Episode 221: Funding the Next Wave of Zero Knowledge Tech

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero 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 this week i dive into the topic of funding in the zk space i chat with a number of different groups who are funding zero knowledge technology in different ways i kick off with a conversation with my colleague susanna from the zero knowledge validator and gub sheep from 0x park all about the

gitcoin side round that we're leading focused on zk tech then i chat with arjun from polygon all about their massive commitment to put one billion into zk through investments acquisitions and grants following this i catch up with alex pruden from elio to talk about z prize an industry-wide effort to accelerate zero knowledge technology and lastly i chat with alistair from the web tree foundation about a newly announced zk component of the polka dot pioneers prize now there have been so many new zero knowledge funding mechanisms funds dows initiatives i could not capture them all in this particular episode but still i hope you enjoy this look into zk funding i do want to highlight the first portion

of this episode focused on get coin and i want to just let you know that if you're looking to get funding for your project be sure to actually add your grant to this round i believe it starts today as this episode lands so if you haven't yet submitted your grant do it as soon as you can to be included in this round of clr matching we've added the link in the show notes if you want to submit your grant just remember to use the tag zk tech to be eligible for the 275 000 in matching funds that we've put together for this one also if you're looking to fund this kind of tech yourself be sure to check out the grants that are available and donate today one more thing i want to highlight is that this coming week we're going to be hosting a

zk jobs fair if you're looking for a new opportunity you want to jump into the space be sure to sign up we're going to add the link in the show notes this is part of the zk hack event which is ongoing right now it's sort of our wrap-up party for the zk hack as well as zk jobs fair so do check it out now i want to pass the mic to tanya who's going to tell us a little bit more about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by penumbra every market is also a market of information that's why penumbra believes privacy is the next frontier of defy penumbra is a cross-chain shielded pool and decentralized exchange allowing users to shield assets from any cosmos chain and privately transact stake swap and market make without revealing your personal information or trading strategies to the

world penumbra labs is also building in public so visit penumbra.zone to learn more use your test nets and join their discord check it out that's penumbra.zone so thanks again penumbra now here's anna's interviews on zk funding so in this episode i'll be talking to a number of different groups who are working to fund zero knowledge tech and i wanted to start this show off with two specific projects that's get coin side rounds and 0x park i'm here with gubsheep from xerox park hi hi anna thanks for having me as well as susanna who i work with at the zero knowledge validator hey susannah hey

anna so i want to quickly introduce you both to our audience actually gub sheep you've already been on the show uh talking about dark forest but do you want to tell us a little bit about what you're working on what you're doing sure um so these days i'm thinking a lot about a combination of things mostly in the applied zero knowledge space um so i'm still tangentially involved with some of 0x park's crypto native gaming efforts including dark force but apart from that we are basically working on trying to understand what it's really going to take to productionalize the next generation of zero knowledge applications uh on blockchain or otherwise and apart from that we do a lot of grant giving educational work

community development sort of work so all of these kinds of nuts and bolts that are involved in putting together what we're seeing as as hopefully a nascent ecosystem of applied zk projects very cool and susanna why don't you tell the audience a little bit more about what you do yes so i've been at their knowledge validator since may last year which by the way is almost a year yeah it's almost here now yeah so at their knowledge validator we validate on eight different networks but the whole purpose behind the validator is to kind of further their knowledge and privacy in the blockchain space so through validating we then want to

support all of the networks that we're active on and we do this through a number of things such as events kind of funding like this so direct investments and also grants and then we have like a number of other little kind of initiatives that are ongoing as well and what i do there is uh i guess i do a lot of kind of operational tasks um it's been a lot of different roles i guess uh because we're quite a small organization we're now growing um we've brought some more people on which helps a lot totally susanna i want to start us off actually talking a little bit about the gitcoin side round that we were doing and this i would say like it falls well within the

purview of xeronaut validator which is to like support and grow zero knowledge tech across the networks that we validate on but also generally and one of the things we had wanted to do for a long while was find a way to like give out grants but grant giving's like a lot harder than it seems sometimes like you actually you have to like get applications and decide which what your criteria is and go through that process and since we're such a small team we were like sort of struggling to think of how to do that but then i had a conversation with scott from git coin in new york during that mainnet week and we had this conversation about potentially launching the zk side round as part of the git coin clr matching round and any

long-standing listener to the show has heard about this because the podcast has a grant and like zk hack has a grant so i've been doing this as a grantee for a long time but yeah with scott we started talking about it as being a grant giver and susanna as like i feel like you are also often in charge of all the special projects i brought you in on this one and yeah we sort of started to put together the bitcoin ck side round one and that was last time that was uh running i think what was it like december 1st through 16th or something 2021 yeah it was the first two weeks of december and i mean i think git coin really aligned with the aims of ck validator because

as i previously mentioned like we are such a small team that resource constraint is just such a big thing and i think i mean that's pretty much universal across a lot of businesses but you know when you have an idea to do something then obviously you have to actually execute and given that kind of the whole process of managing grants end to end i think the collaboration with gitcoin helps take away some of that pressure on the small team that we are having to do everything ourselves so that partnership kind of perfectly aligned like we wanted to be able to give back to zero knowledge projects but we couldn't necessarily manage the whole thing and to end on our own so it just worked perfectly

also i mean one of the cool things about git coin is that it's voting by the crowd like what we provided with the zk side round was very much a matching pool but like the actual votes like voting on who gets what amount of funding is done through and actually suzanna i think you have the numbers here but it's like it's thousands of people making small donations to thousands of projects that then results in like kind of a crowd-sourced what would we call it like distribution like you then know what is a very popular project you know if they got a lot of small donations from a lot of different people clearly there's like some groundswell some sort of public interest that has really like led to that project being successful and even

if the the final number isn't that high because of quadratic voting their matching rewards could be very high but yeah susanna do you want to share maybe a little bit about the last round and like what the numbers looked like yeah so for our round it was relatively really popular as well it got the most contributions out of all the side rounds so we had 53 000 total contributions and that added up to over three hundred thousand dollars and our matching pool was a hundred thousand dollars so like the donations from the general public actually amounted to way more than our matching pool which is really encouraging it just shows that the round was really popular and has like a lot of appetite to actually be funding zero

