Episode 300 - A ZK Podcast Retrospective

Transcript

[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 this is the 300th episode of of the zero knowledge podcast and for this episode I'm going to be doing something I've never done before which is a solo podcast I wanted to take a chance to look back at the episodes that have shaped this show I won't be able to talk

about each one because there's 300 but I'm going to just scan them and highlight the ones that really kind of still today stand out to me as some some pivotal moment some topic or project or guest that looking back I realized have had kind of a profound impact on the way I understand this space I'll try to share some anecdotes and some behind the-scenes stuff along the way as well so we are now at episode 300 but let's go back to the beginning episode one rustfest 2017 in review yep that's our first episode and I've gotten the question a few times why is that your first episode the truth is I think we had recorded an

episode before that but the audio was too messed up where maybe we had introduced a little bit better the whole idea of what we were doing but that first episode was the first one I think we could use we had just come back from rustfest 2017 and in the episode we talk about the venue the food the crowd the tech the scene you know classic event recap type stuff definitely a strange way to start the xer knowledge podcast if you're listening to it today but just for some context going all the way back I mean the podcast i' I think I've told the the origin story of the show but it came about because Frederick had asked

in the parody group hey does anyone want to make a podcast at the time I was working with the parody folks and happened to be there and said yeah and so that first episode was just sort of like it was made for the 10 people in the office with us really and I think over time as the show developed we got a voice we got a name we got a jingle we just never changed that first episode we just kind of left it there when people ask should we listen should I listen to the start I'm like absolutely not it is a strange not that good episode with bad audio we don't know what we're doing it's kind of really really out of date um but I I sort of have never had the

heart to change it like I guess I could re-upload something that at least has a disclaimer saying like don't don't worry the show gets better Pro I promise um but I think part of me just thinks it's really funny that it's our first episode and to be honest the first 10 episodes or so you see us experimenting with all sorts of different formats sometimes we did a ton of research and then we'd like be kind of coming pre-prepared to talk about some technical topic and other times we try interviewing people or talking about our personal stories we did this two-part series on decentral Iz storage which I think had originally planned to be three parts but in that I mean Frederick and I give a lot of backstory into just our

interest in technology and why decentralized technology has always kind of played a role in our histories and you can hear also at the very beginning we don't have a name we refer to the show as this podcast for the first seven episodes it's only on episode 8 that we got a name and I've told this story before like the name we knew it was like this cool type of cryptography which we knew nothing about and the word zero knowledge we were learning it seemed funny and so we named it zero knowledge it was only on episode 21 that we actually started to introduce the audience to the concept of zero knowledge so I think this is like three months into it so we chose the name zero

knowledge and then I had planned on doing an event and I had planned this I think for for a while before we had name and it's funny because it was almost like the decision went as follows let's do a podcast then it was like let's call it zero knowledge podcast then we were like let's do the zero knowledge Summit but the first zero knowledge Summit was actually kind of like this podcast Summit it was just like the name of our podcast Summit but luckily there were some really really talented zero knowledge researchers that caught wind of the zero knowledge Summit applied to speak and then came and were on the stage for the first part of the day and so despite the

zero knowledge Summit maybe being conceived as just an event a blockchain event whatever it did become the zero knowledge Summit by that first edition on episode 38 we introduced ZK snarks Howard woo was It was kind of the first time we covered that in depth just a few episodes later Benedict bones came on to talk about bulletproofspeaking.com because there was like a an insane Heatwave in Berlin and Benedict was actually in town and it was me Frederick and Benedict in this like 40 Dee recording studio I think it was at the nosis offices like at full node in Berlin and like we're talking about some of the most complicated cryptography with Benedict who's an absolute expert

on in the field and he keeps it together but it's just it's always a funny one I think back to that to that episode episode 44 I yeah so we did this thing called like blockchain 101 and we did a few of these these were definitely very very formative for me I think in this case like Frederick my co-host at the time he knew this stuff pretty well like he worked with client architectures and and he understood blockchains much much deeper than I did but this was the first time we were actually introduced to the concept of a mempool a transaction life cycle like basically what happens once a transaction is made and broadcast to this network how does it actually get like go from broadcast to being put into

