Episode 292 - State of ZK - Live at zkSummit10!

Transcript

foreign [Music] we're all here we're almost all here there is one person missing from the roster of co-hosts we have to shame him publicly no I don't know uh for those of you who came here to see Kobe in person he is not here actually he remains The elusive Kobe um we're sad that he's actually not here with us today he will be hopefully here on a panel like this in the future but I am lucky to have three of my regular co-hosts with me uh you I I guess if you listen to the show how many people actually listen to the podcast

regularly raise your hand okay cool just check me good background what was it about like okay 60 70 yeah it's pretty good um but why don't we do little intros if people are maybe they know your voice and they don't actually know what you look like okay let's start with you Nico yeah so I'm Nico um I do research in cryptography zero knowledge I work at geometry with he who is not here today um he is real he is real um and yeah I think that's sort of it cool He Who Shall Not Be Named oh um uh hi I'm Guillermo I uh I'm a glorified paper editor at Bain Capital crypto I guess I write papers with tarun and Alex still singing right there

um and yeah I guess that's kind of it I don't really have too much that's all you do yeah kind of pretty much my free time play piano I like the piano yeah yeah you can like bake pizza if you do oh that's a good point yeah if you ever follow up on Twitter great I have great pizza tips if you want a Sourdough recipe or a sourdough starter happy to mail you on or something you know mailing a sourdough starter oh yeah of course merge for zk11 you gotta do what okay I look I don't know I don't know anything about cooking okay you're up I'm tarun uh founder of Gauntlet uh also investor robot Ventures and uh have been

on this podcast for a long time covering all the non-zk things and convincing Anna they're interested there's interesting things in Mev land and defy yeah actually so I mean I think all of you but especially you true and you've brought on so many guests that I would never have had on that became either like you know people who really influenced my thinking friends like I mean I think Guillermo was a guest that you brought on and then became a co-host so that's pretty cool um so what I I think we have a few questions we were kind of brainstorming what we wanted to talk about as I mentioned please remember that this should be very interactive I just want

to find out where is the mic where are the mics you have the mics okay so yeah if you want to ask a question just put up your hand and wait for a mic because we want to capture it on the audio stream um a theme that I feel has come up actually repeatedly today I think it's sort of you hinted at it it was really just the ZK use case question mark will like will it happen where does it come from what does it look like do we you know I felt after the ZK hack Lisbon I was like so many applications like so many ideas but since then I actually haven't like I think I was asked recently like what's the new ZK idea use case that you've

seen and I was a bit like oh I don't know if I've like been bombarded by them since then and so yeah I think that's maybe a starting point uh ZK use cases where are we at are they coming have you heard about them do you think they're real I think certain is a good answer to this at least a partial answer to this I think there's like uh you know I think the ZK co-processor kind of you know boom that started with Axiom I guess last year was sort of hinting at this idea that like people want something else out of ZK than just like Roll-Ups compression validating in L1 because at some level that's just like not that interesting

right like if I pick a random person on the street in London and I go oh my God we can compress this blockchain like 200 times faster they're just gonna like call the police right and so the real the real question becomes like uh uh you know something that convinces people has to have some something interesting it needs to maybe it needs to reveal something interesting about something that already exists maybe it needs to reveal you know it needs to have some sort of monetary premium in some ways like that you know if I think about object x with a proof an object X without a proof is there a reason that the thing should be worth more with a proof that's like one Avenue of things I've seen

um but yeah I I would say I'm wholeheartedly generally disappointed both in the community and people working on the stuff because like everyone everyone every time they start working application they pivot into working on a proving system uh are a bit confused with the co-processor thing like what do we mean is it like just executing something off chain and giving the proof on chain that it happened and is this not what we've been doing so far anyway I think it's more this idea that there's like a lack of synchrony right like in a roll-up proving system you kind of have to have proofs running synchronously continuously over time but in these like asynchronous use cases it might be like oh like hey when certain State changes happen I do a calculation on historical

State compute some number send it to a contract right but again it still feel like it feels like it's like infrastructure right like everyone working is not enough is like is like oh but it's trying to be less than a roll-up you know I think and like you can kind of see people inching at it but I kind of think the the most interesting thing about going to ZK hackathons versus going to say like each Global hackathons is like ever a ZK hackathon seems to only think about applications that people who understand what a finite field is like want to use which is like not really a great start I guess it feels like you're aiming towards like what are non-block chain but potentially blockchain adjacent

applications of ZK right like it feels like every application of ZK is and in some sense DK feels very tailor-made for blockchains more broadly right but just I want to make sure that I understand the question which is are there non-blockchain applications of ZK that clearly demonstrates some value that is like obvious to just your average person on the street but I think it could be connected to blockchain I think it's the end user part that is still potentially missing I mean there's a whole question of like are blockchains even connected to the end user in a reasonable way but that's we yeah so a great statistic is uh I think a Blog on this next week is that and I'm gonna for those of you who who

cringe when you hear some security vulnerability sounding things that people love using get ready uh but something like 15 of volume to nav auctions and Mev rpcs and private mempools is currently coming from telegram Bots these telegram Bots the first versions of them were people sent you a seed for it sent you their seed phrase in Telegram and then you would trade on their behalf they wrote a little script that would read the seed phrase start trading then of course you know they got pillow read for that and then it became NPC wallet where it was like oh you need two out of two shares to do a withdraw one share can do certain types trade still tons of vulnerabilities but 15 volume these didn't exist three months ago like this

