ZK HACK - Session #7 - Intro

Transcript

and i think we're live i want to say welcome everybody uh i'm so glad you've made it to the zeke hack session number seven there's a little bit of a lag with the video recording and your and like you actually seen it so i might be a bit slow to answer let me know if there's any if you hear me if you have any connectivity things or anything like that um but yeah you're here for zk hack and so i want to tell you a little bit about what ck hack is and we're also going to talk about the sort of last puzzle six and the winners and how that went down so zk hack is has been a seven week event series and puzzle competition it is brought to you by the xero knowledge validator and the zero

knowledge podcast if you don't know either of those please do check them out the podcast is something i've been running for like i think now it's like four years so the zero knowledge podcast is something you can check out you could subscribe you could listen and the xerinol validator validates on a number of uh top pos networks and so if you want to also participate there and delegate to us that's a way that you can actually support all of the zk stuff so what is zk hack zk hack has been a seven seven weeks of workshops and puzzle hacking competitions in this we uh we've actually introduced you to new zk

tools like arc works sircom cairo leo aztec and what we're going to learn about today snarky js there's also been a puzzle hacking competition where we actually had hackers for like breaking advanced cryptography protocols for competition for ranking on the leaderboard uh why would you do this well it would be a really great way to learn about applied zero knowledge cryptography we were hoping that through this we can onboard more people into the ck space and form new connections as well as generate new ideas through collaborations with participants yeah there is a link to the podcast by the way we should actually be sharing links to podcast and the zk validator if somebody can help out there

cool so if you want to join our discord you can do so uh we're going to be adding links if not yet then very soon in the chat so you should see all of that and you can also follow us on twitter at underscore underscore zk hack underscore underscore or just check out the zk hack.dev website you should find all the links there as well we a lot of people are asking uh is there going to be a video yes there will be a video and yes it will be uploaded it's going to be on the zero knowledge podcast youtube channel so be sure to check that out uh and you can already subscribe if you want to be like notified when this comes out

i want to just sort of introduce the team that put together the zk hack it's myself kobe susannah and tanya so big kind of round to everyone who's put this actually and i say that's the team there's actually a lot more people who've helped out with this such as our partners uh we have a gnome and alia who worked with us to build these puzzles and have been incredible partners helpful on so many levels we also have our gold sponsors aztec ident 3 starker and mina and it's these six teams that have also been hosting these workshops and sharing all their info i also want to say a big thank you to our silver sponsors horizon osmosis geometry figment cello and polychain as well as our bronze sponsors lambda aleph

zero penumbra manta panther vac and our media partners zk proof and zero knowledge soul this has been really a wonderful effort with a lot of the top teams in zk and we really appreciate that folks came along with us to do it yeah so what we've been doing is workshops puzzles prizes and hopefully through this folks have met their collaborators now around this point in all of our previous sessions we had kobe kobe gerkin one of the kind of organizers of ck hack who kobe was actually the person who had the idea for puzzles kobe would join us on stage but kobe's not actually here today but luckily we actually have a video

that was recorded so i'm gonna set this up and do let me know that you hear this correctly if not i will uh yeah fix it and try again but i think this should work hello everyone so this is my digital form speaking while my corporeal form is busy with something else and i wanted to talk a bit about puzzle six soundness of music which as usual we had a bunch of great submissions and also great white ups and the winners will be announced later so i chose this form for two reasons the first is that we have this kind of

fruit vegetable theme and the second one is that to our shame our puzzle had a bug that made it much easier and so i'm a tomato in a tomato plantation or whatever this is as fitting for such an occasion you can throw a bit more tomatoes if you want but anyway the purpose of the puzzle itself was to demonstrate how extra elements in a stark setup would lead to a soundness bug such that any public inputs can be used in place of the real ones and some of you may recognize that this is a bug that actually happened this is what

happened for zika sprout before the sapling upgrade which was discovered by ariel gabison and this was a bug that was throughout the entire let's say stack because it was in the implementation but it was also in the paper itself and it's very subtle and was missed for a long a long time and uh yeah it's devastating like it could lead to [Music] too [Music] incredible credible consequences for protocols that have it so yeah i

