ZK13: Welcome to zkSummit & Sponsor Intro - Anna Rose

Transcript

[Music] Please make your way to the front. We have some seats up here and I'd love to see you. I'd love to see your faces. All right. So, I think it's a good time to get started. Agy, are we good to go? Okay, cool. So, welcome everyone to the Zero Knowledge Summit 13. How are you feeling this morning? Good. You excited to be here? Very nice. So, the Zero Knowledge Summit, as you may know, is presented by the Zero

Knowledge podcast. Um, we have done 360 episodes and counting. Last year I took a short break, but we came back in February and we've been running strong since then. This is the team behind the podcast. Uh this year we actually merged the ZK hack team and the podcast team together. So we have a bigger group and I have my wonderful co-hosts, two of which are here today. I still have not had all four of them in the single room, but I'm on a mission to make it happen.

So every summit I share our top episodes. These change slightly. Um this year or actually for this edition we have quantum engineering with Yelena Vokovich and the founding of zero knowledge systems with Austin Hill. Um, we've been doing a small series on quantum as well as like a history series on this really cool Canadian tech company called Zero Knowledge Systems that existed in the late 90s. This was the third in that in that series. Uh, do check it out if you haven't already heard of it. I have it's it's kind of crazy but I have this very

unexpected connection to this company that I talk about in that series. We've also been covering lattises recently. Uh I think we just had two episodes come out on that. So do check them out. So all videos for this event and all of our podcast and all of our study clubs and all of the videos that we create are over on our YouTube channel. You can see last editions like the last summit's videos there and the live stream I think is there already. So yeah uh if you know anyone who wants to follow along from home please share this with them if you're not. So oh actually are you are any of you listeners to the

podcast? Maybe some of you good. Okay if you aren't go check out all our episodes over here. Uh there's lots of great content for you. So now I'm going to talk about a sister project called ZK Hack. So I sort of mentioned this at the beginning. ZK hack was originally kind of a separate project. We've since merged the teams, but ZK hack is the spot to go if you want to like learn some of the basics of ZK. We have study groups. We do content there which is a little bit more for beginners. Um, we do live events and actually our next live event is ZK Hack Berlin, uh, full-fledged hackathon focused on ZK tools and tech. So, if

you're learning about cool stuff here today, but you want to actually try building with it. Head over to zkhack.dev and sign up, register for the Berlin event. This is something I actually have never mentioned on this stage, but we also do a monthly newsletter called ZK Mesh. And Makira and I, where are you maka? Yeah, we started this back in 2020. Um, since then, it's been folded into the ZK hack project. It comes out every month. I think we have a rollup with that QR code. And also, you can always find ZK Mesh and ZK hack. I think we're the only ones. Just Google us. This year we released the second

season of the ZK whiteboard sessions. Uh I think we wrapped up in January. Have any of you seen the ZK whiteboard sessions? Okay, some of you have you seen the second season of the ZK whiteboard sessions? Oh yes, so sort of less. Um the first season came out in 2022. It was really amazing to use like I think a lot of people used it to learn about ZK kind of for the first time. We followed up last year with season 2 and we are currently producing season 3. So you can expect some more whiteboard sessions. Cool. Okay, let's talk about this event. You're here for ZKS Summit 13. So ZKS Summit 13, we've been running ZK Summit since 2018. We've hosted this

in Berlin, San Francisco, online, Amsterdam Lisbon London Athens and now Toronto. So these stages have hosted speakers that present cutting edge CK systems protocols. People save up their research to present for the first time here. It's very exciting to bring it to Toronto. Here's a few pictures from previous events. Let's see. We got six online. Eight 11 4 12. Has anyone been to a ZK summit before? Yeah. Let's make some noise if you've been to a summit before. All right. There was Has anyone

been to one of the old ZK summits? This is this I wonder like pre 2020. Okay. Oh, we do have some people who are at the old ones. Cool. Yeah. So, those were always held in Berlin. We have two two pictures from those. There's ZK Summit, what is it? Three, ZK Summit 2. That's 10 9 two and ZK Summit 7. So this time we are here at heart house at the University of Toronto. Fun fact, I actually went to the University of Toronto for one year many years ago. I will not say when. It's so long ago. And being back here is kind of cool. Like I'm walking around vaguely remembering.

I think that was my cafeteria. I think I was in that building. One interesting thing is so I I don't know if you know this. I never formally studied computer science or cryptography except I did one class at U of the intro to CS CS 101 and in that I believe we did have an introduction to cryptography like just the very very beginner stuff but it's kind of cool to be here doing ZK Summit 13. Okay, a little bit about this venue actually. What do you think of this venue? Is this hall amazing or what?

