Episode 387 - Year in Review: ZK Podcast in 2025 & Beyond

Transcript

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. Hey folks, quick note. We are taking the rest of December off, so there won't be any more Zero Knowledge podcast episodes from us until 2026. But I wanted to use this time to share a little bit about what we have planned for next year and do a brief look back at 2025 and the themes we've covered. First, an update on our plans for 2026. For the show, we

already have two podcast episodes tentatively planned for January. Hint, they both feature ZK OGs and we have some ideas already for a minieries that we would like to produce in the new year. On the ZK Summit front, we are in the midst of planning ZKS Summit 14. We are looking to host this in May in Europe and we'll hopefully be doing this in coordination with some other great ZK events happening that month. I'm leaving this a little bit vague only because we're still getting the venue locked in, but stay tuned over the next few months to hear more about ZK Summit 14. On the educational front, we are in the midst of rolling out the last few ZK whiteboard sessions season 3 modules.

The ZK whiteboard sessions is an educational video series where we go deep on the fundamentals of ZK. This season was produced by ZK hack with support from Bane Capital Crypto. Our hosts were our very own Nico and GMO. Be sure to check out the latest videos plus previous seasons if you want to get uptodate on ZK fundamentals. We also may be releasing some bonus modules in the new year, so stay tuned for that. Lastly, you may or may not be aware of all of the newsletters that we've been producing. I'm going to share them with you. We have ZK Mesh, our monthly newsletter where we curate links to research articles, project updates, new tools, and videos, and share an updated list of upcoming ZK events. We have the

ZK podcast Substack newsletter. Since the beginning of the year, we've been sharing a weekly writeup that gives a bit of background on each episode. We have the state of ZK quarterly report. Now, this was originally published by ZKV, but with the last edition, we've moved this under the zero knowledge podcast brand. The state of ZK report offers analysis, statistics, and examines the most important trends and themes in the ZK ecosystem. There is the monthly state of ZK addendums where we cover adjacent cryptography topics like FHE, MPC, Tees and more. And we have the ZK brief newsletter where every month we also send out a short update highlighting the top three ZK stories you shouldn't miss. So, as you can maybe

tell, there's a lot there. And with all these newsletters, plus the events and educational content and the show, we think we now have enough valuable material to create a dedicated subscriber space for all of our activity. We are calling this ZK Mesh Plus as a unifying subscription space that covers the show, ZK Hack, our events, all the newsletters, and other initiatives we continue to produce. We felt the name was fitting and this will be accessible through the ZK Mesh newsletter over on Substack. It's an experiment in offering a little more for the people who want it and in exploring what a community supported model might look like for the work that we do. As it stands, the ZK Mesh monthly newsletter

will remain free, as well as the weekly ZK podcast newsletter. And of course, the podcast itself will remain mostly the same. But I'll be experimenting with some subscriberonly segments. Subscribers will also have access to discounts and a chance to sign up early to our events like the upcoming ZK Summit. They'll be getting the state of ZK report every quarter along with the addendums and the monthly summaries. and we're going to be exploring other types of content that we can offer to subscribers. Of course, it's opt-in. You don't have to receive everything as a subscriber. You get to pick and choose what you want to access. The goal here isn't really to put anything behind a wall that shouldn't be there, but we want to give people who want to support

the show way to do that and offer something of value in return. So, I hope you'll check it out. The first step is to subscribe to ZK Mesh and if you're interested, pledge your support. We won't be turning anything on until January, but it would be amazing to get a sense early on for who's excited for this. Head over to the Substack. The link is in the show notes. URL is zamesh.substack.com. There you can pledge and be eligible for the upcoming subscriber tier. Throughout next year, we will be looking to develop more perks for our subscribers. Keep an eye on our usual channels. We'll be sharing more about this. So now let's look back at the themes and topics we covered on the Zero Knowledge podcast in

2025. I think it's fair to say it's been a great year just in terms of the vastness of the topics we had a chance to cover and the new ideas we got to explore. I feel like ZK expanded this year moving into so many new realms and our show got to go along with it. Financially the markets are tough right now but ZK research and ZK implementations have been booming. As I go over the themes that we covered, I'll be adding links in the show notes to specific episodes, but of course, you can find all of our episodes over on zeronowledge.fm.

So, here were some of the topics we wanted to cover at the start of 2025. We wanted to explore the overlap between ZK and other cryptographic fields. We wanted to explore new applications for ZK. I was super curious about quantum computing, quantum computers, something I felt I didn't know enough about. We wanted to explore the emerging Lattis work we'd been hearing about. And I personally wanted to explore this story about the Zero Knowledge Systems Company, a company that existed from 1997 to around 2002 in my hometown of Montreal. And I feel like we got a chance to cover all of that. So, first off, early on in the year, we did the Zero Knowledge Systems company episodes.

We produced three episodes focused on this tech company. Not only does this company share the namesake of this show, but it had some very famous cryptographers and thinkers working there and was very ahead of its time in so many ways. It's also a company that I had an unusual coincidental connection to, making for a pretty cool story. There were three parts to that series. The first is the first episode of the year where I shared my connection to the company. The second was an episode with an early employee, Jonathan Wilkins. And the third was an episode with founder of Zero Knowledge Systems, Austin Hill.

