Episode 305 - ZK Rewind: A Look Back at 2023

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 week tun GMO Alex EV and I catch up for a spontaneous in-person endof year episode we were all on the west coast at the same time and so had a chance to do a look back at 2023 we cover what each of us were thinking earlier this year and how the

year has evolved for us we cover many of the topics that are relevant in ZK and Beyond as well as try to paint a bit of a picture of how 2023 differed from 2022 that is the year where almost everything that could blow up did blow up 202 3 was definitely Rosier so yeah I hope you enjoy now before we kick off I do want to let you know about our upcoming multi-week virtual event ZK hack 4 starting on January 16th 2024 and running until February 6th we will be hosting weekly workshops with top teams in ZK showcasing the state-of-the-art and tooling for ZK Builders each week we also host a ZK puzzle hacking competition we share a system that has

something wrong with it you are meant to find the bug hack the protocol and the fastest hacker will make their way to the top of the ZK hack leaderboard for prizes and Glory this is our fourth time running this event series thousands of hackers have participated over the last two years so you may have been to one of our online events already as you know it's not a hackathon but rather it's a chance to learn the latest in ZK tools with members of the ZK hack Community from around the world because it runs over a few weeks people often make friends find Future colleagues or co-founders and also get a chance to really dive into the ZK world with us it's free and open to all in the show notes I've added the link to the first

event of ZK hack 4 that is our kickoff session happening on January 16th in this we will be introducing you to the larger event series and to our Workshop hosts and partners then Kobe Nico and I are planning on doing a pretty exciting intro session helping you become more familiar with the concepts and terms used in ZK you won't want to miss it so I hope to see you there now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's [Music] sponsor Alo is a new layer one blockchain that achieves the programmability of ethereum the privacy of zcash and the scalability of a rollup driven by a mission for a truly secure internet Alo has interwoven zero knowledge proofs into every facet of

their stack resulting in a vertically integrated layer one blockchain that's unparalleled in its approach Alo is ZK by Design dive into their programming language Leo and see what permissionless development looks like offering boundless opportunities for developers and innovators to build ZK apps as Alo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in q1 this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK Journey dive deeper and discover more about Alo at al.org and now here's our [Music] episode it's so fun to get a chance to do a little recap with all of you I'm here with GMO what up often a frequent co-host for better aun Aloha I I've now

been upgraded by the way I'm not just a co-host I've been promoted to the chief marketing officer for the Z who's the only person who takes photos and shares it on Twitter beforehand correct tun also long-standing co-host of the show Alex not co-host but many Time guest M get a priz for what are we at four or five think four five for you wow it's quite rare so welcome back I'm so sorry it so we're going to be doing a very impromptu end of year episode we actually did that last year where we split it in two we did an end of year at the end and then another one looking forward so for this one we're going to do the look back yeah camera you weren't in it don't worry oh I see that's fine

you were in the look forward yeah I thought we were I thought I was one of them oh I think you were in both actually I mean I don't know anyway this one's going to expose some gaping holes in our memories yeah this is really bad maybe I should stop with drinking actually last year when we did the look back we couldn't remember do you kind of like I remember it now that we were trying to think back and the only way to kind of cover 2022 was to do a rundown of the catastrophes one after another after another and it was we were trying to figure out the order of them which came first what happened when this year looking back I think it's going to be different yeah I would describe last year's episode as taking a

single picture of a failed Jenga game where the pieces are on the floor and trying to reassemble the we're trying to remember the the way you got there you got there right yeah see now we have a Michael Lewis book about it so it's fine very accurate I I I didn't accur I didn't read it but I'm in it Ka did read yeah yeah yeah and she she saw you your name and was like wait this is this is true right that's about as far as I know of it but so to start this one off though I want us to go back to the beginning of the year put yourself back January 2023 what were you thinking what were you working on what was on your

mind what were you thinking is right what were we all thinking a valid question many contexts I was actually worried about not crypto stuff I was actually worried about the fact that the open source language models were not very good and and it was sort of like chaty PT was blowing up and then like I had all these friends who'd been working in in NLP what you know obviously the field now became only about large language models but at that time there were still like natural language processing and I was friends who are like post dos or phds or worked at places and like all of them were just like in the do drums despite it being

like such a big thing I mean so the most opportunistic ones of them were like ah I'm going to go raise I'm going to pretend it's like raising for a salana D5 project in 2021 right like I get $10 million by just showing up uh non opportunistic ones were like oh my God flat circle in 2023 and and then the non opportunistic ones were like oh man my research all sucks it's not worth anything like whatever like clearly all these people have these secrets so I was actually trying to like not think about crypto you know like I took the like crypto Xanax and I forgot about it and was like what's happening there so I have one of those you're talking to your AI friends

you're your the folks working in the field where were you at though like those are what your friends were doing I was doing that to distract myself froming about crypto I feel like January was like this point we like yeah is there anything else that can blow up if so man I really don't want to know about people take up gardening tun I mean had had anyone floated the idea of binance not working in January 2023 I'm sure I feel like definitely I feel like post FDX like it was like people kind of immediately jump it was just like fud fud fud fud fud fud fud it was like fud everything yeah the Grim Reaper meme with every logo of every company inace in in fact someone should

have had stable Fusion at that time I guess now there's many tons of good image models just make the Grim Reaper for every combination of crypto entities so that you're already ready for like when that Grim Reaper meme was true man I was selling the bottom as I often do um of course buying a little back at least um wait this this this show can talk about price no price no price uh the topic in our chats were I mean it's I don't know if it would have been January but it would have definitely been q1 it was the zkl idea I think it I

don't know if it was even proposed in 2022 but for sure q1 2023 it was the topic there was a huge telegram group that had formed a ton of projects that had never really thought about it but they saw some connections started to jump in and it lasted for a few months out of that came two companies at least and a bunch of like interesting experiments but I would say like here now that we're at the end of the year it's like died down I don't think it's as hypy at least but we'll see if it continues on wait I want to point I want to hear from GMO what were you where were you at in January what were you thinking about I think this was the the point at which we started trying to understand what ZK was uh which is kind of funny to think about you know uh I

think at that time uh I'm going to front run Alex on this Alex and I were starting to write what then became succinct proofs and linear algebra which we now have a course for and all this Jazz but at the time actually it was just a variety of hilariously unformed ideas and us just like being mad about reading ZK papers in general and how we I couldn't parse them and so Alex would go and read them for me and then explain them very carefully um I think that was mostly it and then afterwards um it was kind of on slightly before zek hack Lisbon which is kind of things got quite interesting and I that's where he presented the work right a little bit or like the or very early version of it wasn't it it was in libon must have been

