Episode 271: Between Two ZK Events with Nico and Guillermo

Transcript

foreign [Music] welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online [Music] this week I catch up with Guillermo my sometimes co-host and Nico from geometry this is Nico's first time on the show and so we started off with a little bit of backstory of how he moved from music to cryptography and chat about the research he's been doing we then chat

about some of Guillermo's work which is about cleaning up and formalizing Concepts in ZK as well as share some news insights from the ZK hack and generally check in on the state of the ecosystem this is recorded right in the middle of the ZK hack and CK Summit events both of which were amazing by the way and so we're all a little bit tired and decided to do this episode more as a casual one but yeah I hope you like it now before we kick off I do want to direct you to the ZK jobs board there you'll find jobs from Top teams work in nck if you're looking for your next opportunity be sure to check it out and if you're a team looking to find great talent please be sure to add your jobs there as well I've added the link in the

show notes now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor foreign Oma's first fractal instance nemata is launching soon namata is a proof of stake L1 for interchain acid agnostic privacy namata natively interoperates with fast finality chains via IBC and with ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge for privacy namata deploys an upgraded version of the multi-acid shielded pool circuit otherwise known as masp which allows all assets fungible and non-fungible to share a common shielded set this removes the size limits of the anonymity set and provides the best privacy guarantees possible for every user in the multi-chain the masp circuit's latest update enables shielded set rewards directly in the shielded set

a novel feature that funds privacy as a public good follow namata on Twitter at namata to learn more and join their community on Discord discord.gg forward slash Nevada so thanks again anoma and now here's our episode [Music] so I'm here with Guillermo who our audience knows and Nico who our audience might not yet know and we are recording this the day after ZK hack and the day before ZK Summit so we are currently in the thick of the Lisbon ZK events that we are doing this April I mean I'm thinking as a kickoff to this one it'd be really cool to talk to Nico actually introduce him a little bit to our

audience and yeah just sort of a heads up to the audience we are all very tired because ZK hack was fun but a lot of work and uh yeah so bear with us but I think we actually have some cool stuff to talk about we're going to do a little review of ZK hack we're going to talk about some new research that's coming out all right let's kick off with Nico Nico your researcher cryptographer at geometry tell us a little bit about what you do yeah so I work on um mostly zero knowledge proofs but also usually privacy enabling Technologies so stuff like threshold signatures thresholding schemes a tiny tiny bit of NPC but all that much more mm-hmm and yeah that's kind of the plan nice and I heard you were in a band uh I believe

it's uh hm LTD yeah and it feels like this is like um someone else another famous group talking about Matthew green right is like also like this musician no not the band but I think it's a musician turned cryptographer also or like musical engineer but okay yeah what is the story there also like is that part of the pipeline too yeah it seems is uh music is the new segue into ZK right like this is it um no it's funny I was listening to another episode of ZK podcast the one with Matthew green recently and he sort of says like yeah I started out as a I think in music technology okay trm and from there went to privacy and so it was a funny parallel because like I studied engineering originally forgot about it

for a while did music full-time for two three years to the whole like record label thing touring releasing an Apple deal yeah the full thing and sorry what instrument do you play again uh I play bass uh yeah okay I gotta do it yeah I usually hide in the back and yeah so did that for a while touring and eventually covet hits oh so there's no more touring right okay we had just released an album um Turned you towards cryptography then yeah wow interesting um sort of helped me yeah I guess Focus so I was already sort of doing music and cryptography at the same time started doing them together sort of like taking exams and then taking the train straight on to Stage like in Liverpool to then play a show and then back to London like

it was what it was yeah it was a bit like crazy for like a week or two I was like can I actually do this and then covet hit oh we're sort of like simplified everything and I was like ZK all the way kind of cool so this is 2020 where you're you're working in and with cryptography but did you actually were you like already working in ZK it was not specifically like zero knowledge proofs but it was like privacy Technologies I see okay so this was like I was working on a threshold scheme with like Phillips actually oh cool cool knife my co-founder yeah tell us a little bit maybe about that like what was what were the exact topics or yeah parts of the Privacy stack what were you trying to solve so we were looking at a project

so let's say you sign up to Signal tiger on WhatsApp whatever you want to know like which ones of your contacts are also using that app right now what what's up and like tagram do is you upload all your contacts to them like they they get to store them and they get to see like who's friends with who essentially uh signal also requires your contacts but they supposedly treat them like in an oblivious manner on trusted hardware and like delete everything afterwards but there's still like this trust assumption and so the question is can we do the same thing of like contact Discovery finding who your contacts are without ever having to upload your contacts and without having to like broadcast hey I'm using signal okay I wonder now like the music part I mean you what you were actually doing is

playing music you weren't like studying musical reforms but did you like had you looked at that like had you looked at like fast forward your transformations in the music context or anything like that so if only enough yes but not through music itself just because I had like I was doing an electrical engineering degree before that I see okay a biological engineer always fun hi fellow um but yeah it's it's funny how like I had to tell you these things I did signal processing and I was doing good like oh yeah music fun I forgot about them get into zika and suddenly like they pop up again yeah oh ffts are back like what's going on here okay cool so that project you were talking about

this like sort of you were kind of telling us a bit about that this is was that your like thesis at the time that was like my Master's I don't know if they call it thesis dissertation in the UK like whatever the thing you were working on yeah which I'm still working on today we're kind of writing it into like a proper paper this time okay building it uh with some people at uh Meister onto like a properly distribute the system and actually like trying it out ah nice and so okay fine we you know you've given us the Spiel but yeah like what what what does it do like how does it work how does it work um so it's based on what we call identity based encryption so we use your phone number as a public key and we can derive a private key that corresponds to it