invite you and encourage you to check out both the winning post for this puzzle but also the post by joe that also wrote the puzzle that wrote about the theory behind the puzzle and he actually also wrote on how to fix the puzzle as in what were the bugs in it and wrote a pr that fixes it so i encourage you to check all of these out and more generally i wanted to wrap up the entire zk hack puzzle scene i guess and just to say that i was so happy to see how many people turn up and attempted to solve the puzzles

most of the people eventually succeeding and i hope it gave you the chance to see let's say the other part of implementing a cryptographic protocol which is how to break it in a non-trivial way and i hope it encourages you know more adversarial thinking in a cryptography work because this is something that is invaluable and an important part of creating robust implementations and teams and people that have this ability to create much better products and implementation in my opinion and yeah that's pretty much i think all i had to say

and yeah i'm looking forward to see more from all of you later on and yeah please keep in touch see you later yeah so thanks kobe for that video i did see a few people mention that maybe it was stuck let me know if the video came through for you or if my if i'm coming through i hope so um but yeah that was that was our that was kobe that was kobe's recap of the puzzles there's a lot of like ketchup jokes happening in the chat all right so i want to invite

uh oh actually wait let me just say one thing i want to say thank you to this week's puzzle sponsor geometry so geometry is a new crypto research house which supports and invests in deep research across cryptography and other applied mathematical methods the team comprises founders and scientists from major web 3 protocols and geometry will be publicly launching in 2022 so stay tuned to see them that's why they're not here today but we will be hearing more about them in the new year you can also follow them on twitter geometry like their their handle is at geometry dao so yeah hope you check them out so now i want to invite susanna to the

stage to give us some thoughts and insights into the puzzles and who gets the prizes okay so hi everyone i'm susanna from xero knowledge validator i've also been working with anna on organizing the zk hack and yeah every week we go through the prizes and every week the prices have been the same for the puzzles so yeah in first place um you get what 2500 usdc in second and third you get a thousand and then for the best write-up you get 500.

so this week the sixth and final puzzle the best solution right up was from neos ledger say well done you've had a couple of solution write-up wins so um yeah just like kobe really liked your write-up this time so yeah well done and third place we have jay bernick um and i mean you can see how tight the scores are gonna be because 998 is you know as high very close to the top score of a thousand and in second it was neos leisure who actually got the puzzle

rights up as well so double win there and then in first place was william um so yeah congratulations very nice to everyone yeah and now like based on all of these results we actually have our you know aggregated leaderboard and stuff so we'll we'll be revealing that soon very cool thank you so much so some folks are asking about the mena workshop the mena workshop is starting very soon this is only the intro kind of to the zk hack which has been a seven week series so don't stress i think it's gonna be about five more minutes and then you have your mina workshop starting maybe not even five let's see okay what

i wanted to share with you was just the the things that are coming up so after uh this event after the meena workshop and after the closing ceremonies which i hope you'll stick around for we will be hosting the zk hack after party so we're going to be using the same map as the job fair from last week and yeah do kind of join us after we're going to share the links in this chat as well so you can go directly to the party after this event quick side thing that i want to make sure you're aware of over on git coin we're doing a zktec side round this is a way to fund open source new projects it's like a great way to actually get

funding if you are look like you're a new project looking to start there's 100k in matched fundings from all of these awesome teams do check that out if you're looking to get funded or if you want to fund emerging zktec these are not investments by the way these are grants just fyi okay and if you want to find out more about zk hack in the future be sure to sign up for our newsletter it's on our website right up at the top we will be sharing more info zika hack doesn't really end here we have a lot of plans for the new year with zika hack so yeah do make sure you get on our mailing list and now as many people are asking for it we have the zika hack number seven with mina so this is the mina workshop so we

are just wrapping up this stage we're actually going to shut this down and what i recommend we do after this is head over to the sessions tab on the side that's where mina is going to be hosting their two hour workshop where we get to learn about snarky js and snaps so yeah you can already head over there now and welcome again to zk hack you know session seven and i hope you enjoy it so see you later