Zero Knowledge
Episode Archive
Episode Archive
106 episodes of Zero Knowledge since the first episode, which aired on October 4th, 2017.
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Episode 91: Near Protocol's focus on UX
August 21st, 2019 | 59 mins 58 secs
blockchain development, blockchain ux, ethereum, near protocol, polkadot
In this episode, we sit down with Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin from Near Protocol to find out about their work. We discuss what brought them to develop Near Protocol, how they used their whiteboard sessions to learn from the best people in the space, the challenge of blockchain UX, and what has motivated them to become one of the fastest moving projects around.
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Episode 90: MPC systems with Nigel Smart
August 14th, 2019 | 57 mins 25 secs
blockchain, cryptography, cryptology, mpc systems, multi-party computation, nigel smart
In this week's episode, we chat with Nigel Smart, Professor of Cryptology at KU Leuven and the co-founder of Unbound Tech, about his background in cryptology, the history of MPC systems, MPC systems in the real world, and how MPC stacks up versus other related cryptography and privacy techniques.
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Episode 89: Eth2.0 update and a look at Libra with Raul Jordan
August 7th, 2019 | 57 mins 51 secs
blockchain, blockchain development, eth2, libra protocol, prysmatic labs, test net, validators
In this week’s episode, we invite Raul Jordan from Prysmatic Labs back to the show. He shares an update about Prysmatic Labs and ETH2.0 development. We cover some of the latest innovations, some existing challenges, timelines, implementation challenges and more. He also shares some insights from his technical review of Facebook's proposed Libra protocol.
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Episode 88: Accumulators with Ben Fisch
July 31st, 2019 | 1 hr 1 min
ben fisch, blockchain, dan boneh, merkle trees, privacy, rsa accumulator, scaling, starks, zero knowledge
In this week’s episode, we chat with Ben Fisch, Stanford PhD student working in Dan Boneh's applied cryptography group. In our conversation, we dig into accumulators, Merkle trees & vector commitments.
We also learn a bit about the RSA Accumulator Paper - entitled "Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains" - that he co-authored with Benedikt Bünz and touch on some of the ways these can be used. -
Episode 87: The road to DEXs with Will Harborne
July 24th, 2019 | 58 mins 32 secs
centralised exchanges, crypto, decentralised exchange, dexs, ethfinex, trading
In this week's episode, we chat with Will Harborne, co-founder of Ethfinex and previously at Bitfinex, about the path from traditional exchanges, to centralised crypto exchanges and more recently DEXs. We explore what the role of the DEXs really is and what we could imagine seeing in the future of the space.
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Episode 86: Ariel Gabizon on his work with zkSNARKs and the beauty of math
July 17th, 2019 | 51 mins 42 secs
blockchain, cryptography, filecoin, stark, zcash, zcash bug, zero knowledge proofs, zksnark
In this week’s episode, we welcome Ariel Gabizon, previously an Electric Coin Company (Zcash) engineer and cryptographer working on zero knowledge constructions. Ariel has worked closely with many of the exciting projects and researchers pushing the boundaries on zero knowledge research. He is also the person who discovered the Zcash bug (along with Sean Bowe and Zooko). In this episode, we explore his journey into the space, what inspires him, and what exciting new paradigms he is exploring today!
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Episode 85: Zexe: Decentralized Private Computation with Pratyush Mishra
July 10th, 2019 | 46 mins 14 secs
blockchain, cryptography, privacy protocol, privacy token, private transactions, zcash, zcon, zexe
In this episode, we sit down with Pratyush Mishra, CS PhD Student at UC Berkeley and one of the co-authors on the Zexe project, to discuss the Zexe protocol. We cover how this paper came to be, what it aims to solve, how it works, how it could be used and dive into some of the differences between Zexe and some other existing zero knowledge protocol proposals.
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Episode 84: Zcash community & more with Amber Baldet
July 3rd, 2019 | 43 mins 18 secs
amber baldet, blockchain, clovyr, privacy, security, zcash, zcash foundation
In this episode, we chat with Amber Baldet, CEO and co-founder of Clovyr and board member of the Zcash Foundation, about her road to the blockchain space, the problems she aims to solve with her work on Clovyr, some updates about the Zcash community & foundation, the state of zero knowledge research and the potential and challenges around the implementation of zero knowledge systems in the real world.