so usually these schemes like traditionally use a central like trusted party that emits all these keys and you kind of trust that it's not gonna like use your keys to impersonate you not desirable in our case but what we can do is like distribute that party and say like okay this one trusted party is now a set of like thousands of parties and as long as a third of them are behaving honestly your identity is not compromised here's a very dumb question from a non-cryptographer is how do you like derive a private key from a public key like like normally right these schemes what you do is you like put in some Randomness yeah and then you get out a private public key pair and then you keep the private part private and the public part public but like you know is there a simple version of this there

is uh yeah very simple uh use simply sign the public key okay and then so the signature on the public key is now unique because the trusted third party has emitted it that's right and you can use that in some encryption scheme afterwards you don't really understand what you just when you said it's signs on it literally a BLS signature like in the same way that um I think validators on ethereum use PLS signatures right I think so yeah yeah it's like I can just verify that the only way that this will like check will pass is like assuming you have your own signature and no one else has like stolen your key like you're the only one that could have

signed it in the first place signing on it's literally the way you just said it you sign on the public key so no I I'll sign your phone number like if I'm the trusted party I sign your phone number and you can now use the signature as your private key okay um we obviously have to do this in a way that you and I are the only people who see the signature because if you reveal it you've now revealed your private key so that's part of the protocol like how do we do this and how do we do this in a distributed manner where I am no longer a single trusted party I'm like one of the many people who can issue like a partial signature and you're gonna have to collect enough of them hmm it's a reconstructure this is still like very magical so like how does this

like work so right like fine I now have assigned version with some unknown key that hopefully no one else knows it's like some toxic waste um and I now have a signed version of my phone number how can I use that as like a private key that someone else can then like encrypt something with the public key and then send it to me and then I can I'm the only person who can do group like I I yeah like there's you know I now have a thing that is like unique to me which is fine and I somehow mapped to my phone number how can I use that so without going too far in the details you do a sort of key exchange where I use my signature like my private key and your public key to derive a shared secret between you and I you can do the same

thing with your private key and my public key ah okay and then we can use the shared secret for um like a symmetric encryption Channel okay okay it's based on pairings essentially like I love just just a note too I know I sort of just mentioned this that we're between Zeke hack and if you get something like you have two very tired people here thank you for explaining it also I haven't looked at this in a while so hopefully this is not nonsensical yeah like I mean like I'm also just like to totally up explaining like you know basic cryptographic thing which is signature is like three seconds ago so honestly like a little knows so I one thing I want to talk about later in this episode is sangria the

work you recently released and you're actually going to be giving a talk about it at the Z Summit but yeah before that I thought it might actually be fun to tell it like or to sort of set the stage a little bit for even this conversation if you're down I want to do a little bit of a look back over what has just happened this weekend um we had CK hack Lisbon so ZK hack you know it's been around for a while we've been doing these online events we did do two in-person parties but this was the first time we tried to do an in-person ZK hack and we did it in the form of a hackathon this was actually the first time we did a ZK Focus hackathon I know of ZK projects being hacked at other hackathons for a while but I think this

might be one of the first actual fixed you know focused hackathons hackathons focused specifically on just ZK not like tooling and that's exactly what I was trying to say no worries you know what I really need like some sort of AI that just speaks for me that would like help me speak better lucky for you I think it might if you it might exist oh my God might not only exists it might be a topic of conversation today we are also going to be talking a little bit about zkpod.ai but yeah let's let's stick to the ZK hack Lisbon so this was weekend event we went Friday to Sunday we ended up with 33 projects submitted which I was so excited about I was very worried that like tooling just wouldn't be there and

people would give up but they didn't they really pushed through and they built things were you worried that you were gonna add like two submissions or something like I I mean wild because I really wanted to do this hackathon two years ago and now I think like wow it is so good we did not try it because so we did get 33 submissions but tooling was still very hard right yeah even today I like over the weekend A lot of people were asking about the tooling yes I think I don't know if it was the same for you and your experience judging but like I've seen a lot of projects that were using risk zero just because that was kind of a way to abstract away the ZK part right I can people can work with the tools they know and then plug it into a zero yeah I mean

I also I heard a lot of hackers would have started on one toolkit one language and actually given up because something wasn't quite ready or they weren't able to get it working fast enough so they would switch yeah and so just picture like you have 48 hours and you've decided halfway through to switch to a new language you don't know so it's it's hard out there but I was so impressed that people put things together got things submitted in time and I mean we're gonna see all the stuff we saw over a weekend was insane honestly like yeah it was crazy at the same time as I was I was trying to ride my slides for ZK Summit right in the time that it took them to come up with a whole project

like deploy like a live demo like write a full report slides everything foreign they barely started I couldn't make slides for a project that I know in and out right like so it's pretty impressive what they've done that's crazy I I was also in the same boat except uh I started my slides uh today at seven in the morning to try to get them in by noon which apparently was the hard set this is the deadline it's today it's been said except it was apparently no no it's not a lie it's real it's real I mean we need them by tomorrow yeah yeah no that's fair I mean we're already cutting it a little close anyway so sorry okay so you helped work on or like I know you were thanked Nico about one of the connection points this was like

so what we saw were there were a few teams that really did ambitious tooling as part of the hackathon um tell us a little bit about maybe the one you worked on so helped with yeah that's funny this was like in conversation with gerster from Pongo night and like we're just talking she was saying like oh I've been wanting to read the ZK Mafia game for the longest time oh that's awesome um yeah she did but yeah but she's been very busy right so so she's like all right once we reach some stage of uh development I can finally play the game like develop the game like this and like Gavin who's like also a builder from London picked up on he was like great I'm down like oh Nico you have this um shuffling Library can we use that for ZK Mafia so we started

riffing off of it and so we realized all they needed to do was Implement agabal encryption in my din assembly like they had everything else sort of ready for them and they just needed that originally they were like let's do the whole game and then uh quickly enough like right no no we're just going to contribute to the standard library and like hopefully we can pick up from there next time amazing so and that's that's what we actually saw was like people adding real tooling real you know libraries and I know there's another team Poseidon too we I actually got to see them and they started recreating Poseidon in all of the different I want to say dsls but it's almost like like they brought Poseidon to to Maiden they brought

