ZK14 - Intro with Anna Rose

Transcript

Thank you. Perfect. All right. So, I want to officially say welcome to ZKS Summit 14, the 14th edition of our flagship event. It's wonderful to see all of you. Uh our last event was in Toronto over a year ago. Uh we were doing this twice a year, but now we've been doing it once a year. So, I'm very glad to have you all here. And as you may know, the ZK Summit is produced by the Zero Knowledge Podcast, a show that I've been hosting for over eight years. And this week, we hit a milestone.

We hit our four Oh, it's a little cut off there, but 400th episode. Yeah. So, this past it was like yesterday, we released our 400th episode. Uh, we talked about, you know, quant the quantum question. We talked about how snarks have basically been moving everywhere. And someone actually baked me a cake, which was kind of sweet. That was real. When I posted this on Twitter, I had to like I'm like, "No, no, this is real. This is not AI generated. I promise."

Anyway, if you want to find out more about us, if you're not familiar with the show, check us check out all of our 400 episodes over on zeronowledge.fm and you can follow us on Twitter as well. The videos from this uh event and all past events and our show are over on our YouTube channel. I think we're live streaming now hopefully. And so, anyone watching at home, thanks for watching. A quick note, um I'm not sure if you're all familiar with this. We have a monthly newsletter called ZK Mesh, which is once again human curated. We actually go and pick out some of the best links, research, articles, and events coming

up, and we produce that once a month. So, if you're not already subscribed, do check it out. And if you want to find a way to support the show directly, we actually have a subscription tier through that newsletter called ZK Mesh Plus. And if you subscribe to the paid tier, we have all sorts of extra goodies and research papers and and actually bonus clips to the show that we'll be sharing with you. Okay, a little bit about this event. This event started the ZK Summit 1 happened in March 2018, which feels like an incredibly long time ago now. Um the this event has been hosted in Berlin, in San Francisco. We went online for a

while. Then we did Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, Athens, Toronto, and now Rome. The these stages have hosted some of the best speakers, thinkers, builders in ZK. I feel like cutting edge systems were presented here for the first time. And so, yeah, I'm very excited to find out what we have in store today. This is the program. We have it actually displayed on two of the screens. And you can find this on our website. There's two stages this time around. And everyone's going to be in this room for the first for the first talk. And then we open up the side stage for the 10:30 talk. And I think it's pretty easy to find in this in this hallway.

The afternoon is packed. Um, we're going to be telling you more about each of these as we go, but yeah, if you want to find out more, you can find it on the website, which is zksummit.com. I'm going to be the host with Nico for this stage and we have Gaylord hosting the side stage. So, if you have any questions or if you're a speaker, go find that side stage or this the stage host uh to help you coordinate. This is the Wi-Fi. This is just a public Wi-Fi, so be careful.

All right. Um I want to say a massive thank you to the sponsors this time around. I don't know if you're all aware, but the market has contracted a little bit for events. And yet, we had these wonderful teams come through for us and kind of choose to allocate their marketing budgets towards our event to help us do this. So, I want to say a massive thank you to our top sponsors, ZK Security, Burnt, Sveright, and Alec Innit. Really guys, we couldn't have done it without you. I want to give you a big hand.

events event production has become more challenging and yet this one came together really well. Um I was really really moved by how people kind of they found us they offered it was really great and here's our community sponsors for this edition. We have Maiden 01 Labs ZKV TO ICM ICME sorry ICME Labs Zcash Foundation Reclaim and Aztec. Thank you to all of our sponsors for coming through. This is the team this time around. It's Rachel, Agy, and I who did all of the production. And we had Nico, Philip, Kobe, and Gaylord who helped on the programming. Yeah. So, if you have any

problems, it's not only me. Uh, this is the hashtag. This is how you can kind of ping us if you want to take photos. Uh, I think I say this in most events. I think feel free to take photos of speakers, but there are some privacy conscious people here. So, don't necessarily just take photos of people and post it. I think that would be that would be nice. Okay. Every time I do this event, we ask a question on the application form and every time we get great answers and this time we got really, really great answers. So, I'm going to read a few to you. If you if you hear your own, you know, make some noise.

Okay. So, this time around, we asked, how would you explain oblivious transfer to a friend? I'm going to read all of these, so bear with me. I have two secrets, and I allow you to learn only one of your choice without me knowing which one you learned. This gives us a sort of two-way privacy. You have two embarrassing secrets in in identical envelopes. Even you don't know which secret is in which envelope. You allow your friend to take one of them. You know he knows one of your secrets, but you will never know which one. I don't know why you would ever do this.

This one is hard to get, but I think it kind of explains. Imagine a vending machine with amnesia. You punch in a code. The machine dispenses a snack. However, the machine immediately forgets which button you pressed. You can't see the other snacks and the machine cannot tell you what you bought. How would you explain oblivious transfer to a friend? With some crypto magic, send you one of my Pokemon without knowing which one. Not exactly true, but we liked it. Um, my friends are getting annoyed that I'm explaining new cryptography concepts to them every six months. I'm not sure they'll ever encounter a situation in which I know two pieces of information and they get

to choose to discover one of them without me knowing which one it was. This is a bit easier. I send you two cookies. You can eat only one. I will not know which one you've eaten. And you do not even see or smell the other one. It got creative. It definitely got creative. How would you explain oblivious transfer to a friend? VO is cool. I don't know if this is actually relevant. And this one I thought was very on brand for where we are. Imagine I have two recipes for cooking an amazing sauce for pasta. My grandma's ragu and my aunt's pesto. I put them inside a box and you can take one of the recipes via a hole. I don't

know which one you took and you don't know the other recipe, which I think kind of explains it. So, thank you all for your wonderful answers. Uh yeah, thank you guys for that. Once again, all of the info on the event, the program, the speakers, you can find all of that on zksummit.com. This again are hashtags and things if you want to share. And that's the end of my intro. Thank you guys so much for being here. I'm very excited to catch up with all of you. I there's a few people here I haven't seen in a year, two years, three years. So, it's very much a homecoming.