when was it was was it March there's two events you're talking about there's the ZK hack hackathon sorry and then there was ZK Summit 9 happening at the same time sorry I meant not ZK hack and you presented a lightning talk at zk9 that I remember after you did it we were like why didn't you just do a talk talk G so a very short talk which was I guess the beginning of this work that's right kind of was a talk but you just did it in Fast Forward yeah yeah I did a two 2.5x speed which was no need to fast forward that one already GMO just comes out of the box at 2x speed for your viewing pleasure what about you Alex like you had been studying a bit more ZK before

this right I got stuck in California at the end of December cuz I had some family members bus visiting and it was very rainy and that turned out to be the natural thing to do for a couple weeks learn ZK and G has been paying the price for the last year and now more people have been paying the pr the commonality here is escapism was where we all were you were escaping your relatives I was escaping crypto I was just selling the bottom I don't know what kind of Escape that was COPE in different ways I was probably just drinking or something I don't know whatever something like that January I was also I was setting in motion ZK hack ZK Liz or yeah ZK hack Lisbon and ZK Summit 9 which turned out

to be too much by the way we did it back toback my team and I ended up doing Agy specifically we did the ZK hack weekend hackathon we had one day off but that night I think we even did the speaker dinner then we did a full-fledged conference with 550 people or so ZK Summit 9 and an after party so we kind and like we joke about it now that we kind of like threw Four Weddings in a row with a team a very small team cuz for each one of those you had venue menu attendance tickets it was crazy don't tell me these things I'm starting to think about weddings and uh it's uh

oh yeah right so I don't know only have to plan one yeah I would be so easy now and obviously these are not Weddings But it's like the level of lift is like putting together each one of the Summits is I mean it's a lot of work yeah yeah yeah every ZK hack is different kind of work it was a big challenge we did it we got through it I'm it was crazy cuz like I know the folks who came loved it they like it was magical the venues we we had were amazing and sorry I don't mean to like Pat my own back here but no it was sick it was like the outcome was amazing but the inside for our team was so bad like hard oh no um but we got we got through it thank you for your service I was just

say yeah Alex and I came out of that and we were like wait holy like ZK is re specifically after ZK Summit we were like ZK is real was it ZK Summit or ZK Hack That was ZK Summit also ZK hack as well the first time ZK hack Lisbon that was the first time we got to see people building yeah with the tools that other teams have been like creating for so long it's possible like the energy maybe like carried over or something but it was it was very clear that it was not a Niche academic field that just happen to have a lot of funding anymore it was like kind of more real than we expected I I remember we had long a number of long conversations immediately after zik Summit Lisbon right and during yeah like the year started out I think people were

really excited we were really excited with some of the launches of the rollups that were being planned for the year early in the year you had ZK sync and then polygon scroll number of these which one came first you tell us you're the I think you have opinion I'm stay remember the adage from being a child first is the worst second is the best third is the one with the treasure chest okay so I don't know why everyone wants to be first to me it I mean I think it is ZK sink era February I have no idea I don't know I was not paying enough attention I I hope I don't get murdered yeah I don't I you you know I

don't need the the roll up War touching my Shores you know like that Armada can stay at you have enough problems already you're like a poet it's lovely I don't need these words touching my Shores the first one is it's very good I like it um great for a chief marketing officer speaking of ZK VMS or ZK ZK EVMS uh just today we were kind of trying to map out how many there are and what's also coming down the line I'm just going to name a couple that I believe are live today ZK sinks ZK era polygon ZK evm scroll Linea nil

there's probably more I'm for sure missing some but we also I mean I've now heard proposals for ZK vm's Tao there's one that's like it's it's not called ZK wum but it's doing ZK wum mhm uh there's one that's doing ZK move there's risk zero which is kind of ZK rust and and it's not a VM per se but it has those testet what what is it zth uh yeah yeah zth right the name anyways there's a lot coming down the line I I have a spicy take which is company is maybe this one will will make the Armada come to my Shores but the the any company that like names themselves with

a ZK prefix that uses ZK now is a little bit like people in the 9s who put an e in front of like eBay eHarmony whatever like they some of them survived but they didn't like become the biggest welcome to the ZK podcast o well the ZK podcast the can change its name oh that's also fair I guess I feel like the company's brand Equity is much harder or the protocol's brand Equity is much harder to switch well I don't want to change the name just yet you hire a chief marketing officer first thing you try to do is change change the name some impact might as well be the name you have another idea no I just think like that there's actually this this thing I I was

thinking about the other day I was like just sorting a like a sheet of like projects by letter and then I counted by letter and the Z ones were like by far the most so there's a sense in which you're kind of like drowning in the like there too many of them and so I think that's like something I hope people start thinking about a little bit more is naming nomenclature remember when blockchain started or Bitcoin started it was bit bit bit bit yeah seems like a similar it's a similar there was an eth eth eth eth as well yeah for sure there and you still see the smartest ones changed their name right like a went from ethland to a which I thought was a very good shift on their part cuz ethland no one sounds

like a hackathon project actually and then it and a doesn't actually now that we mention it the naming so one of the things that came up right maybe around that time maybe around ZK Summit time zk9 was this concept of the of ZK being misused like ZK zero knowledge the Privacy part of a ZK snark a lot of teams were using snarks but not the Privacy part so are they really ZK and I know Justin Thor wrote this like 17 misconceptions about zero knowledge I think and one of them was this naming or maybe around snarks anyway I just remember that being a topic I I

unpopular with some folks landed on the side of I think it's a good shorthand for advanced cryptography not everyone AG a good way to get LP dollars into the space because they only have to remember two letters and their attention span is near zero but I think the counter to my opinion is that it I mean dilutes a lot of different things for sure and and the the fact that a lot of snarks they have no privacy component people may actually think there is a like a privacy component honestly who cares like I think crypto meaning cryptocurrency is like great actually more than cryptography yeah this this feels like whatever there's cryptography not crypto if I go through sort of like the Shamir

hierarchy of controversies in crypto it's like additive notation versus multiplicative notation it's crypto cryptocurrency or cryptography and now I think it's the is ZK allowed to be used for things that don't have privacy even triggered GMA you're just going to trigger everybody if you keep but what about ZK being used for the BL like the blanket term for MPC FH everything thresold decryption all that I mean every talk I've given this year I I preface almost every time this thing on I'm using ZK as the Royal ZK here I mean things that don't have privacy snarks Starks FH NPC and I I i' I've learned that by doing that you disarm people who are about to come out with with the