one of the blocks I mean the topic of me came so much later but I'm glad that we had done that early episode because once me kind of came around I had already had a bit of a mental model for it episode 54 we had Isaac and Evan from what was at the time Kota that became Mina and they introduced us to the concept of recursive snarks so that was I think that was like the first year so the show actually started in 2017 we did like a couple episodes in 2017 but in January of 2018 we started regularly releasing them and it's pretty interesting because it was like that first year was obviously very formative I was starting at pretty much zero basically like no knowledge about the

the technology underlying blockchains and definitely had no knowledge of zero knowledge but just some backstory like I had worked in Tech for about 5 years and I'd worked in I'd worked primarily with like front-end developers I'd done project management with them but yeah I wasn't an engineer I'm not an engineer and I think about that first year and how like deep we dove in to some of the hardest stuff in the space uh it's funny when I listen to those I can hear myself just not fully being able to use the language like I you know I just didn't know how to say or even how to ask the question about cryptography about infrastructure

engineering like I didn't have a lot of the mental models for what was actually happening but at the time obviously I had Frederick my co-host who was an engineer and I remember that combination of an engineer with with me I could ask a lot of the backstory I think I could understand the architectures and maybe even like I was the standin for the audience I was the person who maybe knew quite a bit less and needed quite a bit more explaining so I do think it's pretty cool that by the end of year one we could actually touch on more complicated things like the men poool and recursive snarks so starting in January of 2019 so this was our second year we had done two ZK summits I felt that the ZK

Community was growing immensely from 2018 to 2019 so many kind of new teams popping up and I remember that we could finally start programming like way more ZK content into the show itself we kicked off with an episode about Starks so this episode was with Ellie Ben sassan and alesandro kza Ellie having just founded starkware I think alesandro at the time was part of it but also Alexandro at the time had his Berkeley research Group which over the years contributed to some of the most important breakthroughs in ZK that same month was the first time that tun came on the show he had been recommended by NJ who at the time was at polychain NJ basically pitched tun just

being like I met this guy he's really smart he like worked in physics and glass and high frequency trading and now he's doing something with blockchain you should meet him I remember like reading tun's bio to and being like what are we going to talk about exactly but it was really fun and it's funny because in a way that was like that was the first time we met tun and later he became a friend and after that he became a sometimes co-host of the show and now he's a regular co-host and yeah I just think that's kind of neat in episode 67 was all about formal verification and so obviously that over the years has become even more of a topic we have had another show on that more recently with ver with the folks

from veradis um but that was the first time I was introduced to formal verific verification security I think yeah that was maybe the first time we really tried to cover that on the show so episode 72 that was an episode with Alex G and Alex v from matter labs and we talk about this rollup project that they had in mind I think it was the first time that we really covered Roll-Ups or at least like a professional version of rollups on the show for episode 74 I met Justin Drake who introduced me to the complexity of finding ways to derive true Randomness in computer systems in this episode he kind of showed why it was so important

but also why it's not as straightforward to achieve true Randomness as IID thought it's funny thinking about that episode too like ethereum at the time had the random Beacon as this part of the eth 2 road map I think that that was the reason for the research into this kind of Randomness episode 75 I meet Zach from Aztec for the first time he came on the show right then and introduced us to what was Aztec at the time Aztec 1 very different system I think he had kind of invented his own proving system but that he'll now declare as kind of was a little bit immature maybe um since then Zach obviously went on to co-create plon

with Ariel which transformed our our world episode 76 this was the one with sha Bo where we talk about all sorts of things zcash related but this was the first time that he spoke publicly I believe about how it had been to find the bug in the Sprout version of zcash and how as a team they had to kind of like keep this to themselves until they could find a fix there was like tension to this episode it was it's very much storytelling and I think emotionally this was very hard for everyone involved because because to successfully avoid disaster they needed to find a very kind