should just tell you that this consumer wants convenience and wants to not think and people in ZK application land don't do nothing get that um well you just like on that on your comment earlier you did just like diss this audience I thought that was pretty brave sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry I'm not like trying to disappointed for all of you yeah it's great though sorry have we answered the question well we've definitely started the conversation about use cases I think that focus on the on the end user you sort of taught you're you were trying to get clarification if we meant like non-block chain off blockchain um I don't know do we have any I I think I

like do we have any stats on like what is the product using ZK that has actually had the most impressions and I think I know which one it might be and I don't like it oh it is your least favorite application is it my least favorite that might be the one that you know what we're talking about I don't know what is this oh can we say it audience guess guess what Anna's least favorite application is that generates your knowledge proofs [Laughter] actually we could just leave it as this big unknown I didn't say it um actually okay I'll try to rephrase or relate an argument that was

given to me just maybe like an hour ago about applications is that it's maybe okay that we don't know what they are like they they will probably just emerge out of these things being available and out of having people with a different mindset people who aren't thinking about finite fields to show up and see like oh I can do X and Y thing and start doing it tarune I think you're just you're just like in the next few months there are going to be all like a number of platforms coming out language with like way better tools so people can start experimenting so far you've had to be so in the weeds to use a lot of this stuff

and I mean to be honest we don't know how easy fully easy it'll be right away but there's definitely like strong you know a strong Push by a number of teams to create those sandboxes or playgrounds or things where you can start to deploy and play and build something fast I mean the guitar intake is like isn't isn't that just cope isn't it just like like we're all like you know we built a bunch of tools and like if we build it they will come but we'll be well I think if they exist then we will see right I mean like how do you judge when it's like super hard to build stuff still yeah all right but you know the question is like it's kind of asking just to predict the future in in a way right but

you could imagine the future goes something I don't think it will which is why you know I think we're sitting here but could go something like everyone builds a bunch of really sick tools that like do all great things very quickly but then everyone ends up using like JavaScript and not caring about the ZK part of it because like ah whatever you know users at the end of the day don't care about that I don't know this is I I'm trying to I don't really have a question well we also have that in ZK world right we have a lot of tools that sort of are built to adapt regular code into ZK like if you think of things like with zero the whole point is forget about the ZK Parts just compile to risk five and we'll do the rest for you so we

can bring these people in we just want to think in JavaScript yeah no I I agree with that I guess like you know you could imagine that for a very long time the entire purpose of like building this ZK thing right is kind of like lost on someone like it's easy let's say it's it's very easy you know it's actually like just one line change from running JavaScript right and they're like ah you know but it takes 15 minutes to run this on an AWS server somewhere who cares okay but it almost sounds then like the characteristics that CK brings need to be the thing that you're building for right so then it like is it a privacy or the thing that we need to broadcast like we need to make clear of what it what it is that we are unlocking for people yeah right yeah I think

that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say too I mean it's like look maybe if not only we make this available but you actually have to you know we have to go touch grass every once in a while which is a fine thing to ask for right I think if you do that maybe yeah maybe you will get some real adoption I don't know I mean I again my obvious opinion on this is I think it will like in the future ZK will actually be a thing that people actually use very transparently but there's a you know the it the opposite case is is like reasonable I think yeah I think we have a question from the audience I'm wondering who are the end users in this hypothetical scenario right now because in my imagination cryptography

or not just in my imagination sorry in my worldview I think cryptography is something that the end user is not concerned about it is just there and it works for example if you you signal like the average user doesn't care that it's end-to-end encrypted but it is still there so are we targeting developers here or are we talking or targeting the average person on London streets I mean I guess for that that there needs to be urgency for what is being offered and I think there's these moments where like something happens in the world where people realize like they have no privacy and that matters because something like some you know just horrible story anecdote narrative pops

up and for a little while everyone cares and they kind of scramble to get you know on Signal instead of whatever they were on or on you know we I think that's right but yeah I mean I think there's been these weight like mini spikes of like people caring but it hasn't seemingly been sustained yet um I think it's still coming so it's the conclusion we should fund more Black Mirror episodes yeah yeah freaked out well actually I think it's like real world things have to happen then people seem to keep or or you find things that are other benefits of ZK that are not strictly privacy right like there are a bunch of other benefits you get from from verifiable compute and

like those things should be the things that you push not necessarily privacy I I I'm not saying that privacy isn't the main one but I do think privacy is the one where we'll be waiting a long time or like we have this like basically infinite variance in the time you have to wait and I think that another thing that happened right which is how we got you know privacy security cryptography everywhere is it became essentially indistinguishable from not cryptography right like you write a little s in your web browser https and like all right congratulations like you got a nice little green bar that says you're chilling right but you know at the end of the day if you ask someone to describe the difference between https and HTTP it's

like okay good luck right so there's also some notion where it becomes so easy and so transparent that it's kind of obvious there's no reason to do anything else because you know why the hell would you have something that's strictly worse right I don't know this is a yeah but we're not there yet right like right now doing it in CK even if you add a little s and you have ZK is strictly slower that's right and like by a large amount yes exactly okay I think we had a question over here I'm gonna oh you have the mic perfect um so for a long time governments have been looking for ways to make online voting happen um why isn't CK the perfect solution for this because you know it's verifiable like after the facts I can go and use whatever whatever I got returned after

voting I can use it to verify oh actually my vote got tallied in the total um why isn't that a good use case I think it is a good use case it's a great use case and there have been experiments um I remember in France the last like um Parliament elections that we had French people living abroad could vote online and it did use like some form of zero knowledge proof it wasn't like fully ZK and fully bulletproof there was a lot of trust in the government so do this correctly but there was like an element of ZK sorry what part of the voting problem does ZK solve actually I actually have no idea so prove that you're a registered voter that you haven't voted yet