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Episode 83: From Warp Sync to SPREE with Polkadot's Rob Habermeier
June 26th, 2019 | 1 hr 8 mins
cryptography, engineering, ethereum, lightclients, parity technology, polkadot, warp sync
In this episode, Anna chats with Robert Habermeier, one of the co-founders of Polkadot and an engineer at Parity, about his early experience with Rust and cryptography, as well as the work he did at Parity on Warp Sync and Lightclients, how this helped inspire some of the development of the Polkadot architecture and some of the exciting technical concepts that he has discovered along the way.
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Episode 82: TEEs, SGX and the Graphene project
June 19th, 2019 | 54 mins 29 secs
blockchain, confidentiality, privacy, tee
In this week's episode we chat with the guys behind the Graphene project, Chia-Che Tsai of Texas A&M University and Golem developer Lukasz Glen, about Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), and the way the Graphene project aims to make it easier for devs to interact with these hardware enclaves.
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Episode 81: P2P Messaging & Scuttlebutt with Dominic Tarr
June 12th, 2019 | 47 mins 34 secs
blockchain, dht, distributed hash table, dominic tarr, p2p messaging, privacy, scuttlebot, scuttlebutt, security, social network
In this week’s episode, we meet with Dominic Tarr, a protocol designer and security auditor who works on Scuttlebutt - a decentralized secure gossip platform. We discuss P2P messaging and the challenges of sending messages within a P2P network in a truly decentralised manner.
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Episode 80: On the Frontiers of Validation with Bison Trails
June 5th, 2019 | 1 hr 3 mins
bison trails, blockchain infrastructure, blockchain validation, cosmos, delegators, polkadot, pos, proof-of-stake, tezos, validation, validators
In this week's episode, Anna sits down with Joe Lallouz and Aaron Henshaw from Bison Trails - a validator infrastructure company based in NYC. Recorded during the NYC blockchain week, we chatted about the latest PoS systems to launch, what it means to be a validator, how the incentive structures can impact the ecosystem development and potential futures for this uncharted validator landscape.
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Episode 79: Privacy & P4 with Liz and Chris from Least Authority
May 29th, 2019 | 1 hr 50 secs
blockchain, crypto, least authority, privacy, privacy protocol, private payments, zcash
In this week's episode, we sit down with Liz Steininger and Chris Wood from Least Authority to discuss the state of privacy today, the case for private crypto subscription payments and their P4 proposal. P4, or Private Periodic Payment Protocol, uses the shielded account feature of Zcash to provide a fully decentralised method for recurring end-to-end private cryptocurrency payments.
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Episode 78: Diving into Cosmos with Sunny
May 22nd, 2019 | 1 hr 7 mins
blockchain, blockchain at berkeley, blockchain validator, cosmos, cosmos protocol, pos, proof-of-stake
In this week's episode, Anna sits down with Sunny Aggarwal to talk about his journey into blockchain, the beginnings of Blockchain at Berkeley, how he discovered Cosmos, his role as a validator and as a podcast co-host.
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Episode 77: Funding Blockchain Development with Kevin Owocki
May 15th, 2019 | 1 hr 11 mins
blockchain, eip1337, ethereum, funding blockchain, gitcoin, grants, open source
In this week, we sit down with Kevin Owocki, co-founder of gitcoin, to have a look at how open source blockchain development is funded. We cover the different methods for funding open source work, what has worked in the past, what hasn’t, how funding blockchain projects can be quite different and what people are experimenting with today.
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Episode 76: Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups & Elliptic Curve Cryptography
May 8th, 2019 | 1 hr 31 mins
academia, cryptography, development, elliptic curve, sonics, trusted set up, zcash, zcash bug, zexe
In this week’s episode, we welcome special guest Sean Bowe. Sean is a Zcash Company engineer and the author of the Sprout and Sapling Zcash trusted set ups and much of the underlying cryptography of the protocol. We had a chance to chat about his history, what got him into the topic, some of the joys & challenges to working with SNARKs, and what ideas are inspiring him.