of special balance I'll try to kind of summarize what it was but they had developed this amazing ZK system and had released it into the wild there was value in the zcash network already people were using it on the team itself Ariel who was working there at the time found a problem a bug that would have allowed any malicious actor to go into the private version of zcash the shielded environment and print endless tokens this is like the worst case scenario for for a network and especially the worst case scenario for privacy focused Network so Ariel found it and shared it I think with a very small group and then the group had a choice they could either let people know

but if they did a malicious actor could go do the thing that they had found or they could keep it to themselves and try to find a way to make a fix and they they chose the latter it's interesting thinking about this now because this is in May 2019 and we know what happened they made the fix the news didn't get out and and they moved on to the sapling version of zcash and in that upgrade were able to actually fix this problem I think he mentioned there was some tiny tiny chance that someone had had had a chance to exploit it but all their metrics and everything they knew showed that it had not been discovered only the the inner team had had learned

about this but yeah it was it was a really kind of cathartic episode for him I think to like share this thing that had been on his mind for a while it's funny to think about that today because looking back you know had that had that gone wrong had that been exploited zcash at the time was the premier ZK project it was the biggest in terms of market cap it had the most focus on it it had championed the zero knowledge context it had it had been the first to educate so many people about zero knowledge technology so had they kind of had an epic hack I think it would have thrown the ZK Community back people would have been super afraid of

this thing um but it also brought up some really interesting questions about disclosure and customer the risk that customers might be taking and not knowing ZK security has in has become increasingly important over the years I mean we we've done a few episodes on it recently but I know in our community it's getting more and more important because more and more value is being secured by zero knowledge cryptography and a lot of these systems are really really new anyway I'll keep going episode 78 was a cosmos introduction with sunny this was like I had been very focused on the polka dot ecosystem given that i' been working at parody like cosmos had

always been kind of the competition like the other team thinking about this like multi-chain future but with a very different model and it was really fun to kind of cross over that bridge and to see the other side to get to know that system better I think I already had a lot of friends who worked at Cosmos but I hadn't fully understood what it was how it was different and I think I think it was really good to to start to Branch out there episode 80 I was introduced to Joe and Aaron from bison Trails they later got bought by coinbase but okay I mean that's a

funny episode Joe it turned out had gone to my high school like it was so and it was like only a grade or two away from me like it was and we had a really small high school so it was kind of pretty random that we had figured out that we were in the same school and I kind of I was like oh my gosh I think I knew your older sister and anyway was we talk a little bit about that in the show it was kind of very funny to meet him and Joe in the show basically you can hear him sort of pitch me on the idea of like maybe you could run a validator would you want to and I got to say like it was very influential for me I decided not right then but soon after to kick off the ZK validator for episode 87 I

interviewed will harborne who at the time was at ethfinex and he later became my co-founder on the ZK validator so it's kind of all around that time that we were thinking of founding that or we ended up setting it up in the summer of 2019 and then I think we got kind of into the set on Cosmos at the end of that year episode 86 is when I first interviewed Ariel gabison and he came on a couple times after that I remember finding it so fun to talk to someone who just like his knowledge of math history the way he thinks historically about math and the kind of contributions yeah I just remember I think that was at the time one of the

that's September 2019 and I believe that may have been the first time I met Kobe as well so he came on with Merrick they were talking about cell the topic was like clients and zkps I mean like clients in the ZK context become so much more relevant after the fact but yeah I wanted to mention this mostly cuz yeah it was just that was the first time I met Kobe later we worked on a number of trusted setups together then he became part of the ZK validator we co-created ZK K hack and now he's a regular co-host on this show as well so definitely an important episode episode 100 was the first time I met Dan Bonet and the first time I got to know the Stanford group in more depth