That's crazy. So, we are currently in the main stage. There's a side stage, breakout room, workshop, and a chill out area. We do have maps kind of I think they're placed around the venue. The main stage is very easy to find. The breakout is just over there, so you should see it as well. Now, for the second floor, you actually go up the stairs and you go on the other side of the courtyard. If you look up here, that's actually a restaurant, which I think you can go in, but it's not really part of our event. So, when you go up the stairs, you actually kind of go to the other side of the building. There you find sidstage, workshop, and chill out

room. Oh, yeah. I want to say thank there's we have these wonderful snacks by a great Montreal bakery. Was anyone at ZK Hack Montreal? Yeah. So, you guys know these snacks. So, we brought them again here in uh Toronto. So, Lou and I, uh, it's vegan, gluten-free, lactoseree. Uh, it is created in a facility that might have nuts, I think. So, if you have an allergy, make sure you check the labels and just be aware. Um, this will be found just outside here where we're also serving food. Uh, that's where the lunch will be as well.

And we have this very exciting other snack thing happening. So, this is from Boundless from the Risk Zero team. They have a smoothie bar that they've put together for us. This is only running in the morning. It's upstairs in the chill out room. So, right there. And if you're interested in trying out their verified bar smoothies, which I definitely am, be sure to head there in the break, like this morning break. And yeah, they close up at 12, so just be aware. Cool. Okay, here's our program. You should have this on your lanyards. One small change. Uh at 12:00 our speaker was not able to make it, but we are still going to try to have the talk but with a

replacement speaker. Bey is going to do both of those talks. Yeah. Thank you, Vigny. Also, as you can see on your lanyard, we've moved Ying Tong's talk from 5:30 to 4. Yeah. And maybe just one other note, the breakout. So we have three workshops on the workshop stage and then at what is it at 3:30 we're doing a workshop in the breakout stage. That's kind of why it's designed that way. So that's a full hour. We have stage ho, wonderful stage hosts. So on this stage we have Alex and Nico. On the side stage we have Henrik

and Rachel. On the breakout, we have Jeff and Rachel again. So, Rachel, any of the speakers, do find your breakout host. Rachel's going to be basically moving between those two. And I think you've all been in touch with Rachel. So, if you have any questions, she's your go-to person. Yes, Wi-Fi. So, in your pouch, you have a code. The way it works in this building is we've had to do individual Wi-Fi codes. So, yeah, if you have any issues, go to registration. I think they have some more. All right. Now, I need to say a massive thank you to our sponsors. Risk Zero and Alo return sponsors. I mean, these events really

only happen because teams like Risk Zero and Alio come and support us. They bring extra things. They bring their swag. They bring their smoothie bars. Um, I want to say a massive thank you to these two teams for joining us. This time around for silver sponsors, we have returned sponsor Polygon and first time sponsor Stafle Labs, a local Toronto company. Thank you guys.

And our community sponsors for this edition. We have Tetsa, Tato, Novanet, Rayabs Aztec Celestia Miden and Horizon. Thank you to all of the sponsors for coming together with us for ZK Summit 13. This is the team that made it happen. We have Rachel, Hanya, Agny, me, Henrik. We have our programming team, Nico, Philip, Kobe, and Gaylord. Thank you everyone who made this thing possible. Let's give them a massive round of applause. Also, thank you Agy for finding this location. Uh, you visited Toronto, went to a bunch of spots, and

you came back being like, "It's a bit smaller than we usually do, but I think it'll be worth it." And I'm so happy you did. It's awesome. All right, please follow along. Please ping us, tweet at us, tag us. Uh if you're not in the Telegram group, we're going to be sharing a little bit in there as well. Um that's our our ex Twitter account. If you want to share this live stream, I think we've posted it there as well. And now we've gotten to the point of this presentation that I always love sharing. Every time we do this, we ask people on the application form a question. And this time around we asked how would you explain proximity proofs

to a friend. We get fantastic answers, hundreds of answers. And the committee who also helps to program this went through that list painstakingly and pulled out some very good answers from all of you. So let me say it again. How would you explain proximity proofs to a friend? It's a tool used in ZK proof ZK proofs based on linear codes. Rather than checking if an input is exactly valid, a proximity proof allows you to verify that the input is close to the valid value within some tolerance factor. This is good. Approximate proxies for proofs of approximate