um that you're above a certain age that you're voting for one of the eligible candidates without revealing who you're voting for who you are Etc yeah I would actually to to continue on that idea like I've also heard about sort of not quite projects in the works or even like they're sort of thinking there's been basically inquiries by governments to learn more about that I mean that's even come through some of the you know things that we've been doing I've heard about that so I think your point is good I think the timing is not there yet also I think tooling for a long time was not there and I think trust in it is not quite there like I think there needs to be sort of like you

know great tools that can be well understood that are super well vetted that people feel comfortable with somewhere out in the world then you do a project just to try it out with some government somewhere and then that's kind of proven and then like that's how it would happen I actually think we are kind of at stage like between stage one and stage two and bad so not yet I'll add a few comments like it's like online payments at first like people like don't pay online like don't don't put your credit card information ever and today we're fine just like writing in our car details on the website and just throwing it off so there's been some kind of mentality change if yes I can trust that if I put my things here https we're all good the other thing is there are still challenges that aren't result and one of

the big ones is civil resistance like how do I make sure that they aren't the same user making a bunch of like Bots essentially and voting and that's ZK alone doesn't solve and I think we're still trying to figure out the best way to do it I also would say I think like an online Internet native institution would be the first real consumer governments are just inevitably going to have like too high a bar and like they have to cater to the least common denominator like to be able to use the system and that places huge ux constraints on the developers of these systems uh to the point about the https and the lock the lock took a long time and it took a lot

of like standardization we took a lot of browser changes um I kind of think ZK just hasn't figured out what his lock is it doesn't have like a way of proving to the user that without this proof you get the wrong answer right like there's no there's there's no ux for it I mean using a ZK Mobile Wallet makes me want to just commit to puku like it's like a horrible experience there's a question there's actually a question right here um so we got it jumping back on the Privacy aspect of ZK I think the focus is too much on the consumer which might doesn't care in the end about privacy even though he might want it so you might want to shift the perspective to the businesses

because they do have the incentive to not have to store all this data because of the regulation especially in Europe with the gdpr so if you give them the opportunity to not having to store those confidential data and just have like single proofs for those especially that for example proof of identity then they may be pushed financially speaking to actually integrate it which is good for the user and good for them that means though that we're going to have ZK SAS products oh dear I mean not oh dear it's a thing kyc right like ZK kyc so you sign up to some exchange rather than having to send all your personal information and they

have to like you know respect gdpr and save these things correctly that's really good use case yeah although I mean for businesses it could be all sorts of things I think you can also like the you don't want to share you want to pay on chain you don't want to share the incomes of everyone in your team to each other whatever there's like or your suppliers or there's like always been these ideas of how to do that yeah that was what applies to it for example if you want to prove that as a business you have certain Financial abilities but you don't want to share the entire bank statement or you're like yeah everything you can just make a proof as well it just create there are no business there or there's very few I'm sorry to go back to SAS businesses but and I know they're very untrendy so

much sass but like there there aren't very I think there's a couple projects I've seen in sort of around the ZK space who like hint at doing something like that but it's just very untrendy right now in our ecosystem it seems but like maybe that's the way that happens like you almost need like a bridge like it might be like living on some Network deep cryptography you have some SAS business that interfaces to an existing businesses they don't need to know what's happening under the hood yeah and the middle it's this middleware oh I I will I will not why I got into this industry I I will I will it's a needed it's a needed thing I will say you know like from the perspective of like businesses that have to cooperate

with each other share some information but not all their information for some reason almost all the products that do that use on PC like I don't think there's that many that try to even consider as UK so but are they there do those businesses full businesses yeah it's record like Google and like apple have an NPC thing between you know and cloudflare right like it's actually between data centers and it's like it's not like a very consumer use case of NPC but it is it is actually quite a big use case between businesses that don't want to like share all their information we want to share some targeted thing especially for incident response and stuff but it's extremely Niche right it's like these tech companies building

their own little like private NPC stuff between them so but yeah there's no ZK at that there's another question here oh yeah there's one over here oh you no did we answer we have Mary Mary has a question over there oh sorry I think Mary oh yeah actually I think Mary had her hand up first running sorry this is actually going back to the online voting thing there are actually some technical concerns with that which would make me really not want to recommend recommending that use case a big one being that if you have people's votes encrypted and public then there

does not exist an encryption scheme that is secure today that we know will be secure 10 years from now that just does not exist yeah forward secrecy is definitely a hard part problem but there are expiring ckps so yeah I mean that that topic we did this episode recently and actually I just had a conversation before about this the post-quantum cryptography and then the cryptography for quantum and uh and yeah that that sort of that's the crazy thing about like even all that we're building like if it gets broken eventually then all those past Secrets could be revealed which is kind of

terrifying and I know that maybe wasn't what you were you meant but yeah with your knowledge it's not the case like the the Privacy guarantees your knowledge is perfect uh but with encryption it is the problem and that's why like encrypted votes is a problem encrypted uh data about your genome if you've done any of those like 23andMe tests you know if if that ciphertext is public anywhere someone can like keep it for a while then try to hack it later and they'll they'll find out yeah so I guess I think you weren't mentioning that though you were just saying like there are no systems today same problem that you'd feel comfortable with

um I think you have the you have the next question yeah okay about like new kind of focus on the old ones because like there is you know everybody is like well ZK is for privacy kind of like let's forget about succinos and all it's tough because it's like not exactly okay but whatever so um back to privacy right so we are working hard on like creating new proven systems right it's like newborn system every like three months or something like that and it's fine right it was like maybe it makes sense to kind of work on abstracting it away from the user so that we don't have to look for new ZK