musket ready oh yeah you you wink before they can became Musketeers yeah Musketeers Musketeers oh because we mentioned the ml stuff uh Kobe and I and Daniel Kong did this experiment tun you had invited Y and Daniel on the show I had never met them it was an amazing episode I'm going to we'll try to find a link add it to the show notes Dan Bonet had introduced me to this before this idea of a tested uh images like where you'd create an original image with some sort of signature and then use zkps through every transformation so like an edit crop like a filter or something every time you added something to it you

would use a zkp to prove that it comes from the original source and then ye and Daniel came on and kind of repeated it and from there Kobe Daniel and I created something called the a tested audio experiment where we showed kind of Provence the same idea that I just described for images but for audio and actually the thing that prompted that was the zkp pod. project that Kobe made which we did a whole episode on that too uh where you can actually ask this thing it exists online you can ask it a question using the transcripts it was fed into an llm and it will give you an answer to a question about ZK in my voice or in Kobe's voice and that freaked me out

made me realize like I could be replaced what if someone doesn't know what if it's says something and they think it's me the attested audio experiment is meant as like a counter to that and so that was happening in April actually just after the summit or even maybe just before it was crazy cuz like while I was planning those two things those two events the four events actually Kobe was like check out this thing before we released it and it was like a little bit of an existential moment I remember you were I was kind of freaked out You released a whole note on it I remember right BL Post Yeah blog post right actually we even talked about it think the episode with Nico a little bit too yeah back then time yeah how do you feel about it now yeah I find it less

terrifying because because these models are not very good yeah I find it a little less like I don't know we we also I mean we want to do more things with it but to develop it further into something it's quite it's quite a lot of work to create something that like I mean I think the idea there was like What if we could make it ask the questions I ask on the podcast what if we could have it host an interview or something I think to get there we're still ways off yeah yeah I think you know an interesting fact you know not that this is ZK or crypto at all but you know the thing I was wor I had this fear from all these people who I knew working in AI that the open source stuff would never compete so

then your only choice was to go work at open AI or anthropic or whatever turned out to be not true like I'd say the the performance of Open Source models infrastructure for fine-tuning got so much better in the last 6 to n months it's sort of adjacent to crypto because it like a lot of the open source model infrastructures built off all the old mining data centers um that people use because they just repurpose them to have h100s or p100s really for a while for the longest time um because you know they had these data centers that cheap electricity they had all the they they like optimized them for a very similar wow performance use case you know proof of mistake happened in ethereum suddenly the only thing you can mine are kind of

P coins that that are not profitable sh meaning like like there's very hard to be profitable finding them and so people basically repurpose all these data centers um and then the infrastructure the open source model training got so much better um I think over the last 3 to six months like the fact that mistol can beat GPT 3.5 mistol just was launched last week uh their their newest model 7 bx4 mixt yeah yeah or yeah exactly exactly exactly that one I I think it's like actually I I am ending the year much more hopeful that actually the You know despite all the open AI drama whatever I

actually think quietly The open- Source language model stuff will like it feels like the Clos Source language models are sort of plateauing right like Google puts so much effort into something that feels like so marginally better than gp4 whereas like the open source stuff is still kind of continuing and I think we're going to see hopefully that there's some improvements so are you saying I should be scared that I'm going to be replaced well I actually I actually I actually think the fact that Google's model seems pretty useless and that like they had to use some of certain particular metrics that they look better on than gpc4 like the 32 Chain of Thought reasoning type of metric which is like not a standard way

to compare these things it it feels we're like kind of plateauing on like Transformers can only get you so far like if you want to do voice text zvm projects comparing themselves on performance metcs no yeah yeah yeah but but the nice thing is like crypto's performance metrics are at least yeah like some of them are obviously gerrymandered but the difference is you kind of know the thing actually ran and did this these kind of statistical performance metrics which are like I give you these random queries and like oh well I can't really perfectly compare the training set it it feels a little bit like the reproducibility crisis in science where like you have two thing you know someone's trying to reproduce

an experiment but they can never get exactly the same contexts and so then like obviously there's going to be some metrics one does better than the other wasn't that in the episode with Daniel and ye though wasn't there this like using ZK to prove that something happening inside the model is happening correctly yeah remember but but you still like you wouldn't be able to use that for comparative purposes you you need you need some St statistical test for comparison right it's like I give you a bunch of different queries and they're different tasks right some are like I give you a list of words and I say count the number of times the word Anna appears in this list right and that's one type of query that's like more of a logic query another type of query is one where you you lead a language model on you say oh by the way

most books in this building I'm in are red um David Mumford the algebraic geometer is famous for making a big red book is David mumford's book in this building so you've given it some context that it's it's LED onto this is this Chain of Thought type of thing and then you say can you answer this question and it will often times make these types of mistakes and Google was like oh look we can do these types of things better but like that that's one particular weird metric and my my point is I kind of feel like the gerrymandering in AI is actually a million times crazier than harder to harder to disprove yeah wow and so I think there's there's actually room for crypto as like you know assuming people stop just fighting over

like do I count vote transactions in TPS or not whatever you know you see in Twitter I I feel like it has a way of like having a better standard of like comping things cuz like I think the AI rat race right now is it it a shows that like the marginal improvements are flatlining right now but it also shows that like when you have so many smart people whose entire incentive structure is built around like trying to come up with metrics such that the number goes up 1% like they're going to do all sorts of Bizarro tricks that as opposed to like having something provable that you can trust MH anyway I don't know that's a long rant about that world but yeah I'm going back now to the time

frame where we're at so it's about April 2023 in in our story um another topic that came up or a word I think it was around the that the introduction of the concept of a ZK co-processor was raised would you say I think ye technically called axiim a ZKA Co processor in like December or January okay so like I think like this the steam around it grew and then a lot of people working on similar things that had a state proof somewhere were like we're also a co-processor yeah um and you know the best compliment I guess is to get copied so like the fact that people change their name to your thing is actually a good sign right true and since then there's been a lot of

projects that have come out doing something like that I'll list a couple Axiom Herodotus Nexus iron Mill lrange risk zero did Bonsai and I think for now those are the only public things I know there's some other things in the works I think one thing that had been brought up with the co with just sort of this explosion was like is there a market for this thing like there's a lot of projects doing it but it's it's sort of theoretical at at that it's been very much theoretical do you know if any of them have been now used I think they're used in these like small test deployments like defi yield aggregators