Poseidon 2 to like a few different things yeah that's cool but also Poseidon 2 is like super recent right it's like this yeah yeah new version of the paper that came out like a month ago exactly so so yeah it's funny what we learned from doing this hackathon was like we had just done a single pool like winner top three hackers choice but now I know that for for any future hackathon what I really want to do is have a track for tools and actually have prizes just for that because that is so valuable but it's hard to like how do you how do you kind of like judge here's an application which you can kind of use or here's like this like you know exciting shiny thing and then here's this really important

but like deep in the weed library that we made so I guess this is where like the bounties kind of helped yeah and yes I think these projects were also enabled because people knew like all right even if I don't go for something nice and flashy and shiny like there is something like light at the end of the tumble kind of thing yeah there's a carrot there's something there's more than an honorable mention chewing glass which is what we had so far that's right um so yeah I just listed those honorable mentions but there's I'm gonna say a little bit about these winners um we had a general honorable honorable mentions list I'll say that the teams were there was a stark site ZK dtp cyclone sizemord and ZK Wordle I'll also by the way add a link to all of these

projects if people want to kind of check out what all of them did and then our top three uh ZK safe was third ZK P2P was second and this project Z zero gravity which was a zkml primitive basically was our number one winner and it was so cool to see like we as an audience actually got to see the top three gift presentations another thing I learned demos yeah what the hell so this was like actually seeing three of them on the main I was like I think next time we should also uh like have more presentations for everyone because that was so compelling I do want to also shout out though

hackers Choice fruity friends this was like a ZK social thing they were this was a voting that we did after kind of the judging had had happened and uh they came in first on Hacker's Choice when the snapshot was taken but I do want to do a little shout out to zero Trace who was also a very close second and apparently like took over them while I was on stage or like tied them but anyway so yeah both both of those teams seem to be crowd favorites at the time yeah I wonder if is there anything else that we should talk about CK hack Lisbon any any other like takeaways to be extremely Fair like zero knowledge as like a field that is not just pure Theory hasn't really existed for that

long yeah and kind of you know I get what is the first real useful implementation of some of this stuff like maybe 2016 maybe 2016 maybe but more like 2018 you know or four or five years in and now people are giving live demos where like sure fine the live demos involve like you pressing enter and waiting for some AWS server somewhere in like you know us East one to like Ping you back with the result but but like you can do it and it's like a lie it's a real live demo that you can like check which is sick yeah I don't know I think it's pretty far for five years I think very few tools or systems that I know are like kind of grow that quickly um the other thing I was very surprised like how up to date with like the the

most recent stuff the whole Community is oh yeah oh yeah the zkml stuff was Forefront kind of like this is very very cool the second prize as well like they're using the ZK email proof which is I think a library that was posted like a few months ago you know so it's it's all very very recent and people are already like iterating over these things and it's yeah really awesome to see yeah that the zkml the top prize they had done what was it it was like they talked about the challenge of doing zkps and cryptography plus ml because of different kinds of math that each of them use and then they had found which direction was it in the literature they went back in time in ml and found some type of math that had been used long ago

that could fit better when combined with cryptography what was it again do you remember so weightless neural networks I think is the name I don't know go forever no there was like moving point wasn't it so floating Point arithmetic yes so the issue is usually when you have like your your regular like neural networks you have all these like floating Point numbers so like 1.256 something like you know all these commas and all our snarks we work with finite fields and those are like fixed numbers and we can't deal with those commas or not very naturally at least wow so that's a big overhead in the computation of your snark so by using these weightless neural networks like you no longer have to deal with this floating Point arithmetic and actually you can do this very naturally

with lookup tables do those weightless ones use finite Fields then or it just works well in systems that do I think the latter like Works where I'm like I don't know these kind of these uh weightless neural networks at all right yeah this is a discovery for me as well right uh I think it's just that yeah it translates more naturally cool well yeah I want a big shout out to all the winners and as mentioned we're going to add a link so you can check out these projects in more detail yeah so let's I mean we can talk really briefly about looking forward tomorrow we have ZK Summit are you you're both talking and Guillermo and I are hosting the main stage oh yeah so that'll be fun we have a huge day ahead of us oh my god

um well that's fine don't apologize to me apologize to the audience oh you're an amazing co-host on stages we did zk8 and I think it was that was that was really fun actually it's a lot of fun yeah what else is going on I'm just thinking in the ZK world I don't know when this is gonna air right now we're recording this on April 3rd um we heard on April 1st that Planck isn't real that was a that was a good long is it real it's not real it was made up to Sociology PhD students from UCL seeing how far they could get with a fake cryptography primitive yeah I worry that this is going to air so long after April fools

yeah it was a good one though that was Zach from Aztecs that was great probably the best April Fool's tweet I'd seen I did have to do a double take on it because like the way it's worded it's very much like I'm very sorry to have to announce this it looks like there might be a bug or there might be yeah I was like oh no but that was a great one I liked that yeah why don't we talk a little bit about projects maybe that are going on in our worlds right now Guillermo you've tweeted a few things that like hint at some sort of like ZK work oh no tell us what is happening well I guess I'll start with a disclaimer that I have no idea about anything about ZK I've just I'm I've been LARPing the whole time uh same with cryptography I also have no

