Zero Knowledge Zero Knowledge Podcast

Summary

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Sim Gautham and Liam Eagen from Alpen Labs. They dive into the world of Bitcoin L2s and focus on how ZK can be used to incorporate strong connections between Bitcoin and new execution environments. The group then explore BitVM, covenants, the distinction between the Bridge Operators and sequencers in this model - and how this differs from how these actors work in Eth L2s. They then dive into SNARKnado, including what is happening under the hood, the ways in which this system offers round-based fraud games mixed with ZK and which agent provides DA and more.




Here’s some additional links for this episode:



Bulletproofs++: Next Generation Confidential Transactions via Reciprocal Set Membership Arguments by Eagen, Kanjalkar, Ruffing, Nick
Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More by Bünz, Bootle, Boneh, Andrew, Wuille, and Maxwell
Zcash Website
Protogalaxy: Efficient Protostar-style folding of multiple instances by Eagen and Gabizon
cq: * Cached quotients for fast lookups by Eagen, Fiore and Gabizon
Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin by Miers, Garman, Green and Rubin
Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (extended version) by Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, Garman, Green, Miers, Tromer and Virza
Monero Ring Signatures
Blockstream Whitepapers
Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity by Ben-Sasson, Bentov, Horesh and Riabzev
Ordinal Theory by Casey Rodarmor
BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin by Robin Linus
BitVM 2
BitVM Website
Jeremy Rubin Blog on Lamport Signatures
Introducting SNARKnado by Alpen Labs




ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here.




Episode Sponsors

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
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Summary

In this week’s episode Anna chats with Shumo and Yi from NEBRA. They discuss how NEBRA UPA, or Universal Proof Aggregation, can mitigate the high price of putting ZKPs on-chain. They cover what it takes to incorporate proving systems into NEBRA UPA as well as the benefits that these systems will bring, how developers are meant to interact with them, and future integrations to enable seamless cross-zkRollup applications. They cover prover marketplaces, verification aggregation systems, and the design space that these systems open up.





Here’s some additional links for this episode:



NEBRA
NEBRA UPA Demo
NEBRA Docs
UPA Gas Costs by NEBRA
MIT Bitcoin Club
fflonK: a Fast-Fourier inspired verifier efficient version of PlonK by Gabizon and Williamson
UniPlonK: PlonK with Universal Verifier by Chu, Gomes, Iglesias, Norton and Tebbs





The Web3 Summit is back!

The next edition will be happening in Berlin from Aug 19-21! You can head over to web3summit.com to apply, learn more and grab your tickets today.





Episode Sponsors

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-minimized 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.


As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.


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

There is no episode this week, but wanted to highlight the upcoming ZK Hack Montreal event, happening Aug 9-11 2024. This is the 4th IRL zk-focused hackathon produced by ZK Hack. Apply now to attend ZK Hack Montreal as a hacker and jump into zk.


https://www.zkmontreal.com/


Find out more about ZK Hack as well at https://zkhack.dev/

Summary

In this week’s episode Anna and Kobi chat with Muthu Venkitasubramaniam and Carmit Hazay from Ligero. They discuss their work on MPC and ZK for the last 20 years and how the research has evolved. They then dive into a nuanced conversation on how MPC & ZK are interrelated. The discuss Ligero, what led to the project and the early phases, as well as the new Ligetron system and how they plan on getting this technology into the wild.





Here’s some additional links for this episode:



Ligero
Ligero: Lightweight Sublinear Arguments Without a Trusted Setup by Ames, Hazay, Ishai and Venkitasubramaniam
Ligetron by Ligero
Ligetron: Lightweight Scalable End-to-End Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Post-Quantum ZK-SNARKs on a Browser by Wang, Hazay and Venkitasubramaniam

ℓ-Diversity: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity by Machanavajjhala, Gehrke, Kifer and Venkitasubramaniam
Efficient RSA Key Generation and Threshold Paillier in the Two-Party Setting by Hazay, Mikkelsen, Rabin, Toft and Nicolosi
MeshCal.com
Zero-Knowledge from Secure Multiparty Computation by Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky and Sahai
Introduction to MPC-in-the-Head by Carmit Hazay
ZKBoo: Faster Zero-Knowledge for Boolean Circuits by Giacomelli, Madsen and Orlandi
Episode 322: Definitions, Security and Sumcheck in ZK Systems with Justin Thaler
Communication complexity of secure computation by Franklin and Yung





ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here.





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


As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey.


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

Summary

In this week’s episode Anna chats with Tracy Livengood, co-founder of Pluto; an applied cryptography org building developer tools which add verifiable data from web data to an on-chain application, using ZK.


They discuss Tracy’s move from being an engineer in Web2, what prompted his move into the decentralized web and how he eventually found his way into the ZK space. He shares the concept of ‘Web Proofs’, and how Pluto can use some of the TLSNotary stack to bring private web data into on-chain applications as well as a future tool set he hopes to develop with the project.





Here’s some additional links for this episode:



Pluto.xyz
Pluto Telegram Channel
Docs.Pluto.xyz
0xParc
Signal vs. Noise: How LLMs Broke the Internet and How ZK Proofs Are Going to Fix It by Tracy Livengood





Sign up for zkMesh here!





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!





If you like what we do:



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

This week, Anna and Nico catch up with Antonio Sanso, Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and Youssef El Housni, Engineer at ConsenSys and builder of Linea.


They discuss Antonio and Youssef’s new work, Families of prime-order endomorphism-equipped embedded curves on pairing-friendly curves and dive into Elliptic Curve cryptography, Bandersnatch and Verkle Tries amongst much more, before dissecting what terms in the title of this paper truly mean. After getting into the weeds of cryptographic technicalities, the group explores where this work could be used and what it would enable.





Here’s some additional links for this episode:




zkSummit: A new optimized elliptic curve for one layer proof composition - Youssef El Housni (EY)
ZK7: Pairings in a SNARK - Youssef El Housni - ConsenSys
ZK Study Club - ZEXE reading pt 1 (of 3)
ZK Study Club - ZEXE reading pt 2 (of 3)
ZK Study Club - ZEXE reading pt 3 (of 3)
Introducing Bandersnatch: a fast elliptic curve built over the BLS12-381 scalar field by Masson and Sanso
Verifiable Delay Functions from Supersingular Isogenies and Pairings by De Feo, Masson, Petit and Sanso
Episode 117: Isogenies with Luca De Feo

Families of prime-order endomorphism-equipped embedded curves on pairing-friendly curves
C∅C∅: A Framework for Building Composable Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Kosba, Zhao, Miller, Qian, Chan, Papamanthou, Pass, Shelat and Shi
Constructing Elliptic Curves with Prescribed Embedding Degrees by Barreto, Lynn and Scott
Welcome/Opening + Invited Talk by Nadia Heninger (PKC 2024)
SafeCurves: choosing safe curves for elliptic-curve cryptography





Check out the latest jobs in ZK at the ZK Podcast Jobs Board.





The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, there’s still time to join at zkkrakow.com.





Namada is the shielded asset hub rewarding you to protect the multichain.


Built to give you full control over sharing your personal information, Namada brings data protection to existing assets, applications, and networks. Namada ends the era of transparency by default, enabling shielded transfers and shielded cross-chain actions to protect your data even when interacting with transparent chains.


Learn more and follow Namada mainnet launch at namada.net.





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