Both Jonathan Wilkins and Austin Hill went on to found Blockstream. So, you can just imagine how interconnected their histories are with ours. One day, I do hope to pick up the story again. There does seem to be more to tease out of it. In terms of deep research this year, I feel like lattises and liarrow were both themes that we covered quite extensively on the show. We did a few episodes of each on these topics and we also released two whiteboard sessions on lattises and one on Lee Harrow to complement those episodes. In terms of quantum computing, GMO and I had a wonderful conversation earlier this year with Yelenovich from Stanford. We talked in depth about how quantum computers

work, the different flavors of quantum computing. Later on, we had our interviews with the guys from Quantum Punks and more recently with Project 11. In those, we talked about how quantum computers interact with the cryptography we know and love, as well as the effects this will likely have on the cryptography we rely on today. I have noticed more and more teams focusing on being postquantum secure over this past year. And I feel like on this show, the question, but is it postquantum secure? has been asked way more times than ever before. On the ZK application front, we ended up hosting a series this year on ZK ID projects as there had been this explosion of new teams working on ZK

plus physical IDs, ZK and digital government identity systems, teams looking at different ways to think about revocation and exploring different approaches to building this new generation of digital identity systems. In terms of emerging applications, we covered some new use cases for ZK such as ZK and watermarking, the ZK per deck, ZK lighter. We talked to a few teams about ZK TLS. We explored the latest in ZKML. And we recently did an episode with Ian Meyers, which was a lot of fun, by the way, to get him finally on the show, where we discussed some of the applications like ZK Cred and ZK Promises that he's been working on on the research front. I mean ZK creds has already had an impact on existing

projects and ZK promises a system for programmable anonymous reputation has a lot of potential as well. The episode on ETH proofs with Justin Drake was a lot of fun as there's been this clustering this year of ZK infrastructure projects and this effort to standardized benchmarking for ZK proving has really helped to align them. I was having trouble figuring out actually how to cover this since many of the teams are building similar things but are experimenting with different optimizations and I thought that discussing benchmarking efforts with both Connor early on in the show and then Justin helped to capture some of this momentum. Also, Justin announced the EF's proximity proof prize on our episode with him, and now we are seeing

some of the cryptologology results coming out with new works being published as we speak that try to tackle this problem. I feel like we may see a winner soon, if we haven't already, by the time this airs, but it was really cool to be part of that. I think this idea of prizes, much like Z prize before it, I think it's this wonderful example of how to align a community around a goal and get the best minds in the world solving problems that help all of us. Outside of pure ZK, we also got a chance to explore some other topics like TEES, TLS notary, local first architecture, auditing using AI, and IO with one of my favorite episodes of the year, the

interview with Rachel Lynn. I'm going to play just a little clip. We actually shared a clip on on Twitter of this as well where she just described the magic of assumptions in theoretical cryptography. This is one of the lines that has just stuck with me for the whole year. >> Whenever I talk about assumption, the image that comes up in my mind is a volcano. >> Okay. >> And assumptions are the lavas. On one hand, it's extremely dangerous. >> Yeah. >> Because they're not proven. If I conjecture that a problem, a mathematical problem is hard for polinomial time computer to solve, I'm making an assumption and I might be making the assumption that pigs can fly.

I don't know ultimately because it's not proven. >> Yeah. >> So that in that sense that the volcano is very very very dangerous >> but at the same time the volcano makes new land on which that life can grow. >> Wow. assumptions is where cryptography comes from. It is it is >> you know it has this duality. >> It's beautiful. >> It is it is what we need and then it can take us to places that we we didn't know how to do and then we whenever we have a good new assumption a secure one so much grow out of it. Yeah.

>> You know >> just think about the story of Lises. It didn't exist until RaV's paper in 2005 I think. >> Okay. >> And look how much cryptography has advanced because of this assumption. >> But on the other hand, if our crypto business every day is I want to achieve a goal and I make a new assumption. I want to achieve a goal and I make a new assumption. Then >> we don't know if we're just, you know, pro proving every possible statement based on false assumptions. >> Well, then we know we can't do that, right?

Well, well, no, no. Yeah. In in your in your analogy, are crypto analysis equivalent to like people who like to climb volcanoes when they're erupting and like watch >> Yes. Yes, they are. They're absolutely warriors. They're absolutely warriors and requires a lot of skills. >> I loved that episode. I found it so much fun. We wrapped up this year just recently with two episodes, one with Beigny and one with Prouge. Both of these researchers have produced a lot of research in the last year. In talking to them, we had a chance to cover many of the main research topics that are being actively explored in our community today. But we didn't cover everything.

There are definitely topics we didn't get a chance to dive into. For example, the Zcash updates and its newfound adoption was not covered. I think we definitely could do a deeper look into the infrastructure side of things. We did talk benchmarks, but I think actually talking about some of these optimizations might be interesting. We did cover privacy on a number of episodes, but didn't really touch on the philosophical shift that seems to be happening, the awakening of people to the fact that there's a genuine urgent need for ZK or things like it in the age of AI. We are building the tech that can be used for that. We just need to make sure people know about it. I'm sure that we've missed some of the experiments coming out of hackathons and grant programs that may eventually become

dominant applications. But luckily, we have next year's program to dig into all of these. And so, as we sign off for the year, ZK and privacy are in the news again. Here's hoping this continues and becomes a dominant theme in 2026 and that we see more ZK adoption across emerging tech, in AI, and in combination with adjacent cryptography. That's all for this year. Just before I fully sign off, I just want to say a big thank you to the podcast team who've worked very hard this year, Rachel, Henrik, Hector, Tanya, Agneon events, Gaylord, Kai, and Quentyn who worked with us earlier in the year. I want to say a big thank you to my co-hosts, Nico, GMO, Kobe, and Tun. Thank you to all of our guests

who've been on the show this year, the folks who've worked on the whiteboard sessions, all of the advice and advisers and friends who've really helped to direct a lot of the programming. And a thank you to you, the audience and the community and the folks who shouted each other in the Big Zero Knowledge podcast group. I feel like this is one of the ways we get to keep on the beat of ZK. Yeah. Hope you have a great holiday and a great new year. Looking forward to seeing you next year. Bye.