clue about any of it but on the other hand um the high level idea is the very small amount of ZK literature I've looked at which happens to be negligibly small it turns out it has like this fun little structure which is so you know like in ZK for the most part we deal with like polynomials and polynomial expressions and like a bunch of things that like relate to these things but it turns out like most of the kind of like techniques that are used with polynomials like equally like apply equally well to these more general concepts called like codes like error correcting codes it's kind of weird to make this jump but the point is like a polynomial you can think about it as like a certain kind of

error correcting code where your message is like the coefficients of the polynomial and like your error correcting code is like the polynomial evaluated over every single point in the field uh it has a bunch of nice properties so you know the easiest one being something like if upon if I give you a non-zero polynomial um all you need to do is you don't have to check that the whole thing is not zero you just have to check like one point and with high probability if that evaluation is like zero then the whole thing must have been zero in the first place and that gives you a Converse it says this is so cool Nico didn't we were covering this in our like uh whiteboard sessions study groups weren't we kind of so we were covering it from the polynomial side of things okay and we

were describing it as polynomials this is like a different way of describing the same thing and um but obviously with different ways to describe things you have different perspectives and maybe some things are easier to think about it's better intuition easier to prove so cool yeah that'd be interesting it's kind of funny because uh Nico and I I feel I feel bad I like lectured or we had we had a long chat which was mostly new ranting for like 45 minutes not ranting just checking about things uh about these these things but anyways the point is the polynomial part sometimes turns out to be very important but generally it's actually kind of secondary to this like fact that you have like a specific code that has a certain property which is called like a large distance or

something you know so that's one one such case like this polynomial zero checks what's called but you could imagine there's like a bunch of other kind of normal things we do like folding schemes where you like fold over a bunch of like you know you have you have you want to check a property over a big a set of a bunch of like objects and what you can do is instead of checking every individual object you can like kind of smash them together and then check it over that like smash together object that reduces a lot of work oh yeah um but the point is like fundamentally what you're doing is you're not like these these aren't like properties of polynomials or properties of like these objects that are like linear in other words you can kind of add them together and multiply them together or multiply them by like fixed

numbers and then add them together and then you kind of say like okay if every single object in my list satisfies a certain property right that happens only when kind of a smashed like together object uh like satisfies the same property um and this turns out to be true for like not just you know things like polynomials but it turns out to be true for like a very generic class of objects that happen to be just you know what are called like linear correcting codes so anyways that's that's the high level take uh you know what's the what are is the work the fact that you've you're describing this thing like how what is the paper so the vapor itself does to you know these kinds of papers are weird because fundamentally they don't say anything

right no we don't they say nothing they say nothing in the sense of like nothing new yeah like so so it's it's new uh but it's another perspective of looking at kind of the same object and it suggests there might be techniques that could be used exactly it suggests that there are like you know what we're looking at is something a little bit more General than like the current thing that we're actually seeing right so so you know you can think about like the current space as like this like little sphere somewhere in like you know front of your face in reality like the same stuff that we look at for this like little sphere like actually applies to like a much broader set of objects and so this suggests like kind of interesting things like maybe

polynomials are kind of difficult to deal with for some reason so one of them is you know when you use properties of polynomials you often have to take Fourier transforms uh of like things right of these like objects um and you want to avoid that for like computational reasons or for like any other number of reasons so this suggests that there like might be other things that we can use that satisfy kind of the same properties that we expect of polynomials but instead of using polynomials we can use something that might be easier cleaner simpler not always but sometimes cool so this is like this it's a paper that does a lot of I love I lovingly call it janitorial work yeah of like taking a bunch of like things that look very different cleaning it up a little bit other than putting it

all in one kind of cohesive framework that lets you like sit down and like study it you know and then it all fits in the same kind of like little category I mean those are super important right because like so today you go on any like no I'm seriously going any like zero knowledge like snark course and the first thing you'll see is oh a snark is polynomial IOP with a polynomial commitment scheme that sounds super simple but it took us a while to get there right and to get that abstraction right and to make it work once we had it people could start reasoning about like oh let me replace this kcg with foreign work like yeah you can't think properly about these was it originally like because the first zero knowledge first snarks they were produced as one solid that's right that's right like how did

they tease that out actually the two women I'm not sure okay yeah I think the uh interactive Oracle proof paper the first one is probably I'm not sure maybe Ben's son I'm not entirely sure okay but it is this kind of genital your work right like you go in you notice patterns you sort of separate things and you say all right this Falls within my pattern but if we look at the pattern itself can we come up with something else interesting yeah it's I call it also janitorial work because in a lot of ways it's um it's kind of funny because it's a little thankless right like these are so I mean some people get it but for the most part they're like folk theorems or theorems are there things that people kind of know and when you tell them to them it's

very obvious you're like oh yes of course that must be true um but some people unfortunately equate that to being like true and therefore easy as opposed to like like oh like this is a nice abstraction so anyway so this is a I have a whole lot like the the bass player of knowledge yeah yeah exactly just the side to the back it looks simple what you're doing but if you don't do it it'll come yeah it's weird right so well thank you that's far too kind I think I think it's a much lower in the totem pole than that but the drummer no yeah and actually the drummer's pretty good to make a lot of noise yeah triangle player um I'm like the the but like you know whatever the people who like spend their

time like like the yeah not even but not even the lighting it's the rigging um nice all I do is rig you care what this actually a lot of your work does this kind of thing though I feel like I've heard you talk about like formalizing lots of things so you're just always the rigor everywhere I am always the rigger it's there's something I don't know there's something like Ricker's probably a hard job actually it is no it's really hard but I'm just saying it's thankless right you know these weird things are actually all lies it's all rigged it's all rigged um so yeah so a lot I don't know I get a lot of enjoyment out of this like