knowledge projects yeah i think the whole quadratic funding mechanism really kind of emphasizes what people are interested in outside of just our specific interests and i mean with a traditional kind of grant giving set up at least like from an academic perspective it's like you have some kind of um governing body which would make decisions on what's going to be given funding or not and this just completely distributes that to the people who are actually kind of interested in their knowledge generally and they don't have to be like an expert to take an interest and then that also encourages some element of the grants the the project setting up their grants so that they are trying to attract

people to donate and to demonstrate why their project is actually useful um not just to like an expert audience but to also make it more general i think totally i want to bring gub sheep a little bit into this conversation because as we started this round and xerox park was one of the matching partners but as we started it we realized that bitcoin grantees there just weren't that many zero knowledge projects so all of a sudden we had like amassed a great matching pool but we're kind of like oh no who are we funding and that's where we you know gavshida was sent sending you like texts being like oh man you work in application can you help us out so this is where i feel

like sort of a collaboration between the two groups sort of started do you want to just share with us a little bit about how it was on the receiving end of that for sure yeah i think maybe one of the challenges and i can't speak to other git coin side rounds but it would make sense to me if this was the case one of the challenges whenever you're opening up any new grants program being be it on git coin uh or anywhere else is that there's two sides to this interaction there's uh you know the funds themselves but then there's also the grantees and i think that a lot of teams in the blockchain space are actually struggling with a similar problem where you end up with these you know you raise these like very large sums of money oftentimes like much larger than what we're seeing on

git coin or uh platforms that are built for general purpose public goods funding but then you have to go out and figure out like well where are we actually gonna put these funds how do we how do we put them to good use so on our end based on our work with dark forest and a couple of other applied zk communities and ecosystems um we were able to jump in and find a handful of teams and projects to put on the receiving end of these funds you know and i think like the the goal here with doing that is to encourage potential grantees as well in the zero knowledge space that this is something that is a legitimate way to receive funds um it's a way to uh you know make your project more

visible to the community as well so hopefully these efforts only continue to snowball as we kick off another zk round and hopefully future zk rounds as well totally and this was kind of cool as as the bitcoin zk side round had started we were actually able to bring in a number of grantees so new grants were created during that period and by the end i think we had 19. so we started with just a handful but by the end we had kind of like onboarded new grantees into the get coin space and that meant like just getting them thinking about how to propose a grant what kind of projects they're building how to express that to a crowd and so i felt like i mean at the end of this first round despite it being our

first and you know us learning a lot as we went it turned out quite nicely as you just said susanna like it got a lot of the for for a side round it did very well yeah i mean compared to the other side rounds we had the highest number of contributions so that's not like individual donations but the single contributions given to each project so it basically means that the projects within the round were really popular and then some of the projects were so popular that they maxed out the caps on the main round and also were in like the global top ten of all the projects i think there were two projects featured in our side round

which received the largest donations in terms of amount that the projects received which is really encouraging that these projects are so popular and using zero knowledge technology so it's really cool to be doing this interview right now because actually the git coin grant round 13 is starting i think like any it could be the day that this is released or just around that time and this time around we are once again doing a zk tech side round but this time it's actually a full collaboration between the xero knowledge validator and xerox park and so i thought maybe we could take a moment to share with people what we have planned for this one kind of how well

it's doing so far and and also yeah maybe we can even like help people who have projects better understand how they could potentially get involved so yeah i don't know if gobsheep if you want to share a little bit on that front for sure so this upcoming grants round we've put together a matching pool that's you know about two or three x the size of the previous one we're seeing um partners like ethereum foundation uh scroll.tech polygon a number of roll up teams a number of uh zk companies um i don't have them all off the top of my head here unfortunately uh but you can check them out in some of the blog posts that zk validator and xerox park will be releasing on the round

um so it's a really exciting crew of matching partners that are helping to bring together more attention for this kind of funding um and you know one thing that i really think about with this round is i'm excited to try to use it as again a springboard to legitimize the idea of public goods funding for teams working on zero knowledge technology um some of these teams for example i think come from perhaps more quote-unquote traditional backgrounds and a lot of crypto native projects might so for example you know teams of researchers from the academic world um who might be a little bit further removed from crypto referring to cryptocurrency but

who are working on crypto as in cryptography so being able to direct more funding to to groups like these i think would be really fantastic and could open up in the longer term uh more support from the crypto community for this kind of basic research another area of focus that i'm really excited about is i think that a lot of the attention and a lot of the funding in the space is going towards companies working on zk roll ups which you know all of us here on the podcast today are super excited about as a scaling solution for blockchains but there's this whole other area that i think is currently under appreciated which is the area of zk applications so this means things like tornado cache

or like dark force uh decentralized applications which are enabled by zero knowledge technology that would not be possible otherwise and focusing in on these sorts of use cases i hope can shift more attention into the space of zk applications that are not necessarily rollups because i i think we're going to be seeing a lot of activity in in that domain over the next couple of years i also think i mean on that front i think there's also like some fundamental tooling that it sort of gets it might be funded through the sort of focus on some of the roll-up tech but those types of tools that are more privacy focused for example or more focused on like games those kinds of

like tools structures frameworks things that won't necessarily be used by this by the roll-up companies and projects yeah i think this is a great way for us to start bootstrapping those and they may become equally profitable down the line it's just that like right now the focus has been very much on scaling i just want to sort of pass this to susanna because i know you actually have the numbers and data of this round we should probably mention the matching partners do you want to just share with us a little bit more about that yeah so right now our matching pool is 265 000 this could go up but this is the minimum amount that we're going to have to distribute so far and this is coming

from 11 matching partners so 0x park us zero knowledge validator enoma polygon aztec aelio penumbra scroll gnosis the ethereum foundation and geometry and this is such a good group this is like such a great group of ck teams um okay i i think we've shared a lot on the zk side round i mean if anyone wants to find it they have to head over to the bitcoin grants page there should be a big banner of some sort that says zk tech side round if anyone wants to donate and wants to sort of see this thing in action it should be live now while this is airing so yeah i definitely want to encourage people to

check it out and i do want to use a little bit of time now to talk a little bit more about xerox park's funding activity because i know that actually goes past what just getcoin and since i have you on gubsheep i wanted to uh yeah i wanted to hear a little bit more about that p.s like i will be inviting you back for a full episode to talk more about like all of the application ideas but yeah if you could share a little bit more about the kind of activity you're doing also since this is the zk funding episode like maybe there's people out there who are looking for uh yeah new new ways to get funding for their project for sure um so maybe first a little bit on xerox park itself uh we are a new organization that has spun up with uh in the last six