use cases but we can like develop a stable um I don't know um kind of structure for it so that users don't know that they use ZK for privacy or whatever they just use something and we just work on making this something accessible and then behind that there is a ZK and I guess for that it kind of requires to like work on the old use cases do you mean like standards um not exactly standards but I guess like more thinking about like you know how to improve what we do now like the the project that we have now that provide privacy instead of like creating a new project that does something like I

don't know private voting private something it's like you know kind of like you have chairs right and like you don't like come up with like new exciting way to use chairs every week right and just like make it as comfortable as possible and then people just sit in it and they'll but isn't that kind of happening like don't you feel like some of the like those teams that have built a lot of stuff they're like they're wait they're waiting and hoping that people will start building on top of them so it's like abstracted away from them yeah I mean I agree uh it just kind of felt like you know people feel a little bit upset about like lack of new exciting ZK use cases I mean in a sense that's what like ZK VMS are they're simply abstracting the

underlying ZK they just say look we give you a guarantee you compile to X language whatever it is or you write X language and we'll interpret it for you and you don't ever have to think about ZK acceptanceofar as you do something like whatever proof.verify and then that returns true or whatever right so I I think people are doing that I mean I think there's still plenty of unfortunate technical details that do have to go into some of it um I mean with zero being one that is like trying to avoid as much as possible but many other VMS certainly are right some are blockchain specifics are not um but yeah I mean I think I think it's starting right certainly like it's recognized so this is a huge pain Point

like why the hell should I have to give a crap about like the underlying field of you know whatever provinces might give a crap about right and when in reality I should just be able to write you know as an you know old part like C or something right and to have that you know correctly execute and compile with what I remember yeah I mean one way another way of thinking about it is that there's no there just hasn't been like the tensorflow mode even though now everyone kind of shits on tensorflow if you think about it in 2012 that was like 2013 when it came out it was like that was the thing that enabled a lot of people to like go try training models uh who had you know no training or anything they just followed some guides and they're able to like their way

through something and then it seemed to work and then you know it kind of spun out and grew and then of course people made better and more and more easy Frameworks right like literally you know pytorch is extraordinarily easy um and there's a sense image no one seems to care that much about doing that DK land is or not no one but it definitely feels like everyone goes for like let's have this amazing functional language and make someone have to think so much about like storage structures and like I I just don't think any of these people already talk to a JavaScript developer grab back the uh the mic the the theme because

we had a few questions and actually you sort of just hinted at one of them which is that definition of ZK which I think is kind of controversial I feel like I have a slightly controversial take on this so a few months ago I guess it's now a few months ago Justin thaler at a16z published an article with these like misconceptions about ZK and one of them was very much about like the word ZK the way it's being used we just hinted at it with like ZK zero knowledge for privacy versus sort of parts of snarks for succinctness it's actually not ZK anymore but it still falls under the umbrella so I just

sort of wanna since I have a room full of CK people and succinct people should we you know what what do you make of that should we still use ZK as the umbrella term or not so I think there's like a type system right and like at the highest level when someone says ZK and like it depends on the context in which it's like measured right it's like another Singleton yeah so this is a single tin and then there's like a partial order right but the point is like when someone says zkn and then it's in this context it's in good company and polite company you wouldn't want to say this but but in this company we're all a bit weird so it's fine uh it refers to everything that's fine you say ZK assisting proofs are all the same synced arguments uh whatever you want all ZK yeah uh the

second that you step out into the real world and you say ZK to someone like you've lost like you've automatically lost right you that's that's when you get you know you you put on your nicest like whatever fancy dress or whatever right and then you go to someone you're like okay like I don't know we talk about accessing proofs we talk about synced arguments and when we talk about zero knowledge we really do mean zero knowledge right everything else just parses differently in a different context exactly so when you go out in the fancy dress you have to use ZK properly you have to yeah properly that's correct those are the people who might get confused that's right the one who can't make the difference

and they think they're using something private when they're not there's a problem whereas probably in this room if I say ZK to people they'll know to check oh is this privacy or just scalability exactly I I think maybe a somewhat more pragmatic thing for that maybe people in this room might appreciate more though is that ZK as a shelling point for a term that investors could glom on to was extremely successful exactly it was very successful for fundraising like and every single person in this room who raised any type of capital owes it to all of the people who basically branded everything is one thing and then sold it as a bucket to limited partners and other people as a thing to fund and

fundamentally that actually funded a lot of this stuff so like you know you can you can kind of bash the the non-cognizanti who who get confused but half of you don't have jobs no no I agree but it's more like protection and avoiding the foot gun of calling something private when it's not I'm just saying it's the type of thing that you can't go backwards on like look people yeah turn this Meme and the meme is like what you know so ZK CK roles right yeah start going inside so sorry I guess my my main point was I would not deem talking to investors polite company like your entire argument was predicated okay yeah so I I like that you're dissing

yourself there that's part okay but you know add to this so I think you highlighted the fundraising part but I also think that like catchy short terms like Mev like ZK also capture mind share even when they're kind of peripheral maybe not exactly and so I as someone who's named a lot of my company's products newsletter I did that first letter wasn't about their knowledge we had zero knowledge it was about scalability no it wasn't even about that

um but yeah I my sense is the sort of the camaraderie the the TR it is a bit of a branding thing it like at this at this moment or so far it's also seemed like a good Center Point for attracting talent and people who want to learn and get excited and you there's a community and that's that's special and I really think you're a fan of The Vibes the ZK Vibe VK stands I think it's very obvious that I am a fan of The Vibes so in the same way we have like the https if the Privacy equivalent of this s is ZK then we have a problem if we

have another way of signifying privacy then I'm happy to call everything ZK I mean that's that's accurate especially if the properties of ZK are being very like very much communicated and then they're not being delivered I think that would be very dangerous I think that's what a lot of the arguments against calling everything CK say but I think what might happen instead is that ZK as a term just becomes kind of it's not immediately a so like I think that's actually happened I don't know that ZK is associated with only privacy anymore that's right so it as a term does not signify private for the record