we've chatted about this before uh quite drunkenly actually this is funny because this is I think one of the First episodes we've done like in person where we're not smashed God damn this one yeah I don't know if I'm like goddamn word so bad generally or I'm like God damn it would be awesome [Laughter] no no no no drinking this time folks we have a lot of work ahead of us yeah we should be smart go to bed early get yeah replace the the Mezcal shots with uh with coffee unfortunately but but yeah the the point is you know it's a joke but it's a search for the like the sublime not that I'm saying that any of the things that I do are Sublime they're in fact quite the opposite they're

rather silly but you know it's like in search of like the nice piece of art that like brings everything together anyway there was something very satisfying in finding that simple clean pattern yes simple clean abstraction yes it's a bit of an academic and polynomial commitment and that's it yeah super simple super satisfying nice I've heard a bit about your work and I was trolling your profile uh or Twitter profile rather recently um but you know why don't you why don't you tell us a little bit about it I don't wanna I don't want to speak for you it's kind of boring um so I'm working on something I'm I call Sangria and it's not because I have a drinking issue it's a slightly misknown thing that Tonk

means bad wine yeah oh really yeah sound effect clunk but actually it's I remember Zach telling me this that it was like plonk is like crappy wine that's really like drinking some leftover plonk that gives me headaches yeah okay his line and so knowing that I was working on a system where eventually you get something called relaxed plunk I was thinking okay what is relaxed plunk if not sangria nice nice great absolutely most of the work was in finding the name the rest of it is kind of yeah is kind of bringing the ideas from Nova and Nova's this paper that has like the

kind of fastest recursion snark that we have bringing ideas from there which is in the world of r1cs into the world of plunk it's it's kind of what you were describing over finding the pattern generalizing like what is it that allowed Nova to work right it's this folding scheme and you were talking about earlier about those like smashing two things together into like a compressed instance no it does the same for R1 CS I was kind of looking at it what is the pattern here found the pattern apply it to plunk and now we sort of have the same thing but for Punk interesting uh Nova is it Supernova is it the same like what's this because I know is the paper called super so there were two papers okay one is Nova and then there's a follow-up called Supernova what was the difference between those two okay so Nova sort of

says if the computation you want to prove is the same function applied many many times you prove the first time prove the second time and compress them together into one then you prove the third time and compress that with what you already had like this sort of running instance and you keep going compressing oh okay this works because it's always the same function and you're allowed to compress when it's the same function with Supernova they're saying what if the functions are different and sort of they sort of describe how to do a similar thing with different functions interesting so the idea now is like if you're trying to do a ZK VM you don't have to have like one circuit that does the whole processor right yeah you have a circuit that is part of it and another circuit that there's some other part of

it so that when you're doing cheap instructions like adding you can only call like the cheap circuit when you're doing like a very expensive operation you call the expensive circuit and you keep iterating through that uh sangria is essentially what we call a folding scheme and it's one of the elements that build towards Nova and Supernova okay so you can kind of take either of these plug out their folding scheme plug in sangria and that's it it just works nice folding scheme yeah exactly it's the foldings so fully team I think uh Guillermo sort of touched upon it earlier it's this idea that if you have two problems of some kind like two long circuits you can compress them into one clunk circuit oh it is okay if

you know like a satisfying assignment for this compressed circuit you must have known satisfying assignments for the previous two so you can think or like a sudoku for example I give you two sudokus rather than checking that you answered both I'm going to check a third one which you could have only answered if you hadn't known the first time okay combined or I mean yeah I don't know how you do it for Sudoku but okay that makes sense that's cool yeah nice that's like the yeah the main Insight of Nova and like super clean I guess this is going to be a bit of a dumb question but like Nova Supernova what are they like are they proving systems are they like where I don't really know where in this stack they are yeah you know what I'm not sure either

um so no they are they describe like a succinct proof of incremental computation okay are they like an architecture they are technically a snark okay like it boils down to a snark at the end but it's sort of like the steps along the way that are interesting and what kind of computation can you prove with those snarks would there be any work that that sort of it drew on or changed from that we might recognize absolutely um so this line of work is again what we call incrementally verifiable computation so you have like some function f applied many many times and what we realized like all right if I do the function f and I also have some kind of proof that I carry along and I update my proof every time

I'll be able to just check one proof at the very end rather than checking every step individually originally what we would do is like all right we have snarks these are like super small proofs super small verifiers surely that's what I should be doing right like it's the most efficient thing I have so we did circuits that do snark verifiers and like that was the first instance like in other words the first time we tried it oh okay and then like the Halo people came up with an idea they're like okay actually you know what I'm not gonna do the whole snark verifier I'm just going to do part of it in the circuit and I'll defer some other verification too much later and that line of work if you keep following through eventually we say like oh actually we don't even need to prove

we'll defer approving until the very end and that's what Nova does wow so it's on the it's on the Halo 2 kind of like sort of yeah it's not going that direction yeah interesting I have a feeling there's this fun game that we're like kind of all playing where we've come up with like a bunch of different categories for a bunch of different things but I guess like the paper is fundamentally like it's independent of approving system fundamentally is this question of like like it uses some tricks but but the main thing is this idea that you can take in some instance right and then like it uses one method it really has one mathematical trick you know the doctor is the trick the doctors don't want you to know but that's that's the meat of the thing which is like you can kind of homogenize well I guess that's

that's really yours but I'm gonna use your your terminal version for this one because it's um the right TM extraction which is like you can homogenize system of quadratics in order to like get the this like folding result that you want in the first place like what does one call that line of work right like sure like certainly Downstream of that line of work you do get kind of this like very meaty very useful result but fundamentally it's like a single observation that you have here I think we're still in sort of like complexity Theory land probably like here are these poems and how do we solve these problems here is a problem which is a composition of problems how do I solve that problem so that's what we're saying like here we're composing in a