months with the mandate to support application level r d on ethereum and other decentralized platforms so we're fully funded by donations and grants and we work on a number of different areas including crypto native gaming with projects like dark forest and other projects that are soon to be announced that you should keep an eye out for as well as a lot of focus on applied zktec as well so a lot of our work is done through grant giving and we think about grant giving as particularly important in the crypto space because we're seeing simultaneously a lot of work on both new technologies but also new

organizational models so new models for funding projects new models for building and new models for coordinating different teams it's not always the case that the right vehicle for something to be built in the crypto space is something that looks like a traditional company or business or for example if you live in the us and you're in the startup scene the you know equity funded vc backed delaware c-corp instead what we're seeing is that a lot of this work is being done open source which raises questions about how do you ensure that this kind of work which is very valuable is properly able to be self-sustaining but another feature that we see of the space is that projects are so much more

interdependent i think than you'll see in a lot of software so for example you'll have people across all different levels of the stack closely collaborating as standards evolve as tooling evolves as we learn more about the best application design patterns and because of that a lot of teams don't necessarily want to make a commitment to for example starting a startup or a particular type of org right off the bat i think that this is also a feature of being in software r d not every experiment is necessarily going to pan out into something that looks like a commercializable product and you want to make space for projects that aren't necessarily going to look like that as well

so the idea here is that grant giving is something that allows teams to keep options open and be free from maybe a lot of the more typical constraints around you know what kinds of software projects might be traditionally considered viable and instead to be able to work on things like open source software that doesn't necessarily have a viable business model off the bat that's immediately apparent and i think that creating this space might also allow us to see you know innovation on the organizational side how are teams eventually going to decide to package these projects or coordinate amongst themselves that is the sort of experimentation that we want to be encouraging as well very cool how can people find out more like are

you doing sort of application based grant giving or are you like how do people interact with what you have set up right so a lot of our more public-facing activities you can find on the xerox park blog so if you just go to xeroxpark.org blog that's where we're posting about things like uh we run educational programs and i think in the next couple of weeks actually we're going to announce our applied zk learning group number two and you can take a look there will be an interest form which you can fill out if you're interested in joining the group a lot of our outputs we also post publicly on twitter and on our blog so folks can take a look we've had folks for example like one of our recent releases um you know it was a community project that was building off

of our circom ecdsa implementation we posted a twitter thread about and shared a technical explainer on and someone actually came back to us with both you know a handful of like improvements as well as a disclosure of a vulnerability in the existing prototype so that was really fun being able to just publicly engage with folks by building out in the open i think uh is is really really valuable so you know check us out on twitter check out our blog that's usually how we keep the community updated on what our projects are up to and you can always reach out as well over email at hello xeroxpark.org cool all right thank you so much gubsheep for sharing with us a little bit more about

xerox park thank you susanna for coming on the show and thank you to both of you for you know exploring this get coin and funding generally awesome thanks so much anna thanks anna [Music] so next up i'm here with arjun khalsi who's the head of growth and business development at polygon welcome arjun hey hey anna thank you thank you for having me uh arjun we've spoken with a bunch of polygon people recently there was an episode with me hilo where we talked about sort of the push that polygon is taking into zktec but i felt like it was important to include you on this episode since you have put up quite a bit of funding for zero knowledge technologies and that's

what we're going to talk about here so maybe you can share with us like as far as i know i mean at least to the public the first time we heard about this was a blog post last summer where there was this commitment made to fund zk tech tell us a little bit about like what was the thinking around it sure definitely so actually it's it's interesting now that i talk about it that that the genesis of this idea actually started i remember way back in october or november of 2020. oh that's when we first started discussing this so i remember i was talking to sandeep and he was thinking about this right so at the time to take a step back right when polygon was first founded when it was called matic network this is in 2017 right so the prevailing sort of you could say thinking around

ethereum scalability was around using plasma technology right and in 2017 um vitalik had written a paper on plasma and how you could potentially use like another chain and offset right you know some of these and then sort of use like this checkpointing mechanism to solve for security and so so that is kind of what had prompted us to create our architecture which was like a hybrid proof-of-stake uh plasma approach where you know you not only have security on on the chain on the proof of stake chain but then you also like you could say inherit some security from ethereum right but but again it's important to understand that this is the prevailing thinking then right so you fast forward to 2020 and the discussions all around roll ups yeah right and vitalica talked again a lot about roll ups and and and of course you

know the march of technology is constant right so we knew that there would be something new on the horizon so we're like okay roll ups so you know this has prompted us to now think about like a couple of things right so number one that what does scalability look like in the future um and uh how should we go about solving it like where should we put our investment or rather in which basket should we put our eggs etc so a couple of like interesting you know viewpoints came out of these discussions right so number one we realized that the future of ethereum scaling is also multi-chain right so this is like the most important thing which prompted us to go from matic network to polygon when we realized that the approach we need to take towards ethereum scaling has to be multi-chain the other most important discussion was

that where should we hedge our bets should we do optimistic roll-ups or should we do zika roll-ups right i was about to say right then that was the conversation the the feeling was optimistic roll-up was going to come out sooner and be potentially like evm compatible faster whereas the zk roll up was still a little bit of an unknown no definitely definitely so there were very few teams working on it there was very little uh information about uh sort of out there about you know uh what are the different ways you could solve it it was hardly any like even today you know how you could literally maybe the total number of researchers in the world who really are working on sort of the course dk tech is possibly less than 50 in my opinion 15 oh i think it's like zero i think it's five zero fifteen

yeah i would put it closer to like 300. really really yeah given the community but anyway okay maybe i need to do more research you are like more up to date on this than i am so like when i when i was like looking at all of this i kind of realized that man there is like not not much out there and uh and then again you know optimism uh had you know sort of started talking about how they were going to solve it arbitrarily was talking about how they were going to solve it we had decided to be multi-chain so we said okay you know at some level we'll have to look at both the solutions but we will also need to pick like a clear winner where this is what we feel is going to be the future and essentially this is kind of where

you know we started to make this decision when we really started thinking about what would be the future of scalability right and when you have to make these kind of decisions you need to work backwards rather than trying to project right so what is working backwards mean so we went back to why did we create polygon or like matic network like why did we why are we doing all of this like the only reason why we are doing all of this is to solve for mass adoption of blockchain technology like that is a problem statement we're trying to solve so now the next question is what does mass adoption mean right so mass adoption can be defined in in many ways but the like the closest analogy you can take that or is that of let's say you know mobile phones or smartphones right which are so widely