like how do you decide which protocol to optimize to you run a model offchain to decide the allocation um there've been a bunch of those types of use cases um I think it has been kind kind of hard to get there's been a ton of hackathon projects the hackathon projects are all cool you mean like things built on them like someone has basically made numpy like the numerical library in Python like in axium so like you have almost all the Matrix operations like Matrix notification SVD whatever like I have no clue why any onchain application needs this but my point is there is kind of this sense in which you can build these things you would never do on chain

otherwise now gearo's Ging so I think he's clearly waiting to say something I don't have I don't think I have an intelligent thing to say here I don't know it's just like it is funny that like you know we then went on to do like let's do python for ZK right instead or like numerical stuff yeah like pretty heavy numerical stuff in ZK which I guess is like kind of all of zkl as well um but this is usually less heavy than zkl right it's like doing an SVD versus like or doing like a median or something right or even like or median plus a few extra tricks which is true just funny doing it in a python rapper I don't know it's like a maybe this like a weird purist sense hackathon project no no I think it's someone did it no it's it's

awesome this is not me shoting the haathon project in general it's just like one of those where I'm like there are probably better for this try all the things and we'll see afterwards aren't we looking for a use case where like it wasn't it always meant for like an application on chain to be using this so so I think I think like the defi applications are a little harder one of the problems with these kind of publicly depicted calculations is like well you're telling everyone how to front run you and they can obviously run it off chain and front run you and there's they kind of create more problems for these di for dii protocols it's not quite so simple to use these would there be a way to design a new def protocol with this in mind though cuz I think you're you're trying to plug it into ex had some

Revelation thing where like the protocol was able to use the output but the it wasn't public and and and then it was revealed later there there are ways it could do it to be fair I don't think you need privacy but you would need a pretty deep analysis of the protocol itself right and like we have no good like there are very few protocols in defi that we have good Frameworks for right like in fact actually I would say there's really only one one or two classes of protocols that we have any Frameworks at all that we can say anything about for and like it's unclear how to be like oh yeah cool now now you have this whole other set of things that you can do what can you do with that safely in a way that doesn't suck um and can deal with arbitrary other protocols

interacting with it that's the hard part right or also anyone messing with you in a variety of way you know it's like it's quite of it's a pretty deep question I think like it's not obvious I mean you can build these tools which is great and I'm like glad someone should do these things but it's like if the end user really is D5 protocols like we have a we have we have some glass chewing to do prior yeah I so backing up to this idea of co-processors outside of a marketing term it's been sort of hard for me to understand what people are talking about often times what I I've roughly discerned right is some notion of like a mini rollup where you don't have persistent States between runs of the approver of the software right and so

sort of like a stateless thing the thing that I'm seeing people get interested in is fraud proof so proving that fraud was done mhm shorten Windows things like that that seems to be something that people be willing to pay for and do that's not an end application though to Anna's point I think with defi there's a conceptual problem I think you're right here that is more proximate than the ZK part which is okay now you have this thing that's asynchronous but maybe gives you more compute capabilities maybe you don't need to store all these variables anymore you can just run the averages on the fly or whatever you might need or you could do things that are dynamic

in nature but of course we have no theory for how cfmm for instance was the simplest object that we've been able to analyze could work in a dynamic setting like we've tried to bound what's actually possible within that and the range that we found is either it gives you absolutely nothing or absolutely and the truth is somewhere in there it's actually probably just one of those two possibilities would be my guess but we need to go solve that problem first and that's a hard problem and he just ZK is not going to give you the answer to that problem you it give you a great foot gun for you to shoot yourself with if you don't know the answer Andor it gives you a Precision weapon if you know the direction to shoot in at every point which is the hard part yeah but I mean

it's equivalent of solving the problem as say right I I I think I think like yeah this is actually maybe maybe one of the reasons I had escapism in January out outside of the the the general malaise was I I had felt and I still sort of feel a little bit of this like defi research slump you know like m the three of us had this like 18mon period where we were like pushing out things like every month and there was always new stuff and it was like yeah I mean how many papers have we do like 14 or something 15 yeah it was a lot this is 2021 2022 like late 2020 maybe okay yeah late 2020 when Alex joined all the way to early 2022 I'm not sure defi changed

as much as they all of a sudden let us go outside again yeah maybe that's what it was maybe finally yeah maybe maybe there's that but but I think like uh I think generic they I think like what happened was I think people started getting overly excited about these things and then in practice when you look at the data how people are doing things how me evolved it became much more clear you needed a theory of these me type of things so that you say hey I have a D5 protocol and I can condition it I can take the set of all these C protocols you're going to find the subset that given a certain type of meev has low like some resistance to it right and like the problem is there were

there's always this cryptography Hammer looking for a nail thing where like everyone is a cryptographer is like oh I see Unis swap has tons of volume I'm just going to throw a bunch of cryptography at it and obviously it'll be better and solve all these problems it'll remove me all the dog advertising we saw but when you started trying to analyze what would actually give you reductions in these things then you started realizing the theory of meev is actually a 100 times more complicated than the theory of the the defi prot def5 protocol is actually easy the M part is very hard it actually is like very combinatorial in nature it has many different states and like a lot of the beauty of the defi research we did is there was always some way of taking a continuous limit like you could kind of shrink the block time or Shrink the

trade size or grow the trade size arbitrarily and like you would get some invariance that your results kind of still had to hold but the me thing is not that right it's like it's very it has this inherent discreet chunkiness to it and the then you have to count all the different ways of ordering the chunkiness or all the ways of sensoring all the ways of removing and adding and without having that theory you can't really make a better defy protocol like no matter how much dog sh tokenomics P Ponzi you add to it you're not going to fix the problem what happens when you add Cod processor to this mix so co-processor lets you push off some of the compute if you knew what to compute okay to avoid certain types of attacks or to to improve Capital efficiency or whatever

but the thing is you have to have a formula for that that's resistant to people seeing how you computed it allowing them to manipulate it more I don't know if that I yeah I view it almost as a similar thing we had I we' probably done a maybe we've done a podcast on it we certainly done a talk on the Privacy paper that's right oh yeah yeah and it was sort of a troll paper and saying here's is a really simple model that shows def I love that although I don't know why but okay we were showing that like this thing that people claimed that they wanted to do like actually wasn't possible and a very trivial model shows that you can actually recover the full trade so the the lesson there is the the problem isn't a ZK technology problem