very specific way right like the output of one is fed back into the next thing that's right etc etc I'd have to think some more about it yeah I don't know I feel like we're getting up to the point where this is also kind of getting a little bit back to the framework question is like once you start cleanly separating parts of systems like your old nomenclature kind of goes out the window too because there's a notion of like okay now the last time you've heard about a qap qipqap so those were very well programs yeah quadratic arithmetic program like arithmetic programs okay I don't even for a while like you had to go through that step and in every tutorial you saw there was a qap in there interesting they sort of disappeared today because of the exact reason you're saying

exactly so I feel like we're getting back to that point again but with these liking because you know but what you do you took an individual part of a big proving system and then you cleaned it up really nicely and like you know it's what is it like wiped it down and like put it back in and I was like nice and shiny yeah um but like what do you call that part now no idea all right cool yeah not sure how you would call like these these General problems but what we could do is ask Anna because I've heard you've recently been enhanced enhanced I would say detracted but enhanced seems fine so I yeah since we're talking about projects in all of our worlds uh this is not really my project but I'm involved in it somehow so I don't know people might

have seen this over on Twitter but we well Kobe really created something called zkpod.ai which is fed with all of the episodes from the show and you can ask it questions and get my voice to read out the answer in a terrifying like like close simulation of my actual voice it's quite close but it's still to me it still sounds as pissed off Anna or annoyed Anna or why are you asking it's kind of tired but think it's like why are you asking me this question which is a little arrogant yeah it is maybe it's so overly confident and it says things sometimes that are kind of wrong oh that are totally wrong especially in Spanish that was very funny yeah in other languages I

mean it's I've so yeah just to give everyone a sense for what this thing actually is under the hood Kobe fed it uh transcripts from our show and so when it's answering it's actually drawing on knowledge that has been discussed by guests primarily not by me and and then creates you know the the answers in like this is uh I I don't actually know under the hood we're uh Kobe's gonna come on the show at some point we're going to actually talk a little bit more about it yeah it's a Chachi Boutique kind of similar thing I mean for me it was quite terrifying to see because it answers questions seemingly confidently and maybe like I find out later maybe not quite correctly but seemingly very well

questions I could never answer like it's my voice the same things I can't my brain could not come up with oh off on the spot I could read that I suppose but it's quite it was like pretty profound to see it I got am I shocked to hear yourself yeah speaking I mean Kobe had been doing a bunch of experiments with like my voice and like some things and he would he'd kind of send me notice being like I'm sorry and then like show me something that's some sort of progression yeah this was this was the one that was like he's like no I think that so I think in the text I wrote a little piece on how I felt about it when I saw it and but what he had actually written for this one was something like I'm sorry again because

it wasn't the first one but then he sent me kind of the full-fledged thing where you could type in the question click on my name and audio and have it actually work and I remember I mean first of all part of me was like I sound smart that's cool like that's awesome and then I was like oh my God like this could be a great Learning Resource like things like it also searches in a way through the transcript for you and like creates these connections and I was like this is so brilliant it's gonna be great for people who are using our our podcast to like learn and stuff it might even maybe this could write documents and all these but then I also had like a bit of a total freak out in crisis where I'm like

this could be mistaken for me as well and like I don't have full control over what this voice says which makes me nervous and like yeah so I I've and it's funny because like we have we had it somewhat ready for about two weeks before we released it because I and I'm really glad I had a bit of time to think about I really wanted to think about whether or not we release it this way and like he had said you know we could put a different voice we could change it up right but actually I thought it was so powerful and especially given that like this is the show that people recognize my voice from the show like I think it wouldn't have been quite as crazy if it was just

a standard voice and given that there is actually you know audio recordings of me anyways so we yeah we put it together Kobe well here was sort of the way we did it though Kobe also put his own voice right yeah this was a way that I think it definitely felt like people can choose they can also choose text it's not always me I do have to say your voice is a lot more realistic than Kobe yeah he turned British for some reason it's very strange I still haven't listened to another Kobe version of this I've listened to exactly one transcript of yeah okay okay but I gotta do it I feel like it's funny right now and yeah so you can now put also different language like I If you ask it a question in French it will answer in French however I speak

French and that voice speaks bad friend like it speaks French like if you're an anglophone who barely who's like friends no yeah it sounds like sounds like lazy French to me it's sort of like genesis because you know the language they took it from English right like it's so it and I guess maybe the Timbre of my voice changes a bit when I speak French is that possible it's probably yes yeah I think people have very different voices in different languages [Music]

[Laughter] maybe they'll get my French right eventually but yeah and my Spanish to me I'm like wow I sound great but I bet you I sound like an English person speaking I'm very curious I have not but when I tried it I tried feeding it well first things first it got the like the classical canonical example of like how do I explain a zero knowledge proof to like a five-year-old actually how do I spent a fat fear of zkp to my grandma but okay okay um it a got it completely wrong in Spanish like it's just like you said something like that sounded vaguely right but totally nonsensical and then the service went down and I could not actually

uh Spanish Anna it's gonna be great I want to say even in English my voice is not exactly correct and the thing I've noticed is sometimes I'm saying a word that sounds really American yes and like I don't have I I think I have sort of a generic North American accent but I am from Canada and there are like super subtle ways that I'll say a word differently but I I do wonder if it's like it's possible that there have been variations a little on how I'd say a word and it like yeah I don't know why it picks this like American it could also just be right like the model is probably trained unlike pure American city slicker American you know the way