adopted in the world right so if you look at android if you look at ios like over a billion people you know in in the world use use android right this is not counting all the other like you know let's say let's dump devices like all of your connected tvs and fridges and all that right a billion people use this so how do you solve for scalability for a billion users right now you start working backwards from that right from that problem statement and when you start working backwards from there you kind of realize that optimistic roll-ups to an extent are not going to cut it unless you know optimistic roll-ups by itself you know again mops into something else etcetera but but in its cup in the form in which even it is where it is today and possibly even in the next maybe a couple

of years like we i i don't see how it could scale to a billion users but zk roll-ups could the problem is there were a lot of things which had to be solved along the way yeah right so so it is like you have to go from horse car to race car but you need to solve like internal combustion engine etc you need to solve like a bunch of things and you're like man like i and of course we have to ask ourselves can this be solved so this was in 2020 when you were kind of like maybe starting to think about it but at some point 2021 i guess you made the bet so what changed at that moment like why did you think now let's start funding zk i i think a couple of interesting things were there right so so there were some

optimistic roll up solutions already which are going live right like like arbitrage going live optimism we could see and we looked at all of the code etc what the community is working at and you know working on etcetera and we kind of started to like really really try to see what the actual implementation might look like what how scalable it might be and and on based on our research we realized that this is like definitely more scalable than ethereum and it's not all together bad but this is not mass scalability right and if you want to solve mass scalability then this is the way forward okay and the question is that are we going to do something which is are we going to stick to something which is you know safe and which works etc are we going to go out there and take a shot in the dark

right this is this is basically what the decision ultimately is you can argue for hours of hours about you know what is better what is not and you know all like all the things but ultimately this was basically the decision are we going to go with something which you know you know kind of works and which you can work on or are you willing to take that big bet that big gamble which could solve scalability for a billion users and we chose option two we said do you know what we are not those kind of guys we will take the gamble and we will do what it takes and whatever money is required so be it let's talk about that money let's talk about the funding what is sort of the offer and where does it come from exactly is it from the polygon network a

foundation like tell us okay it's from the foundation so essentially so so this is also interesting right so if you start to like deconstruct what what happened that the word acquisition actually makes no sense in in the web3 world right because you can't really acquire anything like you can't really acquire polygon because the code is free you can create your own polygon tomorrow if you if you so like you know it's open source so what does acquisition mean so what we kind of realized that ultimately in this space what we really need to do is we need to convince teams to work with us right we need to convince teams that listen you're working on like you know top tier zk technology but if you work with us right and be a part of let's say the polygon multi-chain ecosystem then we can bring you know our resources to

bear and then combined we can you know sort of solve this problem like this is essentially it it's a conversation it's not really some business deal which is in some boardroom you know and people are this is really not how it happened this is honestly a conversation where we try we first made a list of all the top tier zk teams in the world then we started talking to them one by one and and here again you know sandeep who had written basically the first white paper of of polygon and we halo who had now come on board etc were the you know top two people who are looking at like this along with you know jd kanani and raag etc who also are you know super technical guys i understand this really well so we evaluated each and every team and this was the conversation that guys

like you are doing this right and once you do this you have to build the chain then you have to build the ecosystem etc we are already great ecosystem builders right and we already have a really large fast growing ecosystem and if you work with us then you can focus on solving like this unsolved problem well we can focus on all everything else so combined our power or rather combined we sort of mutually are complementing each other's strengths you as a research team us as like you know somebody who's great at execution this was the conversation and all of the funding etc was really just you could say incentives or rather acquisition of the team itself these were really active hires as one might say yeah versus really trying to do an acquisition because like i said in web3 you can't do that you can just you know

add best make your case and try to you know convince people that together working along with us like we would achieve the mutual objective and the advantage was that because we had also substantially grown we had like a treasury et cetera and we realized that you know these problems are already getting solved but if you could throw more resources at them that they would get solved faster right so anything which might be like a 2025 solution we could do it in 23. and and that was really the other aspect where you know having access to like resources which we had at polygon we could really make this a new reality and of course there were some other factors which are also extremely important which is the fact that we are very ethereum aligned you know to the philosophy of ethereum and rather to ethereum's philosophy of subtraction which is that

the true way to scale is not by controlling systems it's by really decentralizing them and we have a very clear path on decentralization so i think when the other team saw our like you know what we've achieved and what our philosophy is at school they were like okay let's work with them because they're not the kind of boss around people we'll still have our freedom right they will do whatever we want and we'll have access to resources now and we can go about solving that problem which we really want to solve so yeah tell me a little bit about the pool of funding though like how much did you dedicate what what is and and maybe tell us like how how much is left and what's that for so yeah give us a bit of a sense for this funding that you set forth for zk

got it got it so number one we didn't go with this approach that we will spend this much on acquiring the teams like we spoke to the teams first and we kind of got an idea that this is what it would take so it was like again working backwards versus saying that this is our budget let's see what we can get you know try and optimize the budget no like that's not how you solve and solve problems right so we went to talk to the teams we tried to see what is the best we could offer that you know what would be the best offer and from that perspective and also like you know did other calculations on you know what kind of teams would have to be built what would be the projected burn rate etcetera all of that and we kind of decided on a number and this was that

number now in terms of the funding left what was the number though no so this was the number right we decided we would need at least a billion dollars a billion dollars exactly and that's a billion dollars wow yeah at least a billion dollars to you know get all the teams online and it might take more and and to the point where how much is left etcetera like i told you there's no budget here if you have to spend another billion dollars we'll do it cool like for us what is required is that we have to have to solve this problem right like this because if you solve this problem then you have solved mass adoption right the whole reason why we're doing all of this the the dream will be realized and and you know for that there is no budget like whatever it

takes so that's the kind of mindset we go over there but you had sort of set out originally like at least in the summer what we saw was like a billion dollars is going to go towards zktech and in in a lot of ways that is sort of this acquiring but not exactly because you are also kind of adding more into the research and stuff like that grow the research team structure yeah what else are you also looking like and actually wait before we go into the future and like what else you have maybe plan but i wanted to ask you are you only looking at zk solutions for scaling because zk obviously has more characteristics potentially so for us the long-term bet is definitely zk but it's not as if you're not looking at optimistic roll-up technologies interestingly the blockchain which we're