it's a it's a conceptual error it's the privacy and the shared St stuff are just incompatible with each other and what we should have done is it wasn't a question of can we go understand all the ZK stuff it's like no let's go into a quiet room and think for a little bit before we do anything I think something very similar is happening with this at least my pattern recognition the is just cart before the exactly we haven't thought about what if you take the static mechanisms and make them Dynamic what functions would you want to compute maybe some of them would be very computationally intense you might need a co-processor but that's second order third order yeah the first order problem is what can we do and do we actually need this tool so we listed sort some of the teams that sort of fall under this

category to give them credit I think they've like most most of the ones I know well have amassed a really good team building this kind of thing and I'm assuming that there will be some differentiation as it goes potentially like a focus on a use case that they're trying to experiment with so I have hope for the at least the cohort but I wonder if the the ZK co-processor as it's been described yeah wouldn't need to evolve quite a lot from what you're saying it sounds like the way it was like presented as a solution to a problem that isn't fully understood or something like this like it's it's a tool for solving a problem if the solution is possible then it plays a huge role in it yeah and for def5 for def5 for

specific applications other applications might most people say you know what are CK Co processor is really going to be used for people are like ah defi is like a great case right I think it's a I think D is the hardest in fact it's like the worst case in some ways cuz you have to understand the theory so much about the thing you're building and the beauty of crypto which is also why there's so many explosions and hacks is that you can build whatever you want without understanding it and raise a bunch of money and should be freedom to explode get exploded I think a lot of the other things that we could talk about about applications and so forth including ones that we got really excited about coming out of

Lisbon you could probably broadly put in the co-processor category in other words if they ever need to hit a chain like ethereum like I'm sure we can talk about non-native cryptography on ethereum things like that it's very obvious that like if you have to do something you can't do on ethereum you could do it in this environment that's right that's right so those things are lower hanging fruit so not to disparage any of his amazing teams it's just to say that Defi and some of these problems we have money and where foot guns can really hurt you you really have to do a lot of thinking and you can't just just as you couldn't throw privacy at Unis swap you can't throw co-processing at these things just make sure you just think about some of the

attacks we've seen in the last year like the def attack sophistication has also gone up holy crap right and like the level of like like the the most recent kyber attack is like almost a crazy travesty right it's like they it turns out that there's exactly like a particular fee limit like and there was like a oneway difference one one 10 Theus 9 uh Bas Point sort of different in terms of a multiplier constant that it actually for most numbers this thing worked but someone figured out oh if I actually you know you could think of it as like I make a very tiny error and then it compounds to like the next liquidity pool in like a concentrated

liquidity pool and I can keep compounding it and then you know you know it's not it's a very complicated attack very sophisticated and it's the type of thing I like the ZK co-processing part won't help you with that right like that comes from the mechanism design of the thing yeah right but I mean is the co-processor meant to add security well the co-processor might have computed the number of of of that of like how much liquidity you should have put maybe it would have put the amount that would have triggered the attack you know it it it doesn't help that you have the co-processor doing it you actually have to have the right constraints to say don't do this type of thing right cuz a big pitch of what people say with these co-processor we can increase the expressivity of all these smart contracts it's like we're

having a lot of trouble with the expressivity we have today without without more complicated reasoning but again I I think yeah obviously some of the teams um are have some like amazingly smart people and I think we're going to have really cool co- process I just don't think the defi use case even though it's the one that like on the surface seems like the obvious use Cas I actually think it's going to be the last use case cuz you're going to really have to know the mechanism well interesting huh but yeah I I want to also wish everyone in that Co in that group a lot of luck with the next steps because I do think they're great teams well I think the hackathon there these points of like imbuing non-nav cryptography you're already starting to see people build that type of stuff so for sure that's

very cool okay so now let's put ourselves in the middle of the Year oh man around Paris ZK we so uh ZK validator and geometry did a did a collaboration on ZK Paris I mean there was a ton of ZK events there yeah I'm just trying to think what was happening this summer what was the topic of the summer Celestia Celestia was later wasn't it they did the modular mod Summit and I feel like that was like the beginning of the that's true Celestia train like modular sort of that narrative really kind of taking hold for a lot of teams little groups I was thinking about client side ZK I think at that event I had a little talk track on it

and it was maybe that was the trth of disillusionment of the year at least from where I was standing we were really excited coming out of Lisbon there was all these cool things not we disillusion I'm exaggerating a little bit but hangover hangover afternoon law yeah indeed you ate a little bit too much and need to go take a cester or something that was it that was certainly true in Paris I believe that so unfortunately I wasn't there so I wouldn't know yeah I think next time to find out I think the things that were actually interesting to me in that era and time were kind of the stuff that is not usually that interesting I think to talk about on this podcast but is like the ux side of

things like I actually feel like wallets started at least my experience with using wallets got a lot better General crypto wallets just general crypto wallets I feel like people started really innovating on like the ux and like yeah not not the techn but design interfaces Stu like that and I feel like that stuff has paid dividends to the current I feel like a lot of the wallets are a lot easier to use for new users than they were even like a year ago and I I think that was one of the things I remember I was like wow this is the first crypto transaction I've sent since early 2021 or something like and then a mobile wallet Mobile Wallet yeah and

then we had the friend Tech boom you got into that I did not get into that is that still happening is it or still alive how much are you worth uh 2 E I think wasn't wait what was the like a few years ago there was something that like press hated yeah viit clout so this was bit clout 2.0 no but better um honestly I just I I don't know these these these kinds of ideas of like people trading themselves or like it's just don't really seem that appealing one topic that I I mean I don't know exactly when it was happening but I know it got more and more important for me at least or like it became more and more

visible was hardware and then like we did tun I don't know if you remember this like 2021 we did an interview with supernational and I think we maybe we were we were actually both in Austin and we did it IRL where we were both IRL and the calling but I remember asking I think we asked about ZK but it was not a focus necessarily at the time they were like focused on this vdf work I actually don't know if supernational would be the like I don't know how much of their focus is ZK today but there's all these Hardware teams that emerged over the last year like with vatana ingonyama I mean we actually Alex Pruden and I did a two-part series on Z on the Z Prize

winners AMD got into the game there's an event called ZK accelerate focused on I mean not just Hardware but some sort of hardware angle okay so I have a hot take okay oh no which is that there will be a proving system made that is adapted to be easy to use on things whose architecture looks like h100s because there's going to be so much capacity of that stuff and it's actually going to be like our current proving systems are actually not s like you could modify them in some ways where they have might have certain other guarantees being worse like verification time might get worse but the proving time is like way more optimized for the hardware that you mean

something like might you mean something like linear algebra could be used some combo of all of these things some combination of all of these things I think I don't think we know what it is yet because we don't know the wall clock time performance and we haven't done the like I'm optimizing this thing according to the device like I'm looking at aren't they right now isn't the hard work yeah largely happening yeah I think I think it's happened no no but I I actually think people are people in ZK are still optimizing to slightly older chips the new Chips the new Chips which are impossible to get right like basically you have to be an if you look at the uh my favorite chart so is this bearish on a you mean there's going to be an oversupply of these things eventually

there'll be in abundance and it will make economical sense for you to Target that all of these infrastructure providers are going to start just trying to like find non- aai use case once people stop fine tuning as aggressive so my makes a lot of sense one of the most amazing charts you can watch you can look at is nvidia's chart of h100s the current generation the h200 coming out soon uh divided by who the customer is oh yeah that's a great one and you look at this like exponential drop off and it's like very clear there's like only two people who are get buying like almost all of them which is like Microsoft and uh Microsoft to Amazon now Amazon yeah it's Microsoft to Amazon and then it drops off and then it's like it it eventually you hit Google cuz like

