ZKVs Cosmos Privacy & ZKP Showcase - Intro

Transcript

um i wanted to start off with an overview of actually why what kind of the motivations for this event and um to frame it a little bit so the part of the reason why we put this together is that we believe privacy is becoming critical for all users of blockchains especially with the increasing rise of d5 and as things become more mainstream um but it's something which is often pushed as kind of secondary importance um over sort of other priorities and um we really believe that it's critical for the success and adoption of blockchains and in particular in cosmos it's something which i think has been considered important for a while

but with other high priority components in particular ibc and has sort of had a slightly secondary sort of role but post stargate we really think there's an opportunity to set a very clear new mandate for for cosmos and signal as a community the importance of privacy in the future roadmap and we see this event as being a sort of way to kick off discussions around that um privacy whether in the form of private transactions or or other ways can be a major differentiator of cosmos and there are actually many teams already working on privacy applications or using zero knowledge proofs in this ecosystem and um you know what we want to do here is really give a chance to showcase that

and get the discussions going about what other opportunities are available to really make sure that cosmos can differentiate itself and leverage its unique position um around privacy so the agenda today is going to be um starting off with an introduction about zk validator what we do and um what we're what we're doing in cosmos and then a a quick um sort of intro also from the icf um and billy has kindly sponsored this um this event and then we're going to move on to a talk by zacky about um some of the kind of uh missing public goods in the cosmos privacy ecosystem and how potentially

those could be overcome and then we're going to have a showcase of three new privacy projects who are all working in cosmos ecosystem and these are actually sort of being built by some really well-known members of the cosmos ecosystem and so it's very exciting and we're going to hear all about those later and then that'll be followed with a panel about what's missing for privacy and ckp's in cosmos and it'll be a chance to ask questions and really drill down into those topics and finally we're going to have a networking and breakout session and this is going to be a slightly different format um and we're actually sort of trying this out it's going to be very casual but anyone can create their own breakout session and there will be one also organized by

zk validator where we're going to discuss some of the topics related to actually validation and cosmos um but feel free to sort of start thinking about a topic that you might want to create a breakout session for and at the end you'll be able to create that and anyone can join your room and discuss so it should be should be good fun um so i'm now gonna quickly sort of move on to the the introduction uh since we're a little bit pressed for time and uh to start off maybe uh slightly wrong slide to start off um just to introduce who we are so zk validator is an advocate for privacy at every level

um in the ecosystems we work in um we're present in cosmos we're running we're running a validator and we're supporting um teams in various ways and our primary mission really is to make sure that we represent um the kind of voice of the community in advocating for the importance of privacy um and we're relatively small team there are three of us who are on the event today um and i will i'm also the founder of diversify which is a layer to exchange on ethereum which uses zk stocks to settle trades with a much greater throughput than ethereum's capable of natively and i co-founded zk validated with anna who's the founder of the zero knowledge podcast which i'm sure many of you will be familiar with and may have listened to

as well as zk summit zk sessions zk study group the list goes on i think you get the idea um and we also have on our team tour who is working at the ethereum foundation in applied zkp's and there'll be a chance discuss on that later um so together we're active across many different blockchains running validators cosmos was actually the one that we started on earliest in late 2019 um and we draft and champion proposals advocate for privacy at every level from developers researchers and and community and act as a bridge often between teams that may be working on things with researchers who are deep into

zero knowledge proofs and we're also launching many initiatives around governance and events like this one where we help to to educate and promote um knowledge and experience about zero knowledge proofs and so with that i'm going to hand you over to anna who's going to talk more about the event and you're muted anna i know got it so i want to share a little bit about the goals that we have with this particular event so what we wanted to do is we wanted to definitely introduce ourselves the xerox validator to the wider cosmos community we realized that you know back i think about a year ago we did a baseline report but since then we haven't been as