building with ernst young the nightfall implementation is an optimistic roll-up oh yeah yeah it's an optimistic roller which uses some zk sort of technology for privacy yeah oh yeah so that's actually what i was going to ask so it's like are you also funding privacy tech not are you also funding other scaling solutions but is it more like are you looking to develop zk very much narrowly in the scaling sort of dimension or do you want to see like a flourishing of other use cases and stuff we want to see like flourishing of other use cases for sure we've been closely watching like some other really top tier teams doing this like aztec has been doing some great work yeah um so many other protocols you know have been sort of doing this like um for example even the irms team has had been working on iodine 3 which is a

very interesting you know sort of identity management solution so the very very popular language so we want to build this entire ecosystem it's not just about gk roll-ups of course you know we also realize that in certain cases privacy will be required when you look at mass adoption right when you look at enterprise adoption so when you work again backwards from there you realize that you need to have you need to have solutions for privacy you need to have proper tooling you need to have identity management so many things need to be built and and this is kind of like i said you know the answer to what the other question which you wanted to ask like what what else are we going to be spending money on is basically all of this yeah right so zk roll up is just the blockchain right you need to solve

tooling right and and what we're seeing for example today if you look at uh blockchain technology in general like a proof of stake chain and what we see on ethereum is that there is a huge amount of focus right now today which is good for the ecosystem on two link right which is building uh sort of testing no code environment so you have to do all of that you know for zk as well you need to grow the entire ecosystem like just like how we've done for our proof of stake chain so a lot of resources will go into that as well a lot of teams you're going to incubate for this so that is the other part of the story cool so you've mentioned a few of the teams that have actually like been brought in through this funding um i'll just go over them because i've

had a few of them on the show already but it's polygon maiden polygon zero yes polygon nightfall and then polygon hermes yes is there anything else like so each one of those so far are kind of like roll-up projects in a lot of ways so this is the scaling but i yeah i think kind of moving to those next stages like i don't know if you can already reveal like business deals still in the works but um yeah maybe give us like any sort of hint of the kinds of projects that you're looking for also because think of the the listeners to this episode like you might actually have some people who are building zk things it might be interesting for them to know what you're funding next sure going forward

like i said so what we're really focusing on right now is definitely getting a lot like talking to teams who can build great tooling to make it easier for developers right sort of you know to sort of start building for zika roll-ups to start building for that technology you know of course all of this will be within the you know within the evm sort of environment right so there'll be minimal let's say work required but but but there will be a fair amount of tooling which would have to be built so for example let's say manage the ecosystem for example you know all the sequencers etc and then if you break down for example gk technology right and if you look at the various parts for example creating the roll-up creating the proof like there are different at different stages there are different problems which need to be solved so

we're looking for teams who are working on these problems and if they've figured out some you know great great solutions to these problems like that's the approach you're taking so i can't i would not say that we are really like shopping around looking for a team we're really looking for people who are problem solving this could be anyone frankly speaking it could be like a university student it could be like a top tier funded team but like that's really what we're looking for and currently our of course 100 focus right now is to get our zika roll-up chains like you know production ready as soon as possible we are hoping to get test nets out in at least the next maybe four months three to four months and then um you know start moving to production environments by the end of this year then by next year we'll be able to you

know maybe look at other uh proof generation uh plugging in other different kinds of roof generations like blocky two and etcetera and how you could do that with evm so so that is the roadmap which we are working on right now uh in terms of what lies beyond rollups right like what what happens then well i i can't really say that so so i would say that there is no real concrete plan around that because the zk dream by itself has still not been realized right so we still don't know what the zk path is going to look like what scalability will look like i think we would if once we go live with these solutions we will also begin to understand maybe some of the advantages and some of the limits of this technology and then know like you know what what we need to do

next so that's kind of uh where we are right now but right now like the hundred instead of trying to think too ahead that okay now that's it's really about let's first execute you know polygon has a reputation for shipping um and we want to ship first and and bring that to the community and then you know once we do that like i said you know we will begin to learn more about the ecosystem and what we need to solve next nice one of the other interviews in this episode is actually about uh we're going to be talking about git coin and this sort of bitcoin zk side round which you participated in and um but you also are working with get coin and here i was just curious about like grants and and how we can get funding out into the ecosystem in different ways like less about maybe

direct funding of you know developers or teams but rather just like giving out grants so yeah what's your philosophy around that so definitely grants are of course a great weight you know to get like more teams to work on a certain problem right so by having a let's say a good bitcoin grant you have six or seven or maybe 10 plus teams around the world trying to solve a problem right and the chances of you solving that problem automatically increase so just by having more people solve that problem grants obviously work really well now we've we've had a grant program for a long period of time so if you look at what polygon has been doing we've been giving out bitcoin grants we've been doing hackathons for almost the last three four years like so this is something which we do i think it's so

important for you know uh for all projects to have great grant programs so that we can grow that blockchain ecosystem it's still very small compared to you know like web 2 and some of the other tech out there so so this is very important now in terms of like how we want to engage going forward so of course you know one one part is that we come across teams you know who are doing great work and then you know we try and see if we can work with them the other part is of course like i said so within the zika space we are trying to identify problems right or within the blockchain space in general like where are some of the problems which which need to be solved right and there are multiple ways to solve it so one way is grants we've also

created done something very interesting within polygon right so we've created this program called eir which is an entrepreneur in residence program and this is another way of solving problems right so think of it like problem solving so we have a very large ecosystem of 10000 d apps basically live on a platform so having the ecosystem this big allows us to zoom out right and and from like a 60 000 feet really look at what's missing right so what's missing on nft in gaming what's missing on the d5 side and and what's missing on tooling what's missing on research and then by having an eir program we can find teams and give them focused problem statements to work on saying that guys work on solving this we know it's a problem for the ecosystem maybe you know it's not been noticed yet but we know because we're able to see

the and visualize this and and and we will provide the funding and whatever is required to do this so it's also grants but it's also programs like you know working with lots of incubators and accelerators but also having these eir type programs which you know allow us to attack like multiple problem statements in different ways so this is kind of how we want to go about doing ecosystem building which is enabling freelance developers but also in you know like highly motivated teams who want to maybe switch over from web to and work on focus problem statements very cool i love that idea of bringing over some web 2 folks into web threes yeah this is the d5 team actually uh hamza and i think some keith from the d5 team came up with this concept of a brilliant concept so yeah cool arjun thank you so much for coming on