Nvidia doesn't want to sell to Google cuz Google made their own chip and there's like this a bad blood there but the interesting thing is like these crypto companies don't have access to any of these chips so they're all looking at the slightly older so all the optimizations we see on gpus are are having older gpus cuz the AI people are taking all the newest ones okay but they're they're pumping the price up on that so much it's kind of like a bad token drop uh that that like there's there's going to be basically like AMD or Nvidia is like creating so many chips in the next two years they're like increasing their Fab capacity by 2x that there will be a glut at some point and that is a perfect time for people who have the right ZK proving system to just like soak up that excess Supply and

prove for cheap that's a that's my that's a pretty good yeah I do think some like there is already a little bit of work in that direction in that the hardware companies have started to make proving systems optimized for Hardware oh really but which Hardware oh well specifically here it's the h100 yeah say people have been making for Transformers where they like have you you know the way the memory is laid out particular units all of that stuff there's going to be certain linear algebra stock cuz like what is what is a neural network it's a bunch of linear algebra plus a tiny bit of not linear algebra right it's like linear algebra linear algebra a little bit of not linear algebra and so there's a sense in

most of the point of a GPU from its inception for graphics cards for everything has just been multiplying matrices um this is famous billionaire who is the third largest buyer of h100s the only non-ai chip buyer which is Alex gerko who's a CEO of XTX which is a trading firm who always said like whenever anyone asks like what he does he says multiplying matrices and uh you know that's what we all do that's what we all do if we squint enough squint if we squint enough it's all multiplying matrices and I kind of think people who take advantage of the matrix multiplication piece in their proving systems and make it look a little more like that we'll be able to take advantage of these chips I mean it'd be the continuation of the story of Nvidia

the last 10 years Nvidia just keeps rolling from hype cycle to Hy the next cter of the semiconduct indust figuring out the next one just like an absolute arms dealer but I actually think in the same way that when crypto like after 2017 crashed there was this huge wave of people dumping gpus onto the market and people buying them for doing AI training and for gaming uh because the the chip Supply got really cheap I think you're welcome AI people and the AI it's going to go the other way I think this time it's going to go the AI people are too exuberant ra too much money crypto loving Hardware to question on AI and these kind of this

Hardware stuff though like would AI ever use fpgas or as6 oh people have tried like so Edge Computing fpgas for Nets exists like Microsoft actually ironically spent 5 years on outputting fpjsangprobinsyano to actually do like image manipulations and image processing directly and a lot of it would

essentially be compiling on your oldet down to and synthesizing it directly into the fpg in Apple phones You could argue that the the face ID neural net which is like a very tiny neural net that's run on chip that your the weights are trained by you showing your face is not that different than FP it is an Asic but it's like it Lane Wise it looks a little bit like an fpga because it has to be able to mutate its own weights but I would argue fpgas are sort of historically this type of thing where anytime you see them it's like clearly something where there's there's clearly a good idea like a a thing that needs to go into Hardware but almost every time someone over invests in fpj is they lose money so one of the worst Acquisitions I will say and like I'm sure there tons of

Hardware people fight on is Intel buying Altera like it's Intel buying like Altera big fpga manufacturer intel was like around every cuz I used to work in Hardware so like I remember this acquisition and everyone of my work was on Intel like 100% every Asic engineer was like Intel is like they they said stuff like that okay it was years ago right years ago yeah still allowed they were very very they're very they were very adamant about it I mean guo knows some of these people cuz he was my intern probably around that time that that acquisition happened and the idea that Intel had was that people would put these co-processors and they called them co-processors PGA co-processor next to

your CPU on top of the CP top of thep 3D deposited yeah was crazy and it would run certain high-end calculations maybe signal processing maybe image processing alongside your CPU so you don't your CPU can do all the run your operating system do all the management stuff but these specialized calculations will go to the fpga and this was Intel being like graphics cards we're we don't care about graphics cards we're just going to add the special purpose unit in our chip that is their downfall in fact the I would argue that Intel completely missed all the neural net stuff and then did all these crazy things like by Nirvana which who CEO left and you know that and like within like a few months and started an AI company uh because they like missed the they missed kind of the

What's the phrase forest from the trees oh miss the couldn't see the forest through the trees yeah that vaguely and like they just kind of completely thought this like fpga co-processor would solve everything and and you you could AR it it's kind of I know we we've talk a co- processor guess what they're guess what Intel's doing now you know we have the Intel 1550 Max uh lovingly existing and you know things for four 417 an hour so now they've got into gpus of course the past two years uh everyone is chasing Nvidia now that's right that's right and so but I I actually think all the comp competitors are kind of Hess in one way Nvidia is probably not the best software company by any means but they're the best at the

certain level of developer software which is like how to make a proprietary compiler that like an undergrad could use they also to be fair started developing this which is like this is like the most big brain of all the things Nvidia had the foresight in like 07 I think is when open uh uh sorry with the Cuda was released right to just be like you know what people are going to be able to do with these proc with these gpus they're going to be able to do whatever the they want right and we're going to enable that and people are like what what's useful you know what What can you do with that that you can't do with a processer and everyone was like maybe maybe some specific weird Niche you know weather prediction that your Stokes thing uh but then quickly you know well image net image net had to

happen for people to realize oh that's right that's right that's right but but my point is like this was well before like essentially kind of before that it was like five years or whatever was Alex net stuff was like one yeah yeah and no no one was using gpus it was like who the hell's going to like this is going to be like great for like matrix multiplication essentially or what it was something could be easily paralyzed it's like well jok on you guess what can be easily paralyzed linear algebra don't underestimate matrix multiplication kids damn right anyway sorry all right we got far too far down the rabbit hole well this is that's a good part of end of year episode they don't need to be so structured no not at all anything else happening middle of the Year yes so right around of this slump the thing