we all speak it as right now but like plus or minus variations then it doesn't pick up on those like like nuances yeah pronunciation because it has like a very like like whatever I don't know Kobe tried to train the same model on a colleague's voice who's a Serbian and who who speaks with like an Eastern European accent and that was completely off yeah it didn't get Kobe's either yeah exactly yeah so this this thing is kind of fine-tuned for me that's why I was saying like it has an accent I guess when it speaks French because maybe it has like I mean somehow Incorporated like sounds I think it's English sounds trying to speak French yeah exactly yeah exactly which is what an accent is yeah I guess yeah ZK coming into this like in

your post you talk about like wanting to be able to prove that it is you indeed speaking and not like they say aye so I think that's what made this also I felt like it was actually really kind of important experiment to share because I mean the reaction I had was kind of visceral like I had a bit of a Christ I'm still having a bit of a crisis I'm still like is this thing gonna replace me and what does that mean to be doing a job in the future like and part of me is like how could I use it maybe it's awesome maybe it could like help or I can't be bothered to record this week yeah just get it to to read stuff for me I don't know like I have to read stuff you just drop one in there and see if anyone

notices the difference and you just don't say anything you can make audio books oh that's big brain but but as an experiment I also thought it's kind of crazy that like we did it on this because you could do this to any show right any topic whatever but like in recent episodes we've talked about how ZK could be like a bit of a solve for proving like deep fakes versus actual footage like you can actually you can use ekps to prove provenance of like images for example maybe you could use the K to prove provenance of audio if there was something like an attested sensor in the microphone which means like the microphone itself starts to make a signature saying like this was recorded at this time that's I think the closest you can get to like

getting a voice into something that would be attested and like for sure true and correct and not fake is that enough though could I play ZK pod through a speaker and have a microphone next to it there's actually fun techniques to distinguish between yeah so this is a kind of popular thing I mean maybe not post actually even post editing I think it's the case I didn't know this but they're like you know when you like go and you submit your photos to a like competition you actually don't submit just the like edited photo you actually submit the original raw file and there are like people whose entire job it is to figure out if you doctored the raw file to make it better than it actually is and there's like very clear

signs interesting but I don't know how you're gonna you know probably the same applies to I suspect so as well almost sound um well so this a tested sensor thing it actually like we talked about in the context of cameras and photos and I don't know if a tested sensors exist in microphones yet apparently like it there is some trade-off I think it's something expensive somewhere like there's some reason why you don't have it everywhere you'll definitely have some latency you need to do some cryptography on it immediately so that's right yeah but um this experiment this thing existing all of a sudden I was like well that idea of the deep fake versus the real that all of a sudden becomes very very real because now there is constantly going to be little clips of me talking that I've

never said and could be slightly wrong and I would like to be able to say yeah that is fake I mean here is why this is true these are real things or like just being able to like put a stamp being like this is real content so you can already do that you know take a signature scheme right you go like make a private public key pair post your public key which is I think it's pretty cool I think this would probably be the first podcast to do it I don't know I mean maybe not it's made that's a very strong claim nowadays but and then what you do is you just sign all of your recordings and you're like this is Anna certified I am chilling this is me guaranteed TM 100 organic fair trade content we're trusting here tested it but yes and she's signing them they're not

telling us she could this is true she could be maybe it's just you and I in a room and zkpod.ai oh it's all been fake yeah wait oh even even the attested sensor one I do want to kind of finish that thought because that is just like that would be on the raw right if we did a signature on the thing but what it where it becomes interesting is like through an editing process that's right still being able to prove Providence of that original like the link back to the original file yeah that is something that I think would be super interesting that's definitely super cool if I really need that because it's like maybe the signature is just enough for now but it's like but like on some level I did start to think like proving something's authentic proving something comes actually from me yeah like that would be

something that all of a sudden I think I need which I never thought would be yeah no the signature might even be Overkill in the sense that very few people are actually going to go and check it right that's right well you could just you know have it for fun and then have your you actually you could make it a little JS script that like yeah you play an episode and then you check it with uh with the public signature that would be cool yeah ZK hack should I hack that you should hack it that's gonna be great yeah I mean you just like you know you sign the final edited recording post it on the side and say all right here's here's the you know the public key that's great go check it if you if you dare yeah so but as mentioned I know that

like we do want to do an episode where we dig into exactly what that is a lot of the ideas that I know Kobe's had for like things we can do better one of the issues I would say is like the transcripts for this show unfortunately you know we've been I think we've done over like 150 but often they've been generated by like a transcript maker edited by a person but not always a technical person and so there's mistakes in it and I tried to do a lot of the early ones and and I had a few people on on the team who were able to do really really good ones but um we are actually one of our big projects for the new for for April the new quarter is basically to find ways to crowdsource better transcripts because we need we

need eyes on this I think people who just read our transcripts probably constantly are seeing these annoying I mean imagine all these like weird names that we have all these acronyms for the folks I have like are doing these transcripts are amazing it makes the English grammar great it's just there are so many industry specific things and it's so such like you have to be so focused so yeah so far we haven't kind of found the perfect formula but so I rarely listen actually I think I've listened to one CK podcast episode sorry maybe I should have been your transcript reader guy uh so I mostly read the transcripts and that's how I realize that I slur when I speak English because it doesn't get it it's because sometimes there's

like inaudible or like I have no idea like essentially like there's something that that like kind of half maps to the right thing but not quite so anyways um that would be the crowdsource saying transcripts would be pretty I know I think I mean we're gonna really try to do that so yeah anyone listening if you are more reading like you're more of a transcript reader and you've noticed super annoying things in our transcripts one I'm sorry two we now realize this is a bigger issue than we thought because it's not just people reading it and seeing something wrong when we feed it into a model it also gets stuff wrong it doesn't make some connections and yeah I mean we have to fix it in a way for that to become more accurate and to be a more powerful thing but yeah like as

