On Sept 5th, we held the Zero Knowledge Summit — a gathering of 150 researchers and devs working in the Zero Knowledge, blockchain and privacy spheres for a day of talks, chats, workshops and breakouts.
Almost all the talks were sourced directly from the community and the day was packed (here was the final program).
This was the 3rd event that we held in this format and the 2nd under the Zero Knowledge Podcast umbrella. And this edition was true to form: we focused this edition more directly on the topics of zero knowledge, zkSNARKs, and privacy.
While the day was a bit of a blur for us as organisers, with so many familiar faces and tons of simultaneous tracks, we did get some helpful feedback from the audience.
Here were a few key takeaways:
- This space exists on the bleeding edge of technology and math with so much more to come.
- This event gave people a chance to explore new ideas and meet some of the people driving this important work.
- People want way more access to and courses about the underlying math of zero knowledge proofs!
- Privacy must be balanced with security, and the way to do so is not obvious.
- Zero knowledge as a field is very young: we are still a ways off from having application ready tech….
- …. and yet the field has the potential to influence humanity in a significant way.
If you weren’t able to make it — Here is our playlist of videos. Please subscribe to our channel as we plan on releasing more things like this in the future!
Here were the ideas proposed for the next edition:
- Keep the format small with a curated audience
- Continue with this balance emphasising academics, researchers and builders.
- Hands-on math workshop was super over-subscribed! So be sure to take this into account next time.
- Round tables were well received but a bit short — program more time for these next time.
- Some of the sessions didn’t get the attention they deserved, so maybe do better in communicating and highlighting different sessions during the day.
- Also general timing of some sessions could have been better.
I want to thank all the attendees who came out for the event. Videos for these talks can be found here and we hope to get continued dialogue going around this on twitter and in our telegram channel. If you have additional feedback, please feel free to fill out our feedback form (if you haven’t yet) or leave some comments on this article.
Also a big thanks to the team who came to help out around the event in logistics and programming, Lorenzo, Mary, Balázs, Liz, Lucas, Henrik, Jonas, Marlon and our awesome sponsors — Dekrypt Capital, Nucypher, Least Authority, Parity Technology, 1kx, POA network, Zcash Foundationand Private Internet Access.
We will likely be throwing our next Zero Knowledge Summit in early March 2019 — keep your eye on our twitter for the announcement. In the meantime, we are thinking of doing some smaller meet-ups in other cities. If this is something you would want to support or work with us on, please get in touch with us at hello [at] zeroknowledge.fm.
Lastly, please stay tuned for more related podcasts, writings and content in our Zero Knowledge series!