properties. I have no idea if this is correct, but we liked it. All right. How would you explain proximity proofs to a friend? I'd start by saying this is going to hurt. Then proceed to ask them how much do you know about univariat polomials. A proximity proof is a way to prove that a function or data is close to having certain properties like being a valid polomial without having to check every single part of it. I don't need to read every page of the book to know it's probably not a cookbook if every tenth page talks about dragons. Now, this was a bit of a mixup, though. We we had a lot of answers that talked about like

sampling, which I don't think is exactly proximity proofs, but we still liked this answer. How do you explain proximity proofs to a friend? A friend doesn't need a proof for our proximity. Okay Google's furiously. There was lots of I don't knows, I don't knows as well. There's also a lot of chatbt answers. We see trends. How would you explain proximity proofs to a friend? This is Nico's favorite, I think. A way to quickly get a lowfidelity answer. Is some input close to correct? And this is one of the sadder ones. If I had friends, I would tell them to check out Dan Bonet explain it

instead. Um, Dan actually uh did modules for our whiteboard session. If you're not familiar with his work, you can check it out there. He is a very good explainer. All right. Yeah, thank you all for those wonderful answers. Um, yeah. So, now I'm going to invite Nico to the stage. I don't know how much time do I have. How am I doing? Five minutes. Okay, we're gonna have to do this quick then. So last time around uh last for the last edition of the summit I did a run through like a history of ZK research and then I did a history of ZK applications. After doing that I learned I I had some gaps in my research. Um also I feel like as time goes on when

you look back in time you notice papers that maybe hadn't really hit your radar start to become more important. And so we're doing kind of a revamped version of ZK research from the year 2012 to today. All right. 2012 the term ZK snarks is defined for the first time. The concepts had existed before but this is the first time we see snark. In 2013 we have Pinocchio. In 2015 we have GKR. Mhm. And so here we have sort of the first trend of like can we make snarks and how small can we make them? And in this case are trusted setups already a thing? I think so.

Yeah. By the time you get to Pinocchio you already have um knowledge assumptions, pairings and trusted setups. In 2016 we have the very famous groth 16. Um, just a note to anyone who's here who's maybe not as familiar with ZK, you will hear the term Groth 16 often. It's I think the most implemented proving system. Lots of teams are using it somewhere. Mhm. And that obviously came out in 2016 with a trusted setup. It is also sort of the culmination of that line of research like this is the tiniest proof we knew and it was sort of proven in the model in which it operates. That's the smallest you can get.

In 2017, we had Fry and Lihero presented for the first time. Lihero, I thought was from 2022, but it turns out it is older. 2018, we have Starks and Bulletproofs. So, what's the change here? So, here we're saying let's get rid of the trusted setup. Let's get rid of fancy cryptography as much as we can. So, forget about pairings in some cases for bulletproofs. Forget about elliptic curves altogether. um at the expense of maybe a different model random oracles uh or bigger proofs.

Oh, also yeah, this is Fry Leo is the sort of no trusted setups, no pairings, no curves. 2019 there was an explosion of research. Uh Ma, where are you again? Yes, there also coined the statement Snarktember. There was Snarktober, Snarkvember. It just kept going. 2019, especially near the end of the year, had Sonics, Plonc, Aurora, Spartan, Marlin, and Redshift. Obviously, plonc really stands out here is like you'll see variations of this continue on. We thought, wow, there is so much research, but little did we know what's coming. Well, it kind of stays the same and then it gets crazy. But

also interesting trend here. A lot of these are based on polomials, univariat polomials. And we have this one work Spartan that's saying uh multilinear polinomials could be interesting and let's see how this pans out in the next few years. 2020 Fractal Halo Halo 2 Plopup. So this is kind of the first time we're seeing lookups quarks. It well in this context quarks and plonky one which the team behind plunky has said not really worth mentioning but the name plon becomes a thing so we put it in this list. You also have uh the idea of recursion for the first time. Fractal is a proof of a proof. Um Halo and Halo 2 is another way of doing similar things. sort of for

maybe a bit cheaper. 2021 we have faflanc other types of plon we have nova obviously a major kind of shift change with IBC I don't know if it's defined already as IBC but it's present it's kind of it is yeah emerging for the first time we have breakdown and snark pack yeah so nova is kind of the culmination of this proof of proof ideas uh breakdown is sort of liarero coming back in a different form um yeah I think that's it for for these guys. 2021 2022 and now we have plunky 2 very important proving system. We have hyperplunk we have supernova. We learned that people constantly use the word hyper and

super a lot. We have gemini. We have logup plonkup flookup culk plus and cq. And so you have a lot of lookup stuff happening here. Yeah. Everything on the right hand side and logup is lookups. We do have a multilinear polinomials coming back with hyperplon gemini. Um yeah I think next year cool okay again with the proto proto becomes a name. Okay. Hypernova, Hypernova, Protoar, Proto Galaxy, Goblin Plon, that's that's new. Sangria, one of your works. We have Binius, Lasso, and Jolt, Basefold, Log GKR, and Labrador.