and sharing with us a little bit about polygon zk funding goals and uh yeah good luck with the next period where i hope to see lots of funds going into your ecosystem to fund this kind of tooling absolutely thank you thank you so much for having me [Music] so i want to welcome back alex to the show hey alex what's up hey anna good to see you again uh last time you were on you were actually on for the zk hack event back uh i guess just a few months ago we did this wrap up episode but this time around you're here to talk about zk funding why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're working on uh yeah thank you so i am the ceo of alio and i'm here because we're organizing

this initiative across the industry called c prize which i'm really excited to uh hopefully tell you about very cool so maybe let's start with the seed of this idea where does z prize where's the the idea of z prize come from yeah so first off on the name i guess the the name is sort of riff on xprize which you know is an initiative that's been around for a little while too it's a competition to encourage you know people to kind of solve these these generational problems with breakthrough solutions so that's where the name came from but the idea really started with this problem that we face at alia where we have a system or a platform for private applications and a blockchain is part of it there's a proof-of-work

algorithm that we use which relies upon generating uh zero-knowledge proofs um or miners have to generate those zero-knowledge proofs to participate in in the consensus and you know we just struggled to find a good baseline prover to uh you know to have people take off the shelf and use and you know and as i talked to more and more folks across the industry i realized that you know there really isn't a great baseline of hardware except for you know for a hardware accelerated prover or even verifier and so the idea was like hey you know this technology these ideas these algorithms these proof systems are there's a lot of thought and work that's gone into them but there's been less work on the implementation and hardware and so the idea of the zprize

was really born out of this hey we all have the same problem if these provers or verifiers were more performant it would be able it would enable these applications that we're all talking about and so why don't we band together and create a competition in trying to incentivize teams to build that and in this case it's very much focused on like hardware acceleration when you say that you're thinking you're kind of talking about like building something towards an asic i guess like a z a snark type asic yeah so so that's one goal but there's potential utility in having you know optimized verifier for just a commodity a commodity cpu and you know if someone takes

you know can build a faster verifier or an optimized verifier for even say like a phone you know that that could be really important and interesting there's teams that in fact are really focused on that more so than they're then they're focused on you know on building an asic for any specific problem so that's why the structure of this competition is going to be one where we sort of define a number of categories and different teams will be able to sponsor prizes in whatever category that they they kind of think of and you know one of the things that i'm focused on is trying to find the categories where there's as much overlap as possible so the industry in general will benefit and one thing i didn't mention before that i really do want to highlight here is that the output of all of this all of

the work that the competitors are going to do is going to be open source so this is going to be a public good for the industry uh moving forward maybe you can share a little bit like who do you actually expect to be participating in this competition so so far you've kind of talked a little bit about the categories and like so there's a few things and maybe we can dive into like each of those a little bit more in depth but like yeah who who's this for is this for the little like the dev working in their basement the dev tinkering around or is it for a company uh kind of all the above so i think the the initial idea is to find teams that are already working in the space um on like the problem of accelerating cryptography in hardware and i think

you've actually interviewed you've interviewed a few of them so you know teams like you know for example like the supernational and chain reactions of the world by the way i don't know if you know these folks will actually end up competing but that's like an archetype of potentially teams that might be interested to compete um but also i you know i think there's going to be a lot of people maybe in academia who are researching kind of a specific aspect of or researching hardware acceleration for cryptography that you know they might look at this and say that's a pretty decent pot of prize money maybe i'll just work on this over the summer and so i think we could see some of those people and uh you know and then i think there's a lot of people who work on these problems say big hardware

companies or big chick companies like intel maybe and uh maybe they work on an adjacent problem but but hopefully like one of the goals of this is not just to get acceleration for these proof systems or acceleration for these algorithms it's also to raise the profile of the industry writ large so people who maybe hadn't been paying attention before maybe look say hey wow this is kind of a cool and interesting problem i never really thought about it before but you know i have some of these skills that that you would need to you know be successful so let me throw my hat in the ring so yeah it's kind of a big tent okay so let's let's kind of dive into the categories actually maybe before we do that are they fully defined because i know this is a project like this is a train that's running but

i don't know if it's fully formed yet or is it what is it an airplane in the sky anyway building the airplane as it's flying or something you got it that's right that's definitely the name of the game right now okay so what what are the categories look like today what are you what are you planning so first off i i have to say you know again this is you know i'm i'm at elio but i'm very proud that this is not an alia owned initiative this is a this is a industry initiative and actually just at east denver here recently we had about 30 people representing seven or eight different teams you know all kind of jamming on what this could look like and so uh so first of all i mean what i'm about to say represents not just my thinking but you know contributions for

many and i want to and i'll acknowledge many of them but also you know i i think there's many more contributions that people will make and we want to make sure that we that we define this competition in a way that's specific enough to ensure that we get something that will benefit everybody but general enough to allow for creative solutions that maybe no one has seen before that's really going to be the art here and and that's most of what's going to be the work over the next couple months before we announce the official start of the competition so as it stands uh the idea which again represents the contributions of many folks is to separate these prizes out in three dimensions so one is uh first and most importantly like what's the objective because we

talk about accelerating snarks and what does that actually mean you have to think about are we going for latency so like the fastest proof generation time for example like the fastest this the slow or the the quickest time to generate a single proof are we talking about throughput the most proofs in a single time span where we talk about efficiency the cheapest proof generation right so there's like you know when you say accelerating it's kind of vague you have to define more specifically what's the goal you want for different applications you know there'll be different things you care about so that's kind of one dimension uh the second my initial idea was thinking about hardware platforms like okay you have a cpu you have a gpu you have an fpga and you know there's probably not time to build an asic for

this competition but like you could separate it by that but over the course of conversations i've kind of evolved from just being that specific to hardware platform and being and maybe focusing more on like class of uh prover or verifier and by class i mean it's just it's just a little bit of a higher level abstraction and let me just define what we think those classes are so one is a mobile user or a low power a user of a low power device so maybe there's a reason you would want to verify things for example in that context the other is a what we consider the browser class so this is someone who maybe has a commodity laptop or a commodity desktop and maybe you use either the onboard gpu built into like i say a mac m1 or some other device that's built into you know for a computer that