that happened is so at the start of the year on the research side everybody was really really excited about all the kzg based lookup stuff right so coming out of the c c plus early in the year you have CQ that's sort of stuff and then you had real excitement coming into lisman around folding and a lot of these anything elliptic curve based right and a huge set of things that we can get into but every was really excited about that side of the space Y and quietly around Paris some of the work from polygon around planky 3 started coming out with the mercen prime stuffff been quite a lot of work around the breakdown sort of op iations around it

um all Al vitano you had on did the logarithmic Randomness paper and so quietly there was a lot of work that was getting a lot less attention at the time that was happening in more of the error correcting codes we were spending time on it because obviously we were writing this paper that was around that that came out more recently but it just when we started hearing some of the performance numbers from some of the teams that were working on it it's like wow we been spending all this time on this other it's been really interesting really cool but here's a real phase transition in the space around some and of course the rest of the year which we'll get to seems to have been dominated by advancements in that side yeah around fry breakdown error correcting code base poal commitment

schemes and the like yeah I remember there was an earlier episode and I won't say who it was but someone said uh what was it Starks or dead I believe was the term or something like that um so I guess fact not though the king is dead long Lim the king underestimate matrix multiplication damn right matrix multiplication always wins it really comes back it's like the the meme of you know the Simpson mean where you throw someone out and then the guy comes back behind you and it's like that's always major complication yeah we don't have as much time like we're halfway through the year but we actually we're going to have to speed through the rest I want to bring up another topic that I feel like it's been I mean the topic of ZK and ID has

been around for since the beginning I think or like for many many years at the beginning of the year this year like in our first kickoff episode I was kind of singing I was so excited about ssmo and the badge system using zkps to prove kind of Merit to prove that you had done some action somewhere else and then like in a fresh wallet creating you know zkp ZK badges that basically you know proved you had done something um what you could do with that is then you could start compiling all sorts of behavior from different addresses into one place without connecting it necessarily to the work you had done or what you had done over there and creating a bit of an ID

sadly and this just came out I think in the last few days that ssmo is no more so they are shutting down which is very sad but I think the thing they did just kind of showing what you could do with that idea the separation of like the action happening in one account but the proof of the action happening in another um I think that idea is going to continue to be developed it was really it's very compelling um there have also been a few other ID projects recently I had costess from Z Logan s and aush from ZK email come on the show and tun I know you got excited about ZK email as a potential ID

solution or just generally I think it's the it's the closest thing I've seen to a vampire attack on existing platforms without needing like a centralized Oracle that's the which existing platforms just like a very stupid application that I I really I personally have had a a thing for it existing but is this idea that like if you have reputation on some social media platform can you use it as collateral to borrow against and like in theory there's no real way to do that without be able to prove that like I have this many views on all my videos I have this much people write comments whose sentiment isn't wow

nice 100% like every like fake robot comment right and there's some sense in which all these social media celebrities find this like their only monetization is like Shilling products but imagine if they could like borrow against their clout somehow uh and I kind of feel like there's some notion of like attestations being useful for that because once you get on chain once you actually have some proof of their reputation offchain somewhere else and and I think the emails are interesting because people who are big creators get a email every day that's like you have gained X th000 followers here's number of followers and it's signed with guess what TLS key from Tik Tok so yeah what's super interesting about this sub

technology we were talking about this I think yesterday is this enables you to bootstrap like identity more generally sure but like essentially it's kind of a non-stable force right like the ZK P2P is one one example of this it's like you know whoever whatever platform exists that is kind of sending you this email is like unable to stop it unless they just stop signing emails which seems very bad for them but you could do this you can imagine this with any number of other things yeah right like it's this whole crazy idea that like you can you can essentially like take any piece of offchain data right and you kind of use it in some way of course on chain but

it's Unstoppable right like it's not no one can be like oh yeah like sorry actually you're not allowed to use service anymore it's a kind of mouse game totally but fundamentally it's you know always you're always chasing fun fact ssmo before they disappeared were also playing in that realm because they could do it too with the badges I mean they had the badge system but yeah I I mean I remember at Devcon in Bogota I used who sort of created a g he was just like yeah I'm working on something that will make all oracles on chain obsolete especially chain link I think I'm paraphrasing it but he had some like very and like at the time I was like but you're talking to me about Nell aiers

for like an hour and then all of a sudden you're saying this like for you're like a very precise person you say this bombastic statement and I didn't know didn't get it but like now I'm a total believer wow it actually really really sick that's amazing uh there have been other ID Solutions I just want to mention quickly here polygon ID I believe released something this year there's the zass the AL stuff these are like kyc on chain maybe some way to create yeah like CK narware I think yeah well I think in a lot of a lot of ways you need a ver you need a verification agent um for these to work actually as we were talk we were actually talking about this earlier

today tun we realized we have not had them on the show to talk about this stuff and it might be worth it because I definitely haven't gone deep on that and I'd be curious to hear that side of it but yeah I think I mean I still think ID as a topic remains very exciting it even even like the thing we were talking about earlier about like the attested sensor the attestation of content Providence I think you know if you have an attested sensor in a microphone or if you like if you have I mean I know there's a team that's tried to do this with biometric or what have you but like there is definitely an ID component to this so I think those two things are quite closely tied especially as AI becomes more and more close to us and

looks more like us like we're going to be able to use potentially Merit email web 2 identities some sort of like physical identity real world like material to create like our online identities that are hopefully like a little more nuanced not just like your iris scan yeah I don't know that's what I'm excited about right Watchman from person has a good a phrase which I think gets this which is credible Nuance which I think is probably it does get like exactly the thing you said that's very cool Incredible Nuance of marketing strikes again yeah can't take credit for that one all right can't can't can't take credit for all of these take credit for spotting