we had met Benedict and had him on the show um I think even Ben Fish may have spoken at the ZK Summit when I it was around the same time and I think one of them had introduced me to Dan that was really cool to get a chance to interview him for our hundredth it's an important episode and I feel like his cryptography 101 class and the people who've come out of his classes as well as the research group the Stanford blockchain Club the amazing phds who've worked with him like alesandro K's group you know it's been incredibly influential on the research and how you think about zkps how you break them down even into pieces episode 104 was for me at least

an introduction to Hash functions you can see a lot of these things are funny because I think if you learn computer science you learn them in a very different order than I did like I started with like ZK cryptography then ZK implementations and architectures and then I started to learn about hash functions you know sort of backwards a little bit but that episode was with Allen I think for episode 250 more recently we actually did an episode with JP and Dimitri revisiting hash functions episode 121 was an episode on herbit a project that to be honest I still don't fully understand but I know some folks in our community are really into it I actually wanted to point it out mostly because of the timing of that recording that was the last in-person recording

that I did before all of lockdown set in so the co at the time gayen invited me to record at the offices and no one was there and I remember him saying something like yeah we gave him 3 weeks off just until this thing blows over and uh yeah it took a lot longer than that I think that's also the episode where in the intro you can tell like you know the world is changing dramatically and I'm kind of freaked out I sort of mentioned that I also wanted to give the audience a heads up that I had recorded this episode two weeks before we released it so by the time we released it and I had done that intro you know the world had changed dramatically I mean most of our episodes

are actually done over video so it didn't really change the workflow very much the in-person episodes had been quite rare anyways but then yeah starting in March 2020 we just didn't have any episode 123 were're introduced to Halo with the zcash folks once again Dara and Shawn I think came on for that one but this wasn't Halo 2 this was Halo one um quite a still a paradigm shift there were a bunch of interesting episodes and topics that quarter I learned about FHA with Flavio beresi consensus and hot stuff with itai Abraham I learned about staking derivatives with Alex Evans who later came on a couple times with GMO episode

141 was primarily focused on Dark Forest and it's funny because like okay this is now three years ago ZK games have come I mean there's been more examples but still to this day I think Dark Forest has like captured the imagination the most I Remember Loving that game I played it manually I wasn't writing scripts to do it I was like clicking on the planet and it had bit of like a one of these like social games or like you know you were grinding a lot but I remember losing a day to it having a like actually a lot of fun and just finding it pretty wild not only were we using zkps we were also using XD for me at least it was like one of the first times I was like off of the L1 working in a separate environment episode 145

was all about circom and Hermes with Jordie Bina and Jordy I'd known from I don't know if he came to the first CK Summit but he was definitely there around the second one and I don't think I fully realized until maybe around this time how many contributions to ethereum's survival Jordy had had through the Dow hack and everything but also just the amazing tools that he had been building for ZK in that episode he introduced circom which has been one of the most important ZK dsls it was the first one that was used widely on ethereum I know there's Bellman before that but yeah that was a fun episode and Jordy came back on later episode 194 to talk about the ziki evm and the system they had built for episode 152 I learned

all about blockchain analytics there's like a whole world of tracking other accounts and figuring out what people are doing mapping strategies that I was so oblivious to until that moment and you know I think if you're deep in defi you know this but as someone who wasn't really deep in it I had no idea about that world of analytics and now episode 162 Frederick left the show so this is like at the end of year three Frederick and I had always been co-hosts he as mentioned was the engineering mind and I was sort of the social fun Community but like you know he had been the the heavy hitter when it came to the technical questions and I remember this is the end of 2020 we're

deep in the covid crap and like I remember thinking does anyone want to hear this show without Frederick like I think up to that point it had been the dynamic of the two of us that really like got the show to where it was luckily though that year because he had just become a father we had had to get replacement co-host quite often and so tun Georgio and J and James prestwich I think at the time had joined me for a few episodes to be the interviewer with me and so by the time Fredick left there was a little bit of a model for how to continue going into 2021 while there you have the episodes of nfts an meev and hardware and tun became much more of a