active as we want to be and i think this sort of this event shows or starts that initiative that we want to become a little bit more present in the cosmos ecosystem we want to be known as like if there are privacy projects we want people to definitely like know to get in touch with us this event is also going to be very exciting for me personally because i'm very excited to learn about these three showcase privacy projects people i know and i actually don't know the details of what they're working on and so i really am looking forward to jumping in with all of you to learn about this i think we also want to use this time to kind of gauge the sentiment about privacy in this ecosystem so over the past week there was a little bit of conversation

uh in the validator community around like whether or not privacy is something that the cosmos ecosystem should want i think there are some people who definitely very much want to see privacy and others who are a little bit wary of it and i think this is exactly the conversation that should be started and i think that you know i hope that out of this event some people go away from it with a bit of a better understanding about where privacy could exist and also where there are still some challenges um i also think like i want to find out how the particular kind of construction of ibc how cosmos is built potentially offers like new opportunities for privacy like that other blockchains may not have i think that is something that i think it would be very cool to find out

through these kinds of events now i want to share uh one thing that we have kind of going we have a co we have a pre-proposal for a cosmos hub proposal and one thing that we want to do is basically create a series of events like this one three online one doing one of these every quarter and also potentially a in-person live event if when we can um and this is something we thought potentially could be a cosmos hub proposal but we want to hear from you if it makes sense that we approach it in this way the reason being is like we can always do these events by like finding sponsors and doing them in the traditional sense but if this really is a conversation around cosmos and privacy

we thought it might also make sense for this to be somewhat publicly funded so we don't have to necessarily do the sponsorship route but rather have this be part of the kind of entire cosmos initiative so yeah after at the end of this uh session at the end of this event we're actually going to be doing a session and this is a place where we could potentially talk a little bit more about this other initiatives now these are more like meta initiatives these are sort of blocked we want to this year it's not this is not set in stone but this is something that we'd really like to see happen is we want to do a zk hackathon where you actually get to build sort of zk prototypes and start working with the tools i think the

the space has evolved enough and developed enough that now we could potentially do it and so that's a wish and another project that we are just starting to work on is is trying to create a report around the legal ramifications of privacy tech because i think the unknowns are actually blocking teams from pushing this like forward faster and so we this is something we're just starting to put together if this is if either of these are interesting just get in touch with us um yeah and i think with that i want to say like you might i mean i have the podcast and actually the videos from this event are going to end up on the podcast youtube channel we thought instead of starting a new youtube channel there is a youtube channel

so the xero knowledge podcast is the media partner to this and i now want to introduce billy and say thank you billy's from the interchain foundation and they also supported this event so billy you're muted and no video oh and i'll bring that back so if you want to jump on now would be a great time thanks very much um in light of today being a privacy themed event i will now reveal my private face uh by selling it to a proprietary company who's now mapping out my facial features instead of exposing it to you all where the real danger of privacy is um thank you yeah so i'm billy i work at the interchange foundation i was really excited when anna told me that this event was happening um

it seemed like it was actually it was just like last week or something and i was excited that we were able to put some support behind it um the projects today are all really cutting edge i only heard about like half of them this week myself it's one of my sort of favorite things about this ecosystem people somehow just show up and they've built a blockchain um i uh should give the required sort of status updates that i think are really exciting around the ecosystem in case you aren't informed next monday token transfers are being enabled for ibc um so if you are coming from the ethe world and you're starting to see more of these like bridge interfaces you know metamask just enabled the ability for dapps to uh a a chain id and a node id

um so i feel like a lot of ethereums are just starting to understand that this sort of like multiple chain reality is is happening it's not going to be going away but we'll finally start to get to see some networks which were built specifically for this feature set you know what is it what does it look like when a chain is designed to be bridged between other chains you know ibc is that it's basically a bridge in a box or a bridge in a shipping container if you if you subscribe to sonny's metaphors um yeah so keep an eye for that keep an eye out for the rest of this talks uh i'm really excited and the other thing again is just i'm from the interfaith foundation you know we're we're designed specifically to support new technologies so

uh if you're watching this and you're looking for funding support for your new project your great idea your important work talk to me i'm easily excitable uh tell me why you're excited to work on what you're doing and we'll see if we can throw some fuel on that fire cool thanks so much billy and you look really awesome as a little moon all right