I blame the roll-ups yeah they they literally caused this this wait one problem even the Roll-Ups basically we're like Hey we're we're generating xeronaut proofs and and they call themselves okay roll up snarks uh yeah yeah sorry they started they generated snarks but then they like basically started branding themselves as UK and then they raised a ton of money doing that and they've convinced everyone who buys tokens that yeah actually tarun I think it went the other way I think a lot of those teams were at zk1 zk2 they were ZK companies and then they focused on this actually and there's a lot of examples they started to focus on the scalable because it was less scary

and more there's more potential upside sorry yeah yeah maybe you're right it goes back to fundraising but the names a little bit but the names remained like the names were made and actually a lot of those teams were incredible contributors to early libraries like they they have the legitimacy in a way to be in they were in the space they were there early but they just shifted and I think that's where where that weird Legacy comes from there was also some teams playing on the ambiguity where the website would advertise ZK snark ZK snark or ZK Stark ZK Stark but then the actual system that they're building and that they get people to use

ignores the ZK part yeah right so I don't know but yeah I mean since then I think there's been teams yeah yeah a lot of people have rolled back ones they were originally zero knowledge zero zero knowledge the zkzk a I guess yeah maybe the highest level of way of thinking about it Zeke's just like a term of endearment right that's that's maybe the best way Mr Mrs doctor ml space do we have a lot of people like branding things ml which isn't ml yeah like yeah so how do they solve it there's a ton of AI companies in the Philippines

ml s so I I will say one interesting kind of observation about this is people who are doing layer ones or like pure new chains they actually seem to respect the Privacy aspect of the moniker but people who are doing Roll-Ups don't give a and and I know some of you will take offense of that but fundamentally Roll-Ups only really care about this like compression aspect for Aztec okay they're real most Roll-Ups don't like just they really don't care because it's also fundamentally like not they have to do so much more work to be private versus like an L1 where they can build it in so there was also this kind of fork philosophically between the two of

them that I think caused this insane disambiguation but then they also both need to raise money at the same time so then they sold the same term so back to the fundraising I I think I think I think I think it does it does bow down to that yeah Fair but I do think we we profited from it still we have to acknowledge that oh for sure I made it to 10 of these ten I know right yeah okay is there there was one question oh I think it was on a past topic yeah we're gonna I think we're gonna um no it wasn't a Passover but we can move on um so for let's see I wanted to continue on there was a topic about ZK crossovers so you kind of mentioned zkml

uh there's I'm curious about what your thoughts are like you've been you've mentioned a number of times like MPC there is a ZK MPC crossover there's zkfhe there's zkmev their ZK defy I guess that's dkm DK D5 is more legit than zkmev at this point in time what are those two things given that everyone just wants to use sgx but uh I mean honest truth uh it's Emmy m-e-v-t-e yeah yeah different crossover episode there I feel like you got to make some like swag for this like all the Crossovers

all the Crossovers it's like a shoe drop yeah like an Anna Street what do you think oh that might happen one day right I'm so into that have you guys seen our swag game it's getting good it's really like socks all right it sucks I don't know books but what was the cool thing that we did was it cool what tea bags this time yeah we're in London I don't know if you guys saw that those little squares are tea bags for zk10 but yeah I think like going back to just that crossover ZK crossover episodes what are the like which ones do you think are legit and which ones do you think are kind of like I wouldn't say there's legit and

non-legit but some of them are like ZK as a thin rapper over something else but like we're just doing this thing that we used to do in a ZK circuit and other ones where like we are just changing the things that we're doing so like ZK and PC and like the ability to generate proofs as like a committee that's new and that's very interesting um zkml is very interesting in its promise and what comes out of it but in terms of like the research it is just like can I run a big ZK circuit Izzy KML real yeah yeah absolutely okay um and it's a wonderful engineering effort I don't know if it's a it's a

graphic effort right which Z camera sort of hints at maybe or maybe that's me like reading too much into it and again like reading ZK and getting angry so that's that's I mean you're saying it's like a rapper do you mean like the work is not in the ZK part the work is in building circuits and adapters for ML to be compatible with ZK proof systems and that's super hard um so it is but it's the work isn't in the zip code which side are they adapting though are they adapt because like I've kind of heard both like adapt the ZK side or adapting the ml side but I mean I don't know what's got more potential I feel like ml must be way more developed you've got to adapt ZK

right I'm assuming I don't know so far I it's not like I've seen drastic changes to proof systems for ML it's okay so they are existing incredible uses of existing arithmetization like super smart ways of doing it um but it's not like someone came up with a proof system specifically for ML Guillermo and I were actually just having this conversation earlier which is that in fact it's actually a travesty no one is making specific proof systems for ML because things we have folding schemes are perfect for matrix multiplication and like doing optimizing for like these operations instead of optimizing for a VM it feels like you know you're kind of like there is a simple calculation shoving it into a big

circuit big VM just so your general purposing can execute it and then generating a small proof versus special purpose proving and in some ways ml is in general statistical calculations are just way better when there's tons of special purpose stuff done huh I mean I think it's that's right yeah like like fundamentally there's like you know when you build a processor right the entire point of the process that it can execute anything right but this is not true of ml ml isn't executing anything anticipating a very specific set of instructions like 500 million times right so so fundamentally it's kind of you know we're doing all this wasted effort reducing one thing to another and then doing the other reduction and whatever up until kind of if we get to the end but it doesn't you don't really need to do all of that it

