Episode 328: ZK on Bitcoin with Alpen Labs Zero Knowledge

Summary

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Sims Gautam 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 explores 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/.




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