you built and the idea would be that you would run this inside of a web browser so you could you know interact with an application click a button it creates a proof right there for you so that's like that's so the second class is kind of as if you were a user and then the third class is a server class where this is sort of more of the prover as a service model where someone sends some instructions out to you you generated proof for them and then you return that and in that class you could think of you know maybe higher end specialized gpus or even an fpga could compete in the server class that's that's kind of how we think about the we've evolved a little bit from like specific to hardware to like just more of a class and that way the kind of nice

thing about that is you can say like for for the for the purposes of efficiency say you can compare hey what's an fpga versus a gpu and and kind of really do an apple staples comparison find what hopefully is the best solution for a given application and that's the third category or dimension that we're kind of exploring like what's the application and the application i mean this is like this dimension is really probably the largest right because like are we talking about initially the idea was to focus on the lower level mathematical primitives that kind of underlie many of these operations like multi-scale multiplications uh ntt also known as fft fast fourier transforms so a lot of the proof systems kind of rely on these underlying operations and that's honestly what a lot of the focus on hardware acceleration has been up to this point but you could also define the

application area in a little bit of a higher level say like computing a merkle path right within a merkle tree and make that like that specifically what you what you define and the advantage of doing a higher level definition for the problem is that you enable people to innovate at both the hardware level and honestly at the algorithm level where you could say hey you know this is sort of how people have done this before but if i maybe think of this new trick you know maybe we can get some faster performance out of it so those are the three dimensions that we're thinking of currently how does this actually run like what's the time frame that you have in mind maybe you don't want to say a date yet because i know it's potentially still in flux but like yeah okay give us a sense

for like how long do you expect people to actually compete on these challenges yeah so i we want to give people enough time to build a submission that will beat the benchmarks that we're going to lay out for them and to hopefully move again the baseline of the industry up by what you know we hope is a significant margin so 10 to 14 weeks is honestly the time frame we're thinking of here now that for some applications may be too long for others it may be too short but i think for the majority of the stuff that we're talking about with the kind of expertise and time and effort that it will require we you know from talking to many people that's sort of what we've converged upon but hopefully possibly i guess in in my wildest dreams potentially this is something that maybe will live on beyond a single competition

and you know you can have maybe a yearly event or maybe a you know as this evolves maybe there'll be a competition that you know is longer in time frame or is consists of multiple phases so uh but this initial competition we're thinking of lasting between 10 to 14 weeks and you kind of mentioned the three types of challenges but are there going to be three competitions or are there multiple within each type kind of so back to the building the plane is it's flying kind of thing yeah so i think this is actually maybe maybe it's important to say what's going to happen right from this point from when we're recording this interview to when we start the competition as currently contemplated sometime in the middle of april what's going to happen now is getting together a committee of people from the industry you know organizations

have already committed to supporting this effort at which point you know right now we're around i think 30 different organizations um who've committed in some way and we're going to from them choose a committee balance between academics and industry practitioners from different perspectives hardware algorithms zero knowledge and we're going to try and basically rigorously answer all of these questions and define in very specific very specifically what the competition looks like what the benchmarks are the competitors need to beat and then figure out okay what prizes to allocate how to allocate the prizes is there a first second third is there a winner take all so these are all questions that that i get to help lead people in answering you know and we collectively as a group are going to to

kind of structure and figure out in a way that maximizes hopefully the success of the effort i think a question here is like why would people participate so you'd sort of mention the types of people who would participate but like wouldn't they keep a lot of this info to themselves like i mean obviously there's a cash prize but what are you thinking could really encourage people to to share this stuff yeah i think i just want to emphasize that i don't think the objective of this is to get the best prover for x because again all of us you know and alio maybe most specifically has a protocol that if you apply this knowledge you could profit as a minor potentially right and i think it's unrealistic to expect the people who have this knowledge and would be that successful to want to share it all with

their potential competitors but i do think and i believe that the prizes that you know the industry will be sponsoring will be enough to i think get a better baseline than what currently exists i think so much has been built upon open source foundations take libsnark for example like libsnark is a open source public good software library that people use artworks very much the same thing like these are foundations that people can use and build upon and i'm hopeful that this is the same thing but for uh kind of a category of like in a more applied way for like a category of you know hardware devices or for you know user classes that people can then take and put together as building blocks and then build their own things um and the reality is i don't even think it makes sense to try and optimize

super far down a path for any one proof system today i mean remember like a lot of these proof systems you know the authors of which you've interviewed on this show didn't exist five years ago and five years from now we could very well have all moved on from all of the stuff we're talking about so you know i think that's sort of why i view this as an incremental iterative effort and i view this as like let's let's establish and then try and move the baseline up there's always going to be competitors who are going to be 10x better than the open source baseline but as long as that open source baseline keeps moving up i think we as an industry stand uh the best chance of being able to evolve faster and faster and make these applications practical that people you know that people talk about and possibly

more decentralized because then more people can actually find it and use it exactly we're all about you know this this principle of decentralization you know is what i think really defines this industry and so hopefully we can we can maintain that as well cool where should people find out about it actually yeah so we have a landing page with all the information you need awesome so i'll i'll share that with you in the show notes it's zprize.org so people can go there check it out sign up for a mailer to kind of get updates and we're going to be you know as more details about this competition get solidified you can kind of go there i encourage you to go there and check back in and um you know and see see what new stuff there is again we'll also put out an announcement about when the competition will

officially start and again like i think for now the main thing that i'm really excited about is just you know you go to the landing page and you'll see the number of teams that have already signed up to support this in some way and it's great i mean it really does i think represent the vast majority of this industry and it's great to be collaborating as a community for something that like this that affects all of us you know i think it's too easy for any one of us to get focused on the specific problem we're working on and it's easy to forget that we are part of this broader community working on this technology that's truly uh groundbreaking totally and i should say a little caveat we like zero knowledge validator is part of that initial group yeah i guess i can name i can name a

couple if people are interested so if the ethereum foundation protocol labs minute foundation aztec zero knowledge validator as you mentioned um so that's several of the teams there's a i i'm not going to be exhausted because there are many but i'll just mention those those few of course alio is going to is part of this effort we've got some of the other folks from the kind of the venture side um galaxy digital bain capital variant capital and uh and some others and again the full list is on the landing page but uh i feel pretty good that it represents um kind of the full spectrum of stakeholders within the industry and of course anna very excited to be working with you on this as well as your knowledge validator very cool alex thanks for coming on the show hey thank you very much for having

