How Things Work

Commonware

Exploring how blockchains (and the mechanisms that power them) work. Also available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnVJ5S1DIyuFQ9cIE_oE-U3Wl3JDgZQ8A

Episodes

  1. 02/06/2025

    How Things Work #0: ZODA and The Accidental Computer

    For the pilot episode of "How Things Work", we chat with the Alex Evans and Guillermo Angeris (from Bain Capital Crypto) about their research into blockchain scaling. We first pull back the curtain on Data Availability Sampling (DAS) and explore how systems today encode data for light client sampling. Then, we discuss how their recent work, ZODA (Zero-Overhead Data Availability), promises to make this process more (or even optimally) efficient by transforming the encoding of some data into a proof of its correctness. After that, we dive into a discussion about The Accidental Computer (Polynomial Commitments from Data Availability), a surprising result that shows that succinct proof systems can reuse work already done during data availability encoding to reduce (or wholly remove) work associated with the proof system's polynomial commitment scheme. Last, we chat about implementation progress (in Julia) and how blockchains could be designed to take advantage of this work. *** Speakers *** * Patrick O'Grady (Commonware): https://x.com/_patrickogrady * Alex Evans (Bain Capital Crypto): https://x.com/alexhevans * Guillermo Angeris (Bain Capital Crypto): https://x.com/GuilleAngeris *** References *** * Ligero (Lightweight Sublinear Arguments Without a Trusted Setup): https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1608 * Fraud and Data Availability Proofs (Maximising Light Client Security and Scaling Blockchains with Dishonest Majorities): https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.09044 * Sampling for Proximity and Availability: https://baincapitalcrypto.com/sampling-for-proximity-and-availability/ * ZODA (Zero-Overhead Data Availability): https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/034 * ZODA (An Explainer): https://baincapitalcrypto.com/zoda-explainer/ * The Accidental Computer (Polynomial Commitments from Data Availability): https://baincapitalcrypto.com/the-accidental-computer-polynomial-commitments-from-data-availability/

    1h 35m

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Exploring how blockchains (and the mechanisms that power them) work. Also available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnVJ5S1DIyuFQ9cIE_oE-U3Wl3JDgZQ8A