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.zkk ..read more

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 Bun ..read more

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 ..read more

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.zkk ..read more

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 pl ..read more

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, Sabl ..read more

Quick reminder about our upcoming zkSummit 11 event. Happening in Athens on April 10th, we will be bringing together the top researchers and engineers working in zk to share their latest research and new findings. Apply at zksummit.com If you have already applied, please remember to buy your ticket! Email summit [at] zeroknowledge.fm if you have questions about your application or haven't received a response yet ..read more

In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico chat with Alin Tomescu, founding team member and Head of Cryptography at Aptos Labs. They discuss Alin’s journey to Aptos and his work on distributed on-chain randomness as well as the new Aptos Keyless project. They cover the Keyless accounts architecture, how the flow works for the user and some of the subtleties in the approach they have taken. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Episode 302: ZK for web2 interop with zkLogin & ZK Email Episode 156: Stateless Validation with Alin Tomescu Episode 227: Move & Sui with Sam Blackshear fro ..read more

This week’s episode is a little different from the usual and is split into two parts with Anna and Kobi exploring the history of ZK Hack, its origins and how the event has evolved into what it is today, including current activity in the ZK Hack ecosystem. The second half of the show splits off into Anna and Nico chatting the top 3 hackers from ZK Hack IV Online, which wrapped back in February. Each mini interview catches up with one of the winners and dives into what it was like to hack on the puzzles, which their favourites were and how they can be improved in the future. Here’s some addition ..read more

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun catch up with Uma Roy, CEO and cofounder of Succinct. They dive into Succinct’s developments over the last year ranging from the work they did on the ZK bridge infrastructure to the Succinct platform, the Succinct prover network and their most recent release of SP1. They discuss connections between these products, how their development evolved, the competitive landscape, the future for the project and much more. Here’s some additional links for this episode: Introducing Blobstream by Celestia Succinct Labs SP1 GitHub ZK Jobs Board Episode 255: Verifying ..read more