Episode 38: Intro to zkSNARKs with Howard Wu

This week Anna and Zaki Manian dive into the Cosmos ecosystem and ask the question: is Cosmos Dead? They explore key events, teams and players who worked on Cosmos during different eras before teasing out the strengths and structural flaws that made the project what it is today. The conversation wraps with a discussion around new initiatives aimed at reviving the ecosystem and aligning factions in Cosmos together towards a central goal.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun catch up with Andrew Miller. They cover his early work on consensus, ZK and MPC before switching focus to the topic of his current work: TEEs. They map his evolving opinion on TEEs and explore why they could be seen as an optimal solution to many of the blockchain challenges.

This week Anna and Nico chat with Arnaud Schenk, one of the original co-founders of Aztec and creator of the Polaris Fellowship. They discuss Arnaud’s recent blog post ‘On Trust Infrastructure’, exploring the down sides of a trustless system, the need to make online community building more possible and how programmable cryptography may play a role in these solutions. They explore the history of computer culture, the rejection of institutions by mid-90s internet culture and how the seeds for this were set by the 60s counterculture.

In this week’s episode Anna and Tarun chat with Naveen Durvasula about his recent work ‘Robust Restaking Networks’. They discuss Naveen’s early work on matching markets and how this led him to work on mechanism design before exploring how the concepts of restaking were first presented, and how both Naveen and Tarun have been working to better model the mechanisms underpinning restaking, to understand how they work and how they can be optimized.

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Connor O’Hara from Celestia. After discussing the latest ZK Hack Montréal event where Connor was a judge, they dive into his professional background, the ecosystems he has been a part of and what led him to work on Celestia. They then discuss various ZK-focused initiatives within the Celestia ecosystem.

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Jens Groth and Daniel Marin from Nexus. They catch up on all things Groth16 with the author himself before diving into a variety topics, such as formal verification in the context of ZKPs, the Nexus architecture, the benefits and challenges of building a system from the ground up, folding and IVC plus the properties these offer in a zkVM context and much more.

In this week’s episode, Anna and Guille catch up with Joe Bonneau, Assistant Professor at NYU and Research Partner at a16z crypto research. They discuss the research Joe has been working on since he was last on the show in 2019, including Naysayer proofs, Zero-Knowledge Middleboxes, Sealed-Bid Auctions and other ZK-related research projects to date.