Zero Knowledge Zero Knowledge Podcast

In this week’s episode, Anna and Kobi chat with Gal Arnon, Ph.D student from the Weizmann Institute of Science & Giacomo Fenzi, Ph.D. student in the COMPSEC Lab at EPFL.


Gal and Giacomo are amongst the co-authors of ‘STIR: Reed–Solomon Proximity Testing with Fewer Queries’ and in this conversation, they discuss how their research led them to work on these topics and where the thesis for this particular work sparked from. They set the stage by exploring the history of FRI and discussing some hidden nuances in how FRI works. And then they introduce STIR, a system that can be used in place of FRI, which incorporates various optimisations to improve the performance.




Here’s some additional links for this episode:



FRIDA: Data Availability Sampling from FRI by Hall-Andersen, Simkin and Wagner
Lattice-Based Polynomial Commitments: Towards Asymptotic and Concrete Efficiency by Fenzi, Moghaddas and Nguyen
DEEP-FRI: Sampling Outside the Box Improves Soundness by Ben-Sasson, Goldberg, Kopparty and Saraf
Proximity Gaps for Reed–Solomon Codes by Ben-Sasson, Carmon, Ishai, Kopparty and Saraf
IOPs with Inverse Polynomial Soundness Error by Arnon, Chiesa and Yogev
Episode 293: Exploring Security of ZK Systems with Nethermind’s Michał & Albert
Circle STARKs by Haböck, Levit and Papini
Episode 304: Exploring FRI, LogUp and using M31 for STARKs with Ulrich Haböck
FRI-Binius: Improved Polynomial Commitments for Binary Towers




The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com




Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/




If you like what we do:



Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
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A quick announcement for ZK Hack Krakow, happening from May 17-19 2024 in Krakow (!).


In the spirit of ZK Hack Lisbon and ZK Hack Istanbul, ZK Hack Krakow will be hosting hackers from all over the world to join us for a weekend of building and experimenting with zk tech. Sponsors for this edition are Mina, O1Labs, Aleph Zero, Polygon, Scroll, Avail, Nethermind and more.


If you are interested, apply as a hacker - there will be prizes and bounties to be won, new friends and collaborators to meet and great workshops to get you up to date on ZK tooling. All happening May 17-19 2024


https://www.zkkrakow.com/

In this week’s episode, Anna and Brendan Farmer catch up with Ben Fisch, CEO of Espresso Systems. They explore the inner workings of the current L2 sequencing landscape and then discuss how a shared sequencing marketplace like Espresso works. They touch on how MEV plays a part in the new system, how the role of the sequencer can be separated into subroles, how all these parts will work together in such a system and much more.




Here’s some additional links for this episode:



Episode 222: Something Brewing with Jill Gunter and Ben Fisch from Espresso Systems
Episode 139: Findora with Benedikt Bunz and Ben Fisch
Episode 88: Accumulators with Ben Fisch
CAPE: Configurable Asset Privacy for Ethereum
CAPE GitHub by Espresso Systems
Astria Website
The Future of MEV is SUAVE by Flashbots
Optimism by Superchain
Ben Fisch - Beyond the Base Layer at EthDenver
EigenDA
Episode 188: Analyzing Osmosis & Preventing MEV with Sunny and Dev
Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc
Episode 243: Dive Back into MEV with Alex Stokes and Chris Hager
Episode 291: MEV, Mechanism Design & the Censorship Problem with Mallesh M Pai
Aggregated Blockchains: A New Thesis by Polygon
Based rollups—superpowers from L1 sequencing by Ethereum Research
MEV-Boost GitHub




The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com.




Launching soon, Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 blockchain focused on multichain, asset-agnostic privacy, via a unified shielded set. Namada is natively interoperable with fast-finality chains via IBC, and with Ethereum using a trust-minimised bridge.

Follow Namada on Twitter @namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada.




Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/.




If you like what we do:



Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on YouTube

In this week’s episode, Anna catches up with Jordi Baylina, OG Ethereum contributor and Polygon zkEVM Technical Lead. They cover what Jordi has been working on since he was last on the show in 2021. Back then, zkEVMs were still just an idea. Now that many of these systems have launched, they have a chance to look at how these fit into the general L2 landscape.


They cover Jordi’s view on engineering decentralized systems and how these are rolled out, and the recent research from Polygon, including their AggLayer proposal. They wrap up on what inspires him to keep contributing in the space.




Here’s some additional links for this episode:



Polygon zkEVM
Episode 194: zkEVM with Jordi & David from Hermez
Episode 145: Circom & Hermez with Jordi Baylina
Episode 304: Exploring FRI, LogUp and using M31 for STARKs with Ulrich Haböck
Episode 303: A Dive into Binius with Ulvetanna
Episode 313: Revisiting Hardware with Ingonyama




The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com




Gevulot is the first decentralized proving layer. With Gevulot, users can generate and verify proofs using any proof system, for any use case.

Gevulot is offering priority access to ZK Podcast listeners, register on gevulot.com and write “Zk Podcast” in the note field of the registration form!




Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/




If you like what we do:



Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram

In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico chat with Chelsea Komlo, Chief Scientist for the Zcash Foundation and member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy lab at the University of Waterloo.


They discuss what sparked Chelsea’s interest in cryptography research, starting with her work contributing to Tor, to her move to Zcash and her PhD work on Threshold Signature Schemes. They define some important terms around different signature schemes and discuss possible optimizations that can be used to make these more performant. They then dive into her work on the FROST Threshold Signature Scheme plus some new upcoming work.




Here’s some additional links for this episode:



EdSIDH: Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange on Edwards Curves by Azarderakhsh, Lang, Jao and Koziel
Efficient Signature Generation by Smart Cards by Schnorr
FROST: Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures by Komlo and Goldberg
Episode 316: Alin Tomescu on Distributed On-chain Randomness and Keyless Accounts
Episode 295: Return to MPC with Nigel Smart
[On the insecurity of ROS] by Benhamouda, Lepoint, Loss, Orru and Raykova](https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/945.pdf)
Re-Randomized FROST by Gouvea and Komlo
Frostsnap
CFRG GitHub Repository for FROST
Arctic: Lightweight and Stateless Threshold Schnorr Signatures by Komlo and Goldberg




zkSummit11 is happening next week, head to the zkSummit website to apply for a waitlist spot now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.




Check out the ZK Jobs Board




Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/




If you like what we do:



Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on YouTube

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Niraj Pant and Anish Agnihotri from Ritual. They kick off by revisiting the AIxCrypto intersection before diving into the Ritual product and its goals around developing open access AI infrastructure. They explore the opportunities that open up when you bring ML to smart contracts.




Here’s some additional links for this episode:



Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc
Episode 246: Adversarial Machine Learning Research with Florian Tramèr
Episode 314: Succinct’s Platform, Prover Network and SP1
FrenRug Website
Mistral 7B by Jiang, Sablayrolles, Mensch, Bamford, Chaplot, De Las Casas, Bressand, Lengyel, Lample, Saulnier, Lavaud, Lachaux, Stock, Le Scao, Lavril, Wang, Lacroix, El Sayed
docs.ritual.net
Infernet by Ritual
ML Quickstart Guide by Ritual
Web3 Quickstart Guide by Ritual




zkSummit11 happens in 2 weeks, if you haven’t got your tickets yet head over to the zkSummit website to apply now. The event will be held on 10 April in Athens, Greece.




Check out the ZK Jobs Board




Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/




If you like what we do:



Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
Subscribe to our podcast newsletter
Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm
Join us on Telegram
Catch us on YouTube