just suffices to kind of like get good so the comment you just made about the folding though is is the work unfolding leading to improving systems that would be better suited for zkml so there is this one repo on called zater which uses folding to sort of um compute different layers of the like ml whatever's going on there I'm not familiar with that but essentially like yeah but they they use folding to sort of like scratch that down into one layer and then prove just that so yeah there are like more integrated use uses of like ZK tools interesting and there's more to be done

because like these proof systems for generic circuits you pay an overhead by making it generic we don't need that yeah and there's a lot of known optimizations in the ml side that like a lot of the calculations are actually very like repeated patterns like most the models have like computation that's repeated multiple times even like something like a boosted tree or just like a forest of boosted trees those are very regular calculations they're not like extremely irregular like worst case Behavior calculations and in some sense it's almost a travesty that almost a lot of the work in in zkml has definitely focused on like getting out the initial

prototypes which have been like take a really simple calculation but then put it into this very complicated machine and that translation layer actually adds a lot of overhead um but I think I suspect by next year we'll see some very good special purpose I do want to remind the audience that if you have any comments or things you want to add just remember to put your hand up we'll we'll call on you we'll bring a mic over um I want to kind of keep going with those crossovers though so we've kind of we've covered you say zkmev it doesn't exist no no I I was I was at the Mev conference giving a talk and I I I I I made this point that I was like almost all the mitigation mechanisms of different things we were talking about

were pretty useless unless you had fhe and they were like fhe now we're fine with just like using sgx for everything so it's like it's just like I don't think people in Mev land they only kind of care about performance they don't care about verifiability in a strong manner so it's just Community they're culturally distinct and don't care let's look at putting it yeah it's like a like anthropologically different you know like completely the value system is like orthogonal yeah okay CK fhe so it's cool yeah so last year I mean I think at the last Summit we had ravitel speak on ZK and and actually I had had her on the show right around that

time she introduced me to the idea that there's such thing as ZK it was lattice base ckps which you kind of need if you're working with fhe similar thing right where you're like adjusting the ZK proving system the kinds of maths underneath so they match to one of these crossovers and I mean she was very much she's very pragmatic and she's like it's not ready it's gonna take some time but it made me interested there was not a ton of work so what do we mean by zkfhe like I give you a proof that I run something correctly and that something happens to be on encrypted data yeah I wouldn't be able to Define it okay I think she defined it well on that episode but it was it was definitely like using them in tandem maybe you just said it correctly I'm not entirely sure I just remember

her talking about altering the math right of the on the ZK side or the type yeah the type of okay so what I just described is again just a thin wrapper okay of ZK around what fhg is already doing so I take encrypted data I do some calculations I give it back to you you can decrypt if I now approve that I did my calculation correctly I'm just doing just ZK as usual by the way if somebody here like we're talking to an audience of like extras on this thing is someone going yeah yeah I think we just yeah Define it for us I still actually have no idea what this is so I think I think the definition is correct but it's it's hotter than that because of course it's hard okay yeah because it's not just a thin rapper I think that I mean there's

probably like cryptographers in the room that that can go into into more details but the maths don't really align so you can't just like use existing proof systems and hope to to prove an fhe circuit so so sorry here's here's the dumb question so essentially what it is is we can think of kind of fhe you can do very few calculations and then essentially you have some sort of Oracle call that says I need someone else to perform a computation uh and you would provide me a proof that the competition was done correctly uh and then so it is it like is that correct yeah that would be these kind of things but I guess I'm not I'm not too sure what ravitalis is talking about but I guess the low hanging fruit in a way is that you do need some form of proofs to

to make like some fhe use cases work because if you can for as you were saying like if you have an Oracle and you can ask like a decryption uh of an fat ciphertext which is could be like the reason of something that has been Computing with fat you can like spam this Oracle with like correctly formed ciphertext but that are random in a way it can very easily like extract the secret key of the of the fhe scheme so you do need some kind of proof that you knew the Sci-Fi the original plain text that was encoded to lead to this computation that produced the results otherwise you're screwed and very quickly screwed so interesting okay and and to ruin I I disagree like the Meb people care about fhe

[Laughter] I think the there are people who think they do but oh yeah if you talk to them and ask them like what they want out of these systems and why they're engineering them a certain way then they like to give you a completely different answer than their philosophical answer they find I mean I think I think what you mean is that the the Mev Searchers they only care about the speed no no I mean I literally am talking about like people designing the auctions right the people building the auctions they all are like we like fhe but it's actually too annoying for us to use so we're going to do this sgx thing and then hope that one day we just cross over and it works perfectly but I care about fhe and you work in that I'm with flashbots you know

it's a pragmatic thing it's like yeah we we care about like making things available for end users and whether we like it or not it's true that sgx is probably like the most primary Choice today but we would love to have fhe and and probably you know down the line it pro means like some kind of like fat plus ZK if we could uh but of course it's like you know way way Triple Threat so we'll see I guess yeah the acronyms Mev z-k-f-h-e no one will know what we're talking about at all very good so maybe I mean what's ruin might be getting at as well as like you could probably create systems now right which fhe is very limited and what it can do right and I guess the point is

you know instead of creating complicated systems which you can then just stick into a te and then hope fhe gets good enough that you just Port it over right you could imagine creating like fairly you have to go pretty deep into the guts of these systems right and construct you know things that can be delegated very small tasks that could be delegated to fhe right just enough to give you privacy but it requires rethinking what you know auctions or things like that yeah it doesn't look the same AST changes no absolutely I think I think that's the right way of doing it it's like either you want to read something quick and then you wrap the whole thing in the te or you manage to carve out like part of the protocol part of the use cases and you make it happen into into an fhe