regular co-host around that time we also in the spring of 2021 we actually ended up in the same city we both were in Austin for about 6 weeks it was kind of a crazy time that was when that huge snowstorm had happened and there was a few of people who had kind of made their way to Austin during that time that was when tun introduced me to GMO and the episode was all about building private amms GMO as you know later became one of my co-hosts as well so this is 2021 we decided to do a series on um rollups so I think there's about like two or three months where I covered optimistic Roll-Ups with the optimism team arbitrum ZK sync Aztec and I think there was one

that was a bit later that I also included in that but I can't remember who it was right now I mean it's funny because if you think about the rollup ecosystem at the time there were like four to six players like now you think about how many rollup teams there are I'm sure someone has a count somewhere maybe L2 beat knows I mean I would put this number at like over 30 for sure maybe more summer 2021 I had the osmosis team on they introduced me to threshold decryption and how that would affect me I feel like just the idea has been kind of compelling I don't think osmosis yet has has implemented it but I I hope they will soon we cross episode 200 at this point what did I do for episode 200 let me

check yeah so just so you know as we as we speak I'm like looking through the the episodes um ah episode 200 yeah so this was an episode with alesandro kizza it was all about snark research and education it was interesting talking to him about teaching ZK at the time too one of the biggest challenges has been in a fast moving space say you write a textbook you might end up wrri a chapter that becomes completely obsolete within 6 months like some other system has come up that just makes it so that no one is using those systems anymore or they're not using those techniques and I think this has been one of the challenges it was Dave who also was one of the co-founders of Osmosis but was in the was in alesandro's

research group originally I remember Dave explaining to me how you break down a snark into the IOP and the polinomial commitment scheme and at this point when you learn about snarks you learn that breakdown but I think what people often don't realize is that before it was described that way you would have to actually read through an entire snark system it it hadn't been modularized that way like they weren't yet breaking down the snark into its components until researchers like alesandro realized that you could kind of tease out these modules and once you could do that you could optimize those at the end of 2021 the ZK validator and

the ZK podcast co-created ZK hack online this was a seven-week event with a puzzle hacking competition happening kind of between each weekly session uh we did six puzzles at the time with seven different workshops it was every Tuesday and we bootstrapped we kind of kicked off the ZK project with that series I think we just thought of it like an event we we didn't really know that it would turn into a community and and a project in its own right and we did an episode on it to kind of interviewing folks who had participated I got to meet some really great cryptographers applied cryptographers I hadn't met before um so first of its kind and actually I can tell you that we're going to be having another ZK hack

online in January so yeah if you missed the first three and you're into maybe checking out what that was you can join us it's all free and it's all online so it's really easy to be part of it for episode 220 with the folks from polygon zero that's Brendan and Daniel later that year Brendan was part of the group that put together the ZK whiteboard sessions actually you'd recognize him as one of the hosts to round out 2022 I remember doing an exploration of bridges we talked a lot about wallets I mean 2022 was kind of a a year of Crisis and we didn't really talk that much about what was going on

in the market we just kind of kept going with the cool research and the great projects I remember though we did want to cover something about tornado because it was obviously so relevant to ZK and so we did this impact of the tornado sanctions series with episodes 245 and 249 and I think there was one other where we talked about it that was that was a complicated topic because everything we had focused on was like Cool Tech we we had a few episodes about like the legal aspect of blockchain but this was the first time the ZK Community came head-to-head with legality and I think it was a little bit of a wakeup call to our community it forced a lot of teams working in the space to re-evaluate some of their

appetite for risk it's so funny because this happened in August and so there was like three months of I I felt like deep reputational damage to ZK until FTX and then it was just reputational damage all around it was almost like the FTX Scandal pushed the question of ZK further down in people's minds some fun episodes were as I'd mentioned the 250 what's the deal with hash functions at episode 251 I got to meet risk zero for the first time we saved episode 256 for Dan because we thought we'd have him come back on and he did this episode about new ZK use cases that I know so many people have referenced I think this