mentioned we'll do I'll do a full a full one on that I don't want to actually reveal too much because like kovish beyond the one we do yeah he can share more about especially about the plans just thinking about like you know latest ZK news I want to ask the two of you who is the realist zkevm oh no I oh actually uh it's we started out the hackathon it's okay hack that's we saw the first ZK ZK ZK Eva oh that was very aggressive yeah yeah it was Aztec connect so it was acid connect being deployed on scroll yeah there he is obviously but yeah it's a funny idea that's wicked

um yeah we are I mean recently there's been obviously a lot of conversation about the what a ZK evm is I think it might be worth exploring once again I mean just as a note if people are curious about these Roll-Ups and stuff in 2021 I think I did a series on all of the major Roll-Ups at the time oh and I I mean I think a lot of the architecture was already set then so it might be interesting I'll try to dig them up like that just might be interesting for folks to read or till to listen to or read potentially yeah Fair now all of a sudden I'm like no one actually listens to call everyone's reading wrong oh no that would be interesting to try to figure out the percentage of like

quote-unquote listeners who are actually not listening but reading yeah I don't know how to do these are record like if you I don't think I have a stat like I don't think I can do a little pull yeah I should do a poll yeah I definitely read way more than I've listened to wow like a lot like actually I mostly read them wow I know Georgios told me he did too and he didn't listen to them so I know too I know two readers now oh no but okay with respect to the ZK VM thing Kobe brought up something interesting the other day on Twitter which we sort of lost track of why we're doing ZK VM like it was supposed to be a segue from like we have a lot of solidity contracts that exist can we pour those into like something scalable yeah let's just make

sure that our scanning solution is compatible with the evm if it is just like a transition period well why do we care so much so strongly now right like it's supposed to be like temporary there's a fundamental question right like I think the assumptions are like twofold right one of them is this is a temporary thing it's gonna exist over the next five or ten years and then you know post that you're just gonna use like languages which are designed to be ZK and efficient for ZK and things like that there's also a second point which is evm and Associated tooling has reached like escape velocity and it's going to be the next JavaScript right like thing that no one really likes to do yeah like solidity is just going to

be like wow like JavaScript it's a thing no one really likes to do everyone agrees that it mostly sucks uh for any variety of like reasons but like you know we're still stuck with it and like we have typescript which is like this like very complicated type system that like just like what does it do it compiles down to JavaScript right and like sure it gives you more guarantees but like at the end of the day it's you know it's like you've stuck with a little smiley face on like the the monster like the Eldritch monster with like all the eyes and stuff and it's like sure like we could pretend it's like much nicer but fundamentally you still have the monster in the back so I don't know this is so there's there's people who are married to the evm and like yeah that's an interesting

effective I agree I don't know I mean I don't know if I agree with it I'm just saying like like yeah the argument actually the answer is I have no clue I actually have not that much of an opinion on it but I actually have no clue I'm just like this I mean someone told me this I was like oh actually that that makes sense right like you could imagine that like crap here we go JavaScript number two and it's like you know now maybe with wasm or like maybe gonna start getting divorced from that but it's gonna take a long time and javascript's been around since you know whatever uh whatever his name has made it up on a weekend and was like ah yes this is going to be like our stepping stone language for like the web right and here we are like you know

writing like our processors have like Specific Instructions that like all they do is like convert certain numbers from like JavaScript formats to not so it's like we have like yeah like at this point it's like etched into the hardware right it's rather unfortunate well JavaScript never be replaced it seems that if things go the right way TM and things like that you could imagine that like wasm itself becomes like the new kind of what we call neutral Computing like Intermediate Language like I wanna I'm not gonna call it JavaScript but like still right now people are writing JavaScript and come out and get down to wasm that's right like that's right it's still the same fundamental problem so I

don't know yeah and it's like you know awesome is like kind of a weird intermediate thing that like you can kind of compile ahead of time or just in time or things like that but it's it's still like weird right it's not like without its own like kind of you know crevices and question for you is it wasm or is it wasm we ask because it's web assembly oh assembly assembly awesome sounds awesome Blossom sounds cooler I feel really bad because I actually cannot but it's not between those eyes assembly yeah

it's like I guess it's like a more nasal accent but it's just I I don't know I just mapped them to the same thing like in my brain it just yeah there's a whole yeah anyways got it okay okay we figured out nothing but I finally got to talk about that I think I had talked about it on another episode recently we're like halfway through show up at night I wanna see it right but halfway through the show I switched from one oh no no um but it's a little weird just to mess with the zkpod of course this one's gonna be beautiful laughs

so um yeah I think we're gonna have to sign off pretty soon uh heading to a speaker dinner for ZK summit zika summit starts tomorrow by the time this show comes out I think the videos should be out too so you'll be able to check out what we did tomorrow uh what we did today I don't know anyway that's very complicated but yeah so we'll try to add that to the show notes um but yeah is there anything else we should say before we sign off I'll put in a Shameless plug oh oh yes so we talked about the beginning of the show about like the music and the band the band it's not like I I completely you know left it still very much playing with them and still playing shows and we're releasing an album like three four

days after recording so probably by the time you hear this like the album is online oh wow so you know check us out on Spotify dude what's the name check out my SoundCloud what's what's the name of your band smash that like button smash the like button like And subscribe uh the name of the band is hmltd cool we'll try to add that too if we can yeah send it over to us uh Nico it's really fun having you on the show for the first time being on the podcast for the first time that was awesome that was such a banger it's always fun to record in person yeah it's rare but it's very fun and I'm so fun yes and uh thank you to the podcast team Henrik Tanya and Rachel and to our listeners thanks for listening

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