circuit totally yeah yeah okay nice okay the last one that I had on my list I know we had we have ZK MPC but I don't know if we have if we see experts here that like there was a project there was like there are a few there was a few projects over the years I I actually don't know that combo but I almost wonder is that a similar thing where it's like a rapper no that's more can people who have parts of a secret generated ZK proof together in a way that prove something about that secret that we all have or like that we put together but without ever really revealing our stars of The Secret okay so that's more in the weeds or more

integrated actually as if it's architecture I feel like this is like not zkx it's almost the other way of operation it should be NPCs okay exactly in that case like the it's almost like the NPC that's a wrapper around ZK like you're doing MPC over a ZK proof okay it may be MPC ZK is like oh yeah wait you have to wait because this is we need to get your audio is this uh Secrets shared between all of the users all of the uh like so there are different models yeah one of them is uh if I have a secret but I don't have the capacity to prove anything about it I'll secret share it like I'll do shares of

it give one share to some cloud service another share to another cloud service and together they can sort of make a proof or like I think each one of them makes their own proof and at the end I combined the two proofs into one real proof about the secret I had that's one model the other model is um I know part of a secret Guillermo knows the other part tarun knows the other parts but we don't want to reveal to each other what parts we know but yet the three of us want to prove something to Anna about the aggregate secret that we know how do we do that right interesting and do you have some kind of uh threshold cryptography plus ZK so like we all know a shared secret and like uh if a bunch

of us like gather together and create a so so back check me on this one but I think the first model I discussed of um secret shares like one person knows the secret produce secret shares and distribute them out I think you can do like uh two out of five thing and with only two people producing proofs for you that's enough okay but you're also reducing your like sort of uh trust budgets where now if only two of these people collude they'll find your full secret yeah yeah do you know any like names that I can search about this yes yes it's a paper I know produce Mrs on it I don't know who I forgot who else is this is eos not to be mistaken for Brock Pearson for Eos

the blockchain oh when I saw that I was like odd gaming which was presented at ZK Summit a while back I think seven in Africa yeah that's when I was like what is this you get a chance to say something um to go back to mpcndk I think we have it actually both ways because we have on one hand uh as you say you want to produce a proof and the witness is going to be provided from different people and so they have to collaborate in creating this proof I think there's a paper I heard that there's a paper from danbone about this but you also have MPS in the

heads which is we're going to use NPC techniques to produce a ZK proof and so it's reversed routines for NPC protocols like there's there's a lot of crossover yeah yeah okay so the course of us are both ways both ways but you just just to make sure I heard it was MPC in the head yeah yeah and that was like Nigel smart I think he was he part of that he works on that yeah yeah I had him on the show at the time I think he was doing that by the way I said that for most things like any topic will address in cryptography like at this point what haven't you had that is there something that's like the big gaping hole after like so many years that you're like 200 missing I'm sure a

lot but come on is there something that comes to mind that's like oh this is the thing that's like well all the pretty much like most of these crossover ones I have not talked about so this is very interesting I want to explore them um just so you know any any and this is also to the audience potentially listening later anything we're mentioning here we'll add we will have show notes we'll be able to put links to the previous episodes and everything so we'll try to dig those up vkd5 it's not really uh the same kind of acronym you said there's a lot yeah I think there's stuff I think the main thing you have to remember is that like the ZK is not a Panacea so there was like I think 2020 2021 there were just like so many of these teams are like oh we're

doing ZK uniswap and they like did it mindlessly without thinking and then you know we wrote a bunch of papers that show when that doesn't work and you can only I mean and as acknowledged on them actually because you were the reason why we wrote the paper yeah it's so nice we've evolved since then I think people have kind of realized like oh I can't just like throw ZK and like hope that people won't pay attention um because people do care about the Privacy aspects in defy quite a bit actually um I think some of the things are like auctions so like designs for particular types of Mev auctions that usually can that's maybe closer to to that type of stuff but I think there's also a lot of stuff on Cross chain D5 for proving

properties about collateral on another chain such that you can use it locally and that is actually sort of like a weaker form of a bridge uh so there's definitely a lot of stuff in that vein I think a lot of it is just uh you know kind of slowly being built up right now I think in the layer two world where there's like many Roll-Ups with these kind of somewhat shared sequencing aspects um a lot of the the partial adamancy guarantees are coming from ZK and so that but it it it it it's it's more like evolutionary rather than revolutionary to do fine I just remembered that work and even that show we did this show I think where we talked about it it was such a sanity check at the time to the kinds of claims being made like there

were so many like private decks private decks like all immense different things to different people I remember your work really was like a a little bit of like a lightning like hey let's wake like let's get out of this weird stupor we're in let's be realistic this is not some of those claims are not possible I think it shifted people who are in that to like take it into account change direction be a little bit smarter it really I I remember that feeling of like and the teams responded yeah uh not not some some teams not so kindly but um yeah yeah I've got some there were some emails um the cross chain stuff is way way more of the and that's now though right that's and this is kind of

referring to your talk where it's like intense and you start to like I I'm not vain I actually think one of the interesting things that hasn't really happened a lot is you know um we're preoccupied a lot with what's possible Right like a lot of ZK is like okay what what can we do with this um and I think one of the things that I haven't seen a lot in the field is actually impossibility results like when things can't like if you only have ZK and you don't have any other guarantees what can't you do right like in some sense there's a bunch of questions like I mean one of them happens to be privacy indexes is really not achievable with just ZK you have to actually get smart about how you do a bunch of these things um but but more broadly right you can

imagine that that there's a lot of these crossovers that actually don't make sense you know one exam I don't think this is true but one example is like you know maybe there really isn't like a Panacea for zkml and it requires a lot of communication to actually get things done and that place is abound on how well you're likely to do right how fast you can run a given model or something of the like so it's kind of interesting like I mean I guess uh this gets us is like I I think there is a place right now for kind of the the more negative work that outlines what the boundaries of what we can do are in CK and then what we actually need to enable thing like further applications you know I feel like we're getting close to the edge of what's possible but

it's still very fuzzy you know in both theoretical sense and the Practical one I think I mean I have one last topic that I wanted to cover which is a little bit about like the trajectory of ZK and where we are this is you know the name of this the state of ZK um as a project I mean so ZK Summit one was in 2018 beginning between like early 2018. I think that was around the same time we named the show zero knowledge and it went I like I remember the first summit was 100 people