influenced a lot of hackathon projects as well for 2023 instead of highlighting just the episodes cuz it's It's Tricky like when I think about this year I don't know yet which episodes become the most important or the most influential but I can tell you a few of the topics that I think really were we covered topics like Hardware ID onchain reputation new rollup environments or data availability FH and these kind of crossover FH and zkps MPCs and ZK this was of the year I would say of like the ZK co-processors with Axiom and Herodotus lrange Labs I didn't have all

of them on but I I remember talking axium about just that model that they had sort of they had pioneered at least the term co-processor and it gave some good framing for what these teams are trying to do Quantum cryptography with orat we did two episodes on that that were just very interesting some new applications formal verification and security other things would be like new platforms coming coming out new projects new places for people to build with ZK lookup tables folding was the topic of of research I had a chance to have shron and Benedict buns and B Chen from espresso came on to talk about their work protostar that did

seem to be a bit of a theme at least of this year we did Ariel snark Trilogy Where we tried to give a historic view into the breakthroughs that altered the course of pairing basedn Arc history also had a really fun episode with Zach doing the history of plon from the start and maybe like the ZK pod a episode zkp pod where you can ask this thing questions about ZK and my voice or Kobe's voice will'll give you an answer and this is based on the transcripts that we fed it from the show ah we started to touch on the topic of like ZK and ml having O ye son and Daniel on the show it actually continued from one of the youth cases that Dan had mentioned

this photo data Providence as it goes through editing we went on after that Kobe and I actually worked a little bit with Daniel we did the attested audio experiment where we were trying to show that you could use zkps through the editing process of audio they had already done a lot of work on photos but yeah this was kind of some work to to push it into the audio realm and I know there was this Amazing hackathon Project where they actually built the attested sensor microphone that was the one part of our experiment that was missing we had just sort of emulated it by signing with ethereum address so that's a bit of a look back I hope you liked it I know it's a bit of a weird format me just kind of going through the different episodes something I didn't really say was I wanted to say a big thank you to

all of the guests especially those that came on multiple times as well as the co-hosts over the years like Josh Cincinnati James prestwich Georgios Alex Pruden who also runs the ZK Study Club and my current roster of co-hosts Nico garmo Kobe and tun and I want to say a big thank you to my first co-host Frederick for those first three years of doing it together it was during that time that we set up all the systems that's where I when I learned how to edit we learned how to have mic technique and how to host an interview correctly and and what to look for and yeah how to make it interesting I don't know that I would have done it without him so yeah thanks Fredick I've heard from lots of people

who got influenced by some of the guests that they heard on the ZK podcast and it's very much to choose your own adventure with this show like I said no need to go back to the start to listen to all of them pick the ones you like and share them we're trying by the way to like fix up a lot of our old transcripts to get them in better condition so that you can also just read them I want to say a few words about the ZK podcast team we have Henrik who's the editor Rachel the producer and you hear Tanya's voice every week doing the ad Tanya used to be my producer as well on the show I'd say daytoday it's mostly me and Rachel and I think a lot of people in our space have interfaced with Rachel because she also will be the person in

touch with you for ZK Summit sometimes or for scheduling of the show Henrik is the editor of the show we know he edited the first time tun was on which was January 2019 and he would edit on and off over the years but then he became our full-time editor in 2020 I think and he's also a great musical composer who made two versions of our jingle yeah big thank you to everyone who who's been part of this journey so far I really like doing this show it's something I do every week I like the Cadence of it I love the fact that I get to meet new people through having them on the show as guests I get introduced to very very cuttingedge Topics by some of the smartest people I have ever met I have an amazing group of co-hosts I have a

team that has now been with me for a few years a lot of people by the way do pitch to come on the show but the better way to get on the ZK podcast is is to join the ZK community be present participate in it be at our hackathons contribute good research this is how I find a lot of my guests they emerge from the community they've contributed something they they've been authors on some paper they've gotten their hands dirty and built something that's usually what I'm looking for but yeah just a tip so I think that wraps up episode 300 I want to say a big thank you to the podcast team again Rachel Henrik and Tanya and to our listeners thanks for listening