This is sort of the Lattis work first starting to make an appearance in our world. And uh actually, I think this wasn't on the slide last time because lattises hadn't hit at least my radar. So now that's going to be highlighter for 2023. Yeah. So the left hand side is sort of all these variations of NOVA and this proof of proof idea pushed to the extreme. Um and then in the end of 2023 we we see a different trend starting to emerge is better hashbased proofs. So like bignas base fold um and then last year so this has also changed a fair bit since I presented this last time in October. So we have plunky 3 in 2024, stack proof, circle starks, blaze,

breaking base, Garuda and pari, poly, polymath, greyhound, lattis fold, stir and worse. Some of these presented actually on these stages, some that we're actually going to hear about today. Yeah. And a mixed bag of ideas now like you get folding and latises, sort of these two ideas merging together. Um, what else do we have with Blaze and Breaking Base? We have ideas from uh Lihero and ideas from Fry sort of merging as well. Cool. Um super interesting. Oh, and the return of small proofs Garuda and Perry and Polymath or back to the sort of growth 16 trusted setup per circuit setup but tiny proofs and 2025 highlights. This is a big question mark. It's hard to predict now,

although we're in May. We're a few months in, but it's hard to really predict which of these will stand the test of time. But we have a number of them presenting today. So if you're curious to follow some of these threads, this is a great place to do it. We have Mercury Samaritan Zinc Ligorto Ligorito, Twist and Shout, Neo, Lattis Fold Plus, Micronova, and Warp. More merging of ideas, right? More Latis folding. Uh you have the sort of blaze-like ideas making their way into elliptic curve world with Mercury and Samaritan. And then you have warp which combines linear prover all these multilinear polomials hash schemes and folding. So like yeah very cool everything is merging. Yeah. And I'm

thinking like today we're also going to be checking out a lot of talks. It's possible we want to add to this right after. Um obviously as time goes on we learn about things we learn about things that even maybe came out in previous years that start to kind of become relevant. So this is a changing evolving list. And I think that wraps up our highlights of ZK research. Thank you. Kind of by accident, I picked the dates 2012 to 2025, not realizing that's the last 13 years of ZK research presented here at ZK Summit 13. It's a good little coincidence. Um, very cursed coincidence. Thank you, Nico. Yeah, thank you, Nico, for that. Cheers.

All right, we got a wrap. So, I think we're at time. All info of the event will be at zksummit.com. That is actually the most up-to-date uh schedule as well. We really tried to keep those printouts in your lanyard up to date, but we had some very last minute changes. Um you can see some of them. Uh I want to just highlight that there's some side events happening kind of all week. So if you go to the website zksummit.com, there's a link to our wonderful partners side events. Tomorrow there's two events. There's something on the 14th and on the 16th if you want to check them out. Uh here again is the program and so coming up on this stage we have we die presenting the onchain privacy trillemma. Very excited to hear

that the side stage we actually have a hold until 11 and we're going to be opening up that stage. Then on the breakout we have openbanking.nr NR kind of an application of ZK and on the workshop we have EC plonish. So I think starting now we're going to give everyone two minutes to basically pick your stage to settle in um and then we can get started. We'll be sharing more about the program as we go. We have nice long breaks at this event. This is how we always do it. So we have big halfhour breaks. So if we are running over in any way we always catch up. That's also a great time for you to meet with people, talk with people. And as the program

gets later in the day, we actually start to shut down stages. So if you want to workshop, brainstorm, there's the chill out area. There's desks around. Yeah, please feel free to to start building the next generation of ZK stuff here. Cool. I think that's the end of my presentation. Thank you all. Very excited to have you. Can't wait for the day. Very cool. All right. So I think yeah take take a few minutes pick your stage and we're gonna start up again with way dai on this stage shortly. Thank you. Also if you what stay here if you're interested in Oh yeah if you're interested in privacy you should stay here says way die. Also if you don't mind coming if you do want to stay please come up a bit closer so

the speaker can see you. Thank you.