110 people the second Summit was packed people were very excited and then it went down again which was like a lot of fun as an event planner and then it sort of slowly slowly meandered along got a little bit bigger and then in the last two years especially I mean you can see it in the events the events is like one metric you don't all see this but I can see it in the show like the listen you know the the download count on the show you see these like spikes but yeah like I I mean I have a sense a little bit for like at least the metrics that I have access to but where are we on that ZK scale like have we just gone through almost a

delayed ZK bull market just so you know this like as the crypto Market crashed ZK took off it was very strange like my metrics went up when everyone went down and I was like we're Defying Gravity people this is amazing but yeah like and I will say this you know ZK CK 10 we've made it to 10 but I will say like currently on our metrics is sort of leveled it's not we're not getting the big swoops up anymore and I'm I'm totally cool with that I find those swoops kind of scary they weird me out a little bit I like slow and steady that's my way but I'm just curious what you guys think about that

like from where you're sitting is ZK sorry before we get to that I actually want to say like it is insane and Alex Turner and I were just talking about this which is you said the first ZK event the first cks I met was in March of 2018. we were just talking about the fact that like what existed in 2018 see cash maker though yeah right but like okay is that ZK now like uh are you doing a thing like that that exists the fact that that was the only thing that existed exactly right it's zcash and but it was Z cash and a lot of like and research groups and Universities at the time Berkeley like I don't even know if Alessandra had already started his but there were some Berkeley people no he probably had and Dan bonet's group

and I'm sure and I'm sure there were others for sure like Ellie I'm sure fry paper was around then right yeah yeah 20 yeah but it was Tiny and also we weren't on the map so like I was kind of lucky that ZK researchers even learned about it it was it was so yeah this is what I'm getting I was like how did you have like the like big brain Vision to be like ah yes ZK is the thing that will like eBay you know this story maybe I know this I'm sure you all know this story so do you know the story is anyone know the story the podcast for the first okay we're gonna do a little history of the podcast for the you can all listen to it don't the first 11 episodes are terrible but if you go back to the beginning of

zero launch podcast we had no name we were this podcast welcome to I think that's what Frederick would say like this podcast my old co-host and then around episode 11 I think it's around there we're like we have a name we're the zero knowledge podcast because and I don't know if we said it but we were thinking it because we have zero knowledge not not the cryptography and Zeke this is the truth in this position and then I had just like want I mean so I had a startup before assess based startup by the way

which is where my disdain comes from but um yeah like I had done events I think we had thrown parties with my old uh company and I knew that they were just cool they were like fun to do and I wanted to do an event around the podcast so something something Summit became insert name of the show a placeholder zero knowledge Summit this event started incredible and we had named it by then we I mean I had I think I had met Zuko too and I was like trying to get him on the show and I was trying to definitely like get zero knowledge people to come and I'm like I was you know we did know what it was we weren't

completely pulling it out of the air like I was working at the time in an engineering team we knew that zkp's existed but they were still pretty far away from us um but yeah and that's how the first summit came to be and actually what happened is we sent out the invite for it the you know I think it was still application only at the time it was kind of the the crypto bull market so it was more just because there's you know could have been a lot of random people coming who wouldn't have been very technical but someone passed it over I think it was Howard Wu got it and he was like I want to apply to the ZK pod the ZK Summit and I'm gonna bring like eight of my cryptography friends who do ZK and at the same time Zuko was like we

have someone on our team who's up for coming strad who's here actually today um and then strad yeah and strad came and so we had those two kind of people strads started it off he was the first talk Howard was the second as far as I remember and then there was a few others and then we but the event was also a lot of just like random blockchain who was local we were in Berlin but yeah that's how that started wow and then every Summit after after the less other oh no no actually no not full like maybe like 90 CK but it was like getting there that's the story

that was like a lot of story time no that was and actually the audience of this show like the audience like I have told this story on the show before I haven't heard the story or I mean not on the show at least but does that destroy the magic for everyone fake it till you make it as a well-trodden in this industry just look at tether faked it though I don't think I've ever pretended to be like good at this I don't know so anyway so I didn't mean to derail too too far sorry I'm like where's the cat this is the question this is the trajectory of ZK now I'm sorry I interrupted you like so the metric I have is sort of research and the pace at which it's coming out and also I have a

very like short time frame that I'm looking at because I joined very recently but it still feels like it's super fast and it's probably going getting faster okay so as far as I'm concerned like speed lots of speed still lots of energy and on that trajectory yeah all the papers started on the bull market are being finished they're being edited as we speak and coming out of the oven um I I yeah I think we've maybe you think is the wrong term I hope we've hit like a bit of an apex right it seems like the more Normie channel so to speak have have stopped like raving about ZK and now we're kind of left with um more more slow maybe more deliberate

work I I want to call research slow or deliberate in any way but but it's the closest thing that we have so I think it feels like that's kind of continuing on um but I feel like the the frenzy of getting in now and doing ