Bonus Interview: The Path into ZK with grjte

Transcript

foreign [Music] I'm Brendan I work on ZK stuff at polygon and I'd like to welcome you to another episode of the ZK whiteboard sessions interview series uh today we're with kershta uh who works uh with me at polygon specifically on polygon Maiden we're joined by a triple threat podcaster validator investor Anna Rose hey so I think we wanted to do this interview um we wanted to kind of talk to you

gershta because you have a really you've had a really interesting story getting into this industry and we kind of thought that like since a lot of our viewers We Believe are kind of coming from other Industries trying to understand how to get their get get into ZK where to start they're looking for material um I thought it would be really cool to explore a little bit how you found your way into it um so maybe tell us maybe before that tell us a little bit about what you were doing before and maybe why you found this space interesting yeah um so before this I was CTO of a web 2 startup that I'd started with some

people um after having been CEO of a startup that I didn't start I sort of that that one got sold and I went well I think I sort of know how to do this let me try it so I teamed up with a couple people and we went for it and um I kind of got tired of I didn't find the product that motivating to me we had picked something that um the guys who were sales and marketing people were confident they could sell so I sort of went through the iteration of like bootstrap the product we get it to being profitable and then I was sort of ready for something more technically interesting and challenging for me and um my husband who does some defy stuff uh I was sort of like I know it might be a fun time to start playing around in

you know the ethereum ecosystem so last September I uh just kind of started learning solidity and going through this um kind of a security road map how to like just doing hacking puzzles and looking at all of the different um ways that you can break things um and hack contracts and I came across um zika kind of from that and signed up for it and then got really interested in it because I care a lot about privacy I think it's really important I think that if I think that we can do it a lot better than the way that we're currently doing it in the world and the way to do that is through ZK and the way where um that is being developed and pushed is is here in this space and so

um I just got really excited about solving harder problems about working on something that I think is really important kind of globally um and and to me personally as as someone joining from the outside you sort of mentioned that the one of the first things you wanted to see was like how to break things how do you find things that are broken like exactly like how do you do you do you read like audit reports do you like I don't know look on look for some hacks and then dive in when there's like a bug or a hack so I I really do love reading the uh the recap threads of like how hacks went down some of them are really boring like I find the social engineering one's really boring but I find the ones where somebody like cheats

a Merkel path quite cool um so you know I I do enjoy reading through those what I was looking at last year I had never done any of that kind of stuff before I had never done ctfs like it was brand new from scratch and there are a bunch of kind of puzzle um series that people have put together there's like ethernets there's um I don't know just a bunch of different things and so I was sort of going through some of those and using that as my path to learn solidity as well cool um why do you think you ended up choosing ZK I know you mentioned you were interested in privacy but like was there anything else maybe about this community at this moment that appealed

to you yeah I mean it's really exciting to be on the front edge of something that's becoming a practical reality like the protocols that people are using are from the past like three years Planck was 2019 right and the first practical things were within the past sort of five years and it's just really exciting to be working with this kind of stuff I think it's also really exciting to be in a space where anybody can jump in and do it and that was one thing that I noticed when I started last year was that there are people here who are you know cryptographers with phds have been doing it for decades and then there are people here who just found the space exciting and the work interesting and started doing it because I wanted to do it and I

feel like everybody gets treated on an equal footing as long as they're doing a good job at what they're doing and that I think so it's very meritocratic which I think is also important to me I think this is all underselling how excited I am about CK I am really excited about ZK I didn't just fall into it but there are all these cool things going on as well nice um how did you find uh sort of like the math component because I I know that that's I think scene is really intimidating for for a lot of people did you previously have uh sort of an academic math background or did you sort of like work your way through it uh just curious about that I would consider myself to have had a very insufficient math background it was quite frustrating

and I just yeah it just kind of worked on working my my way through it so last year while I was doing the ZK hack puzzles and working on solving all of those to learn ZK stuff I was also going through like studying group Theory and studying sort of more advanced linear algebra whatever it was relevant to whatever thing I was doing and just trying to fill in gaps and I feel like I've spent the last year as well just trying to continue filling in gaps I have a computer science background so I did have to do some discrete math and and some other things but I don't have as much of a proof-based mathematical background as as I would maybe like to have although people would say all you need is polynomials and there is a lot to that as well like all you need is

polynomials to do this stuff I think I feel like I don't feel like I know something until I can recreate it from like first principles and explain it to people that way and so in order to be able to do that I think you do want to just keep digging just keep working at it until you feel like you're getting a handle on I guess do you do you have the experience Now sort of looking back uh do you have the sense of like oh it wasn't that hard like so sort of like like it looked like more of a like not to decline that it actually was in terms of uh like getting the kind of requisite that background maybe maybe not I don't know

I don't know like learn something and then they're like oh this thing is Trivial and like that's very frustrating to somebody who's learning it to have somebody be like you can figure this out that thing's trivial but I have learned about myself over the past year that maybe I am one of these people who like once I've learned something I go oh it's trivial just because I suddenly know it so I I sort of know what you're saying but I also I'm not sure I want to answer the answer to that question yeah no no I I I I I I definitely don't want to like want to trivialize it I I just think that the like my personal opinion is that the uh the math aspect of the scene is really really intimidating um and it's still like difficult to to kind of work through but I I don't think

that it should be seen as like something that's insurmountable no I a lot of terminal terminology piled on top of it in order to teach it so probably if you're not understanding it the first time what's missing is the gap between like where your intuition could be and the way that it's being explained and maybe what you need to do is like figure out how to map that terminology to something that's meaningful to you so I think that to me was the thing that sort of cracks it open more I want to talk about resources and books groups things that also helped you along the way as you're talking about this though it makes me think I know that somewhere there is a glossary of terms

for ZK that has been created that might be something that we will try to dig up to add in the in the show notes to this because even that starting point I think for some people might be really helpful just so that when people are using some of these terms they have somewhere to look otherwise like those terms may actually only be defined within like large papers and so yeah I think creating glossaries in these like yeah kind of a little bit simpler informational text is going to be really helpful I know I know a lot of people we're all creating resources but yeah let's talk resources what kind of things helped you dig into this space like books potentially or study clubs or

people who are helpful I think still Far and Away the most effective like value for time spent that I had was doing the ZK hack puzzles um there is associated reading that comes with those and that was helpful if you kind of get stuck on them there are hints um and I think you can you can get there you know and then there are write-ups if you're really really stuck but don't look at the write-ups figure it out yourself first um but I would say in terms of like value value for time put in those were those were definitely the highest after that um you know there's something about just like clocking in every day being around experts so last fall I did

um this Study Club there were about five of us reading Justin Baylor's book and that was really good because um I don't know if I would have finished reading through the book on my own otherwise but I did like make an effort to even if I didn't have time to sit down with it as much as I wanted to at least go over the chapter before we would meet um to discuss uh so that was that was helpful and it was good timing for me to do it um honestly working at Maiden has been really great I mean when I when I decided I wanted to do to dig deeper basically I was like well I want to be doing this as much as I can and I want to be around as many experts as I can be around um and so joining writing when I did it

was just bobbin threadbear and my and then I was the second person which meant there are there aren't a lot of people already doing different parts of the work like there's just him and me um and I'm bringing engineering experience which is useful but it's like I can anything that I'm sort of like really interested in that he thinks I might be able to do I can kind of say I really want to work on this thing and go for it and so I got to do a lot of Hands-On learning that way and then there are you know calls where we're discussing DK stuff um with Brendan and with Jordy and Daniel and the other people at polygon and so once I found out those calls existed that was part of what made me really want to join uh was to be able to sit in on those

so it sounds like sort of to recap it was like following Twitter like on Twitter hacks and bugs and digging into like what had happened doing the ZK hack event series which back last fall this is 2021 it ran seven weeks or seven weeks of workshops and six puzzles that event is actually coming up again soon so maybe I'll mention it here but uh next month we're starting ZK hack three and it will be four weeks with three puzzles and so if anyone's interested they maybe could actually go through this again it has a weekly Cadence you get to meet people along the way so you did that you then did the thaler book club which was also actually in the ZK hack Discord if anyone's

watching and isn't in there jump in check it out we have actually three study clubs going right now including one around this series and um did you and then you joined a company yeah and then you actually got firsthand experience working with a uh a practitioner do you like do you actually recommend that that at some like or maybe the question here is like at what stage did you want to LEAP into actually working how far do you think people should go before they apply I know I feel like there's a lot of people who are really nervous about putting like getting involved if they don't feel like they have the full skill set yet I think if there's something you want to

do and you want to get better at doing it you should start doing it as early as possible doing the actual thing that it is you want to be doing um like yeah I didn't know I didn't have any of the prerequisites for the job really like I didn't know ZK I didn't know rust um I I also applied to the job anonymously so I did not give like a normal resume experience um I submitted a PR and then I emailed bobbin and I was like Hey I want to work we we met actually at the zika hack after party so we had talked for maybe three minutes or something and um I was just impressed by how quickly he had done as much as he's done in the space in like the span of about three years he'd done a whole lot of stuff and um

then I looked at what it done and I was like well he's a really good engineer I'd be really happy to work with him and he knows all this stuff and I would get to like see this project from the beginning through its growth so yeah so I did a PR I emailed him I was like I want to work I want to do it or not I've sort of done these things we talked shocked and then I did like a half time internship for two months oh also I in that email I was like I don't know Russ but I could learn Russ just give me three months or whatever so so I did this like halftime thing and then I got hired full time at the end of it so I always say if you want to do it like just go for it just push yourself

um there are a lot of opportunities and and you know have some relevant expertise it doesn't have to be ZK expertise as long as it's useful then like there is a space for you yeah and I guess what you're saying too is like there is a need for new like people to join this space and be learning and I think a lot of people even who've been here for a long time they're often learning new paradigms new techniques these are being introduced all the time so if even if you're at the learning stage like you're going to be continuously learning so why not jump in pretty soon I know a lot of teams are looking for people and so that's maybe something that people don't always realize is like a lot of these teams are missing talents still so if you think you have something I think it's really

great to reach out to them yeah I mean we're looking for people and we're not looking just for ZK people we're looking for people who are good engineers and who are like interested in ZK and and gonna put in the time to learn it but yeah yeah and there's I I I I would just maybe uh jump in there and say that there there's a lot um like thinking about what we work on with zero and what you're working on with Biden like it's not all pure cryptography like I I'm curious in your experience that Biden like how because you're you're sort of doing two things right like you're working with uh cryptography to verify execution of this computer that you're like building with file no builds you're also like building the computer itself I'm I'm just curious

like which of those two things uh was kind of most appealing and like what what do you enjoy enjoy most and uh got it like between the two I like the spread of it but you're right there's been like a lot of learning for me that wasn't just CK stuff across the last year like this is my first time building a VM I have previously done work on compilers but um I'm revisiting that and it's been it's been a while that was my first job like at the end of college and out of college um and so there's a lot of different kind of like deep engineering or whatever stuff going on but it is in a different context and so it's cool to take things that you might know from previous kind of computer science stuff and figure out how like maps to the ZK

contest while at the same time learning the ZK stuff uh I really enjoy all of it I would like to do more of all of it there's like never enough time what do you think was the steepest learning curve of all if you look back over the last now year and a bit I guess like maybe at what phase was it the hardest and which topics yeah do you think were the hardest I think the steepest learning curve was the first couple weeks of CK hack I did not manage to solve the first puzzle I had a good intuition for it but I didn't know to use Sage um I had never used sage like yeah and it wasn't mentioned at all in the puzzle

so it turns out that everybody solved it like solved it with that um so I was kind of like trying to do it with rust which I also never looked at before um so anyway I got stuck on that one and then the second one um I didn't even really like I got sort of partly thinking about it but did not come to like really an answer with it and so then by the third one like that's the point where you start to feel sort of like a little bit demoralized it's like I'm spending all my time doing this thing and like making no progress um and it it was very satisfying but I did get the third one um but that was probably the the time that was like felt the steepest but it's also the time of the biggest progress when you do push through it

um other yeah I mean I think that's that's my answer for it the beginning we should also we should mention that like but you're saying like the first two you weren't able to do the third one you were able to do you ended up like winning the write-up submission on two of the like later ones as well so that was pretty cool yeah so it went from not being able to do it to actually having the best write-up of all yeah so that's a good week cool that's quite a leap it's nice um let's talk about being Anon but I mean I think I guess one question people might have is like why Anon I think the honest answer is that I

don't really know I like I I really value my privacy but I'm not actually sure I think this is one of those things where it's not really there isn't really a rational reason it's like it's emotional and I just care about being able to have my privacy that doesn't mean I won't tell people and and choose or feel things but it's a choice to reveal you know so I think there's sort of that personal feeling that I have which is also probably part of what drives me to think that ZK and and making privacy technology technology possible and private computation like a reality for everybody is really important um I I was doing I was a witness to enough of the marketing stuff in web 2 before this as well that you really see how how invaded everybody's privacy is

um so I would say there's that but the other thing is just it's really cool that it's possible and it's kind of only possible in this space and so to me it's something that I think should be a reality is almost a reality I'd like to be one of the people doing that and making it visible and kind of pushing it Forward um so to go through an anonymous hiring process was incredibly cool I did have to kyc uh the polygon when I signed the contract to get payments but I only the deal during that internship was that only one person would know and so I never like bobbin didn't know and in fact I did the whole thing voice modded with the video off um I didn't kind of show it any tell

anybody say anything to anybody who I was until I've been in the space for about six months I think again like I was saying I really care about kind of meritocracy and it felt really great to be like I'm here only because of what I've done with CK so that's it it's just like I've put this into the world with CK and now I'm working in ZK purely on that foundation and I think it would be great for like everybody to be able to to have that sort of a an opportunity yeah like being able to uh be sort of like recognized for your work without any sort of preconceptions about your identity or what else you've done I think is really powerful yeah sorry um for the record I I assumed from your name that you were like a Romanian teenager or something

um uh yeah yeah the first time a little bit to see people's reactions very cool um did you like you probably also are working with Ann on you're on the other side of that as well where you're meeting people in the community working with people who are also Anonymous how do you think like I think there's a few things that change obviously preconceptions stereotype things that people will inevitably project on other people that's gone but there is also a question about like reputation how do you feel like in this space how does one learn to get to know and trust anons if you don't know who they are you don't

know their background you don't know what they've done before I think um I think my personal apology uh policy tends to be careful trust um like give people the benefit of the doubt but make sure that my bases are covered so I don't like end up getting in trouble um and right yeah exactly right um and this kind of comes from what I was doing beforehand because for the five years before this I was hiring remotely anyway all contractors um from wherever and we were all you know we were a global remote team like I don't really know anything about any of those people

um you just sort of do your best to read them early on and then give them a chance and make sure they can't destroy anything if they don't deserve to have the chance and then you know give them more and more as it comes so I feel like it's the same thing reputation networks are flawed anyway like unless it's somebody I know really well um how much does it count for and I have this I'm not really a big fan of credentialism as you could probably guess by the fact that I wanted to come in and do something on a merit basis but I think you can lock out a lot of really great people that way uh definitely there is I mean at the same time though

there is in our community there's folks who've been there we know the work we know that we can like trust that they're going to have done their very best and had some of the best people in the space to have a look at the work that they do and therefore like those libraries those tools might be a little bit more trusted I do think that there's like in general and on or not that is just like a different way of thinking like you're not trusting some stamp from a company you're actually like seeing the work of people and sort of tracking that um so maybe yeah maybe that doesn't it names don't matter anymore I mean I like that sadly I started non and on so I can't really go back or unless there isn't a non out there

that's me who knows new Twitter handle uh yeah I I think it's really cool that you were able to build up like such a strong reputation like a fairly compressed amount of time and and I wonder if being a non-like sort of uh like contributed to that because like there's nothing to like there's like like no prior work to prejudge or like like I I I think that sometimes when people are coming into this space or into the ZK space specifically there can be a bias based on like whatever the last thing they did was um and so so I think it's cool uh approach yeah I think that's true I think in particular the last thing that I was doing I sort of I was proud of the

process of like bootstrapping a company um but I wasn't particularly proud of the product and so like it wasn't something that I feel aligns with like things that I think are really exciting in the world and but it does reflect on me because I you know was part of bringing that thing to life it's not like a bad product though I mean it's like fine you know whatever it's like a million products like that are just you know you don't get too excited unless it's like really useful for your work or whatever but but it wasn't something that I wanted to bring with me into my like first initial connection with people what I wanted to bring with me was like the ZK love and whatever skill I had managed to Garner by that point nice any any thoughts anything kind of to share with with the listeners going

through these modules these sessions they're learning piece by piece yeah is there anything you think that they should keep in mind the sessions are really great but it's it's a really great resource to have um so I would say go yeah going through them is great and going through the resources that they list but in general like the best way to learn is to be Hands-On it's like either Make It or Break It and by that I mean the technology make or break a protocol like actually or VM or whatever yeah pack it or build it yeah yeah and like that's how you're gonna explore if you you know are more um pencil and paper inclined then like sit down and do the proofs or whatever but I think ultimately as long as you get Hands-On and gets Hands-On as

quickly as possible and like fail as hard as you can as fast as you can although the usual advice cool thanks so much grocer for this interview and sharing with us a little bit more context to your journey into ZK and yeah all the work that you're doing thanks Christian thank you thanks for having me [Music]