Episodes

Episode 220: The Road to Plonky2 with Brendan and Daniel from Polygon Zero

This week, Anna chats with Brendan Farmer and Daniel Lubarov from Polygon Zero, formerly known as Mir, about their early experiments with different proving systems, their work combining PLONK and Halo called Plonky – as well as the more recent combination of PLONK plus FRI (a technique that is borrowed from STARKs) which makes up Plonky2.

Episode 219: Scaling Ethereum with Polygon’s Mihailo Bjelic

This week, Anna chats with Mihailo Bjelic one of the co-founders of Polygon. Mihailo takes us through the evolution of Polygon and how the promise of web3 has led them to betting big on ZK-focused technologies. We learn about their approach to the two main challenges within their mission to scaling Ethereum – security and data availability; and how their suite of products aims to tackle these. Lastly, we hear about what’s next on the Polygon roadmap to onboarding the first billion to Ethereum – for the products themselves and the ecosystem as a whole.

Episode 218: Hardened JS and the Architecture of Agoric with Dean Tribble

This week, Anna chats with Dean Tribble, co-founder and CEO of Agoric. Dean walks us through the landscape of programming languages and Agoric’s philosophy behind building a blockchain that has Hardened JS as its smart contract language. We hear about the two big challenges in using JavaScript in blockchain development, malleability and non-deterministic, and how Agoric addresses these. Dean explains the security implications of many popular blockchain languages and how this led them to build Agoric’s smart contract infrastructure allowing JavaScript functions to run with specific access control – leaving the money management to the larger framework. We touch on what to expect from the upcoming development phases of Agoric, various bridging partnerships to come, and last but not least – if, when and how they envision ZK roll-ups getting implemented into the stack.

Episode 217: Information Theory & Blockchain with Sreeram Kannan

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with Sreeram Kannan, Associate Professor at University of Washington where he runs the UW Blockchain Lab. In this episode, they look at how information theory and blockchain intersect and map the progression of Bitcoin security. They discuss Sreeram’s early work on P2P mobile networks and how this evolved to work on consensus and fair sequencing. Sreeram takes us through his philosophical reasoning of shifting from genomic research to blockchain research and the two major areas in P2P systems that he focuses on: maximum throughput and low latency.

Episode 216: A Dip into the Mempool & MEV with Project Blanc

This week, Anna chats with Dean Eigenmann and Edgar Aroutiounian from Project Blanc, a team building bots and developing MEV strategies. They revisit the topic of MEV, what it is and how teams like Project Blanc work to capture it. They also dive into the concept of re-orgs, accelerationism as a philosophy and get a look at what goes on in the Dark Forest.

Episode 215: Charting Zodiac & DAOs with Nathan Ginnever and Auryn Macmillan

This week Anna chats with Nathan Ginnever, an applied cryptographer and contributor to Zodiac, and Auryn Macmillan, a product manager and Solidity dev at Gnosis Guild, about the modules and components that make up Zodiac’s suite of composable DAO tooling. In the conversation, they explore the DAO landscape and the lessons they’ve gathered from earlier tools like the Gnosis Safe and SafeSnap. As well as run-through the components that make up the Zodiac standard, new upcoming innovations, the emerging trends in DAO management and more.

Episode 214: Emin Gün Sirer on Avalanche and its Formation

This week Anna chats with Emin Gün Sirer – CEO Ava Labs and Founder of Avalanche. They chat about the experiences that led him to become interested in distributed systems research and his work as a professor at Cornell that led to the development of Avalanche. They then dig into their novel consensus mechanism which uses the sub-sampling technique, the architecture of the network with the 3 distinct components: X-Chain, C-Chain and P-Chain, bridges and more.

Episode 213: zk-SNARKs meets Optimistic Rollup with Zkopru

This week Anna chats with Wanseob an Applied ZKP Developer in the Privacy & Scaling Exploration Team at the Ethereum Foundation and one of the authors of the Zkopru protocol. They explore how Zkopru uses optimistic rollups and zero knowledge proofs to create a privacy-focused Layer 2. Wanseob walks us through the transaction process and how the protocol is built to circumvent high gas fees. We also hear a little about what’s to come in the Zkopru ecosystem from merchandising to private exchange of NFTs.

Episode 212: 2021 < 2022 with Co-hosts & Friends

This week, Anna checks in with co-hosts & friends, Tarun Chitra, James Prestwich, Josh Cincinnati and Guillermo Angeris, for a retrospective look at 2021 and a look forward to 2022. Enjoy this conversation full of blasphemous hot takes, bad 2022 predictions and dad jokes.

Bonus ZK Hack Wrap with Kobi!

While we decided not to release a full episode this week, Anna did get a chance to catch up with Kobi Gurkan, one of the co-organizers of ZK Hack and someone who was very missed in the last episode about the event!

Episode 211: It’s a wrap! ZK Hack Takeaways & What’s Next!

This week, Anna hosts a special 5-part interview with a roundup of perspectives from ZK Hack. First, she chats with puzzle hackers who share what it was like to solve these real-world cryptography bugs and learn complex concepts in real time. They discuss how they got started learning in this space and the resources and tools that helped them. Next, Anna speaks with the puzzle builders on the challenges of designing and building these novel zk puzzles. They discuss the state of the community and how the community could work together to create learning resources to enable its growth. Last but not least, there is a chat with part of the ZK Hack organizing team on what they thought of the event and what’s to come next!

Episode 210: The Road to STARKs and Miden with Bobbin Threadbare

This week, Anna chats with Bobbin Threadbare about his project Miden, a STARK-based roll-up which was recently purchased by Polygon. We recap the differences between STARKs and SNARKs and the increasingly blurred line between these two proving systems. We then map Bobbin’s journey to Miden VM (now Polygon Miden), how it originated from his earlier project Distaff VM and now incorporates the Winterfell prover from his days at Facebook.

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