Talent really quickly cuz we we really don't have time to go into them other kind of categories that have come up this year predictions no no predictions is the next one we're going to do a whole episode for that um this is only the look back but this year the ZK and bridges there was some before but I think it became more experimented with this this time around there's now this proven Marketplace idea that's been growing I know that there were experiments with ZK governance and ZK for solvency after FTX apparently became used for the first time for real although I know that there's question marks ones for C entities are kind of to be honest like you need some notion of liabilities and the problem is

the liability is the easiest thing to hide oh they're all offchain it it it felt like it was like marketing most of proof of solvency it's like marketing for people who are like just smart enough to understand the like concept of this proof but like not diligent enough to go read about like how an exchange works like it's just like it like targets a certain type of like the midwit and the meme no yikes I want to just wrap up like my own event schedule cuz after I think so far we talked about ZK hack Lisbon ZK Summit 9 yep ZK Paris then there's ZK Summit 10 in London yeah where I saw all all of you that's right so cool also an amazing

event we didn't I mean we won't have too much time to dig into it but videos of all of these events are online I'll add links to that and ZK N I think that week was just amazing zk1 I felt like it was a much more the thing about zk9 is I remember there was a lot of VCS there it was kind of more bubbly like it was more like hypy zk10 was more pure like the research was excellent the folks who came were kind of the people that I'm often wanting to have at events like this like it was it's a kind of event where the people on stage and the people sitting next to you are kind of at a similar caliber that's what they're all nerds they're

all nerds and they're they're really in the field for the right reasons that's kind of how I like it um that was zk10 Z and then we did I did ZK hack isul so that was my last event of the Year oh my God what a yeah what a number of events so that was the second hackathon that we did I think I actually in my in one of my episodes recently at the beginning of the episode I gave a little like throwback to that sharing a bit about it but yeah just another shout out to ZK PP because we mentioned them here they were they came in and second for the ZK hack Lisbon event and now are a company I hope to see the same thing come out of ZK hack Istanbul and we are planning a ZK hack online in January and another ZK

hack in the future so if anyone's thinking of building like a ZK project that could be become a company like think about you know coming to one of these events I want to say one more thing too about your paper GMO I want to go back to like the beginning actually both of your papers Alex and GMO going back to the beginning of the year you H you had these ideas GMO talking about the work that you did Alex you did as well we've been short forming at spaa that's right so yeah let's talk about what happened with that right so yeah so I mean it started you know as we chatted some understanding of ZK stuff we we actually had an episode on the paper itself yeah and yeah so anyway so this sport came out it was kind of interesting and then uh I believe you

for For Better or Worse gave us the opportunity to actually teach a short course on it yeah um so I think it's in the ZK hack Discord if I why don't you first though describe what was the work what did it end up being I don't know Alex do you want to do this ahead so in this work and you should listen to the episode that we have on it we looked at succinct proofs and found some simple generalizations and reductions that we think describe a lot of how we get succinctness in protocols it is a very very specific tool set that we build up gradually over the course of the and we found actually in the discussion maybe during during recording or shortly thereafter could be suitable for a

course because it's a slow buildup in classic guo SL step Boyd fashion Al s nowadays only by association which was just really suitable I think to a course because similar to how you would do it in a normal sort of linear learning learning fion you start out with really really simple tools and hopefully by the end of it you're doing some real damage right so I think that's when Anna actually came up with the idea of being like hey maybe maybe we can actually make this uh ZK what you call ZK white session ZK study session and and the reason being is like I I think I don't know if we

talked about it in that but maybe I asked you this after but it was almost like how much does someone need to know how much pre like studying in the ZK world do they have to do to be able to follow the logic of this paper and a lot of what we talked about was the fact that like when you look at a lot of the papers that come out they're not really written for like people who aren't deep in the field that's right and you kind of wrote this paper where you're leading the The Reader through kind of like you're adding the building blocks you're you're kind of defining things early so that later in the paper when you implement them use those techniques do something with it the the reader actually like has a reference to what

you're talking about yeah exactly and so so that naturally lend itself to kind of a course structure as you as you suggested and I mean this is like again big brain an intuition being like maybe it should be good and moves to work and and so we have I guess we recorded three sessions they're all online the course is fully open unfortunately I haven't yet posted the next homework so probably by the time this airs you will I hope so yeah so but the course is essentially three sessions it goes through the paper I think session one goes through the introduction part one session two goes through like section two and three of the paper something like that and then section three actually goes through something like proving a certain notion of soundness for fry which is a it's it's a pretty bit more involved in the

first two sections uh the first two sections kind of give you the tools that you might need to understand a lot of uh you know protocols that are kind of out in the field of ZK the Royal ZK if we may um and the last one is you know okay fine you you've spent all this time eating eating your vegetables uh let's do something quite real with the tools that we've built up and so it's it's kind of a weird course there's homeworks on it and the homeworks are are in some ways kind of uh you know what one would might do if you read the paper and you come up with a you're like okay there's proofs here that are not fully stated let's write them down and some of them are actually just extensions that might be of interest and things like that so

it's worth you know if you're interested in the paper and you're quite good at you know you're quite familiar with this stuff it's just worth taking a peek at the homework so kind of fun I think and in my opinion I hear one of the most the last homework that you're to post it one of the questions and extensions is the entirety of a recent paper that was published which we will not name ooh yeah that's right it's it's very very possible that I might may or may not make that a question in in the in the last homework uh it may or may not be on the GitHub uh but anyways triple dog dare you but with that uh yeah a at a high level it's just kind of a fun thing I mean it's rare that you get papers with courses that accompany just the paper

and and it's you know it's kind of funny because it's but this this was the right kind of paper for something like this because it was written for someone who's learning that's what I noticed right away and just yeah in the reaction that people were having from it so I was like let's do this as a study group study groups just for anyone who's not familiar uh we have the ZK hack project we've done hackathons we do online events but we also have a really active Discord and there we host study groups where some you'll be reading the moon maath manual or the theiler book but in this case we decided to do a short form three-parter and I think we we actually have built a website with all of the doc with all the videos on them so we can add the link to that if you just want to

watch the videos but also join the Discord for future stuff like this and I know that like people ask you questions in that chat you're still answering so that's good yeah it's weird it's kind of a fun that's something done before which is teach a open source course it's actually all of a tech code is available online for both the homework and the slides and everything and the videos are certainly available online and indeed actually uh as a as an exercise to the reader the homeworks have no Solutions so if you would like to see solutions for the homework you should submit them as a poll request on the GitHub repository so anyway nice very very good so yeah we'll definitely add the link to that um I think this brings us then to the end of our episode and we're close to the end of 2023 do you feel good what

a year out of here yeah you know well thank you guys so much for doing this and thanks to everyone who worked on the show for this year thank you to Agy for doing those events Rachel for being the podcast producer Henrik for being the editor uh Tanya for reading the ads I'm definitely missing people all all my amazing co-host this year and you for throwing all these events and traveling all over the world and dragging us out there yeah um it's been really special all right thanks guys for doing this wrap up of 2023 yeah thank you for having us thanks so much fun thanks cool cool and I next episode we do we should really do our

look forward let's do it see you there and to our listeners thanks for listening you almost got it I almost forgot [Music] it