss ProtoStar and how it compares to works such as Nova and HyperNova, as well as explore some definitions for commonly used terms in the accumulation literature.
In this bonus episode, Anna jumps back on the mic for a quick interview with guest Daniel Kang. They describe the Attested Audio Experiment, a joint project they are doing around zkpod.ai which explores how to create attested audio using zkps. In this experiment, they create a proof that some piece of edited audio originates from original audio recorded by Anna, Kobi and Daniel. This proof helps to distinguish this from zkpod.ai generated audio. In the future some iteration of this architecture could be used by content creators to distinguish deepfake audio from the real thing.
This week, Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan continue their conversation with a full episode dedicated to their new side project zkpod.ai – the voice ai trained on transcripts from this show which uses both Anna and Kobi’s voices to share insights and answer questions about zk topics. They cover the origin of the project and discuss their motivations and concerns around its uses as well as how they could see the project developing and what this could mean for the field of zk. Kobi shares his thoughts on the current tooling available, where this could progress and potential limitations it holds.
In this week’s episode, host Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan check in on the state of ZK today. They discuss recent ZK applications and tooling as well as developments from the last 6 months. They review new use cases such as ZK for off-chain computations and dive into research breakthroughs, trends, security and much more. Finally, they introduce the concept of zkpod.ai which will be covered fully in next week’s episode.
In today’s episode, Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt interview Srinath Setty, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of notable works such as Spartan, Nova, SuperNova, and HyperNova. This discussion covers Setty’s early work and how this led to him working on SNARKs, folding schemes and sumcheck protocols, as well as his views on the future trajectory of the ZK space.
Given the current chatter around Nova-style accumulation schemes, this interview offers a chance to explore the perspective of a key contributor behind these developments.
In this week’s episode, Anna sits down with Yi Sun, co-founder of Axiom. Yi was recently on the show to discuss ZK ML’s, however this time they take a closer look at the Axiom project and what it means to be a ZK coprocessor for Ethereum. During the interview they also explore what problems Axiom are trying to solve, how ZKPs are used to help bring historic data into smart contracts and what new use cases this architecture can support.