me this is great [Music] so now i'm here with aleister stewart who is the lead scientist and research team lead at the web3 foundation welcome alastair hi emma so al you've been on the show before but in the past it was mostly about the research you were doing this time around we're going to be talking about an initiative happening uh focused more on funding so there's a zk component to the polka dot pioneers prize that i just recently heard about and thought it would be great to include in this episode all about zk funding why don't we kind of start from the top of that what is the polka dot pioneers prize what's the point of this what is it

so it's a sort of x prize like initiative in theory uh we've been given a million dots by the treasury to give out to teams that are doing cool stuff for polka dots and the plan is to put a large part of it like the vast majority towards zero knowledge stuff cool so tell me how like how does the treasury funding in all of this work so there's a polka dot treasury a place which is kind of accumulating funds but yeah kind of who decides how this is distributed and like kind of where did the polka dot pioneers prize initiative even come from right so the treasury sort of its spending is controlled by own chain

governance in particular here the the polkadot council so the money from the treasury comes from inflation from transaction fees and things and we have this sort of mechanism called the bounty where why the treasury can uh decide it's going to spend the money on something so we have a vote and people put a proposal we put a vote saying we put this much money in the bounty and then we assign a creator to decide how the money is going to be spent is the polka dot pioneers prize one large bounty or are there sub bounties within that kind of initiative so it's structured as one large bounty but we won't give it out all at once and not least because we're we're giving it

out for two specific reasons one of one of them which is the uh the zk part and the other is is for polka dot infrastructure for people for instance uh if a team were to dev were to implement the polka dot loan node in another language which is a tough project we'd be paying them got it so let's talk a little bit about the zk part of the polka dot pioneer prize you sort of mentioned that it's going to be a large part of it so you said one million dots so i'm assuming like you know a large you know maybe more than 500 000 dots would be allocated towards the zk funding what is your idea for like how this would actually happen like how are

you actually going to give this out like what and what are you looking for right and both of these are pretty tough because it's it's really a question to answer because it's kind of early on okay and we've had we've had quite a lot of discussion but it's still not so clear to even to us who are responsible for the creators who are responsible for handing out the money uh how this thing is going to is going to play ahead um but we have a list of things we're looking for that the things we we like to to see the usual sort of zero knowledge transactions for money general purpose zero knowledge the stuff you put in with smart contracts or uh sort of more interesting things in the identity

direction in the games direction that this yeah anything that's interesting and substantial enough could be eligible and so far i mean what you just described sounded very much like applications using zero knowledge but are you also looking for any specific tooling are there any kind of any libraries or anything that you want to potentially support or yeah expand on with this um yeah indeed we're kind of looking for a complete thing so an application although if that's just showing off uh something more fundamental then it probably also has a good chance okay but there are libraries and you can probably already use them right now so for instance artwork you could compile to

rust and just you put that in the substrate chain and as sort of like jeff was talking about yesterday i don't know if that performs so well but it's good enough you can go and deploy something yeah so by the way by yesterday so we're recording this a day after the xero knowledge validator did an event on like with focused on polka dot and there we learned that arc works it there's basically a project to bring arc works to substrate in a way or like to connect those two things yeah you can use it right now and in fact uh a team passer act did some tests for using it that they wanted to to use artworks to do the calls you can do with the theory in the evm like this evm precompiles for

for bls well in particular sort of for bn254 right now and they wanted to another sort of electric curve thing so they wanted to to get that into inc the smart contract language which which uh sort of rust like smart contract language on substrate that compiles to wasm and they successfully got that working and found that it actually wasn't terribly slow cool but i would would a project like that be a good candidate for this bounty like actually doing the work that patrick had done no because they you know that thing didn't really uh take that long that was the point okay so you need what you're looking for like something much much more complete you

want an application using zk but i have a question here does it have to be on polka dot or is this like would you be up for funding fundamentals ek research like if it was like building an like instead of porting arc works but if you were building like a new dsl for something new would you be up for funding that you think not really unless they were targeting polka dot yeah okay it is still polka dot focused but i mean if you did i have a dsl and then then have that on on substrate then you know that that's definitely a good candidate okay and and we would be very interested in new projects right i i mean i'm sure some team could report uh one of the guys who are doing stuff for ethereum

uh to poke it up with no problem but if they're not going to maintain it it's really a bad choice for a price so you would be looking for like a team that's building itself around the concept of zero knowledge that would potentially be able to build within the polka dot ecosystem i guess but like it should have zk at its core exactly yes okay what so you sort of mentioned a few of these ideas that you were like that identity games how do you actually think about that like what maybe we can flesh that out a little and i realize al this is very early on in the development of this funding project but i think it is still cool to include here so i mean yeah we we thought about each of these possible applications

and the things we'd really like to see done that maybe people haven't done on on other ecosystems yet or have done uh but not ideally i mean so for instance with games there's several games on ethereum but we should already be a lot more scalable a lot cheaper in terms of transaction fees than ethereum so there's things you can and not to mention uh we could use different technology uh you're very restricted in what you can do efficiently on ethereum and so we we just think we can do more hmm can you tell me a little bit more about the curation part so you mentioned that there's a portion of this that is curated but yeah how does that work who are the curators what are you deciding on

so on on chain the the curator account now that is controlled by a multisig in which the five people control uh i'm one of them this alex from the web3 foundation grants that there's raoul who's council member and doing governance things for parity there's uh soda who works for hasta and brian who uh from ocala cool and uh we will collectively in the end have to do something on chain to spend this money so how does it work like what is the criteria like what would happen someone goes through an application process they send you and then you decide kind of how it gets allocated

a pioneers prize.poker.network okay there is an email maybe polkadotpioneersprice.parity.io parity.com definitely something at priority.i okay okay i guess you can find it on the website yes uh i i know the email uh forwards to all us curators okay the the process it's still a bit unclear uh maybe people from priority will be involved but the ultimate decision on chain definitely rests with the curators okay is this only for technical projects or would like community projects also be kind of eligible so at its core i think this is this is a technical price we want to see like

actual code on substrate that does cool stuff obviously if projects have community have a well-designed idea then this is a bonus okay got it cool al so listen thanks for coming on the show and sharing with us a little bit about the polkadot pioneers prize and the zk portion of it focused on funding zktech okay thank you so this concludes the episode on zk funding i know that there are actually a number of other funding bodies out there grants programs a lot of the zk projects are running their own grants programs but this is just a small selection that i chose for this particular episode so i hope you got something out of it and i do want to say

thank you to the podcast producer tanya the podcast editor henrik and to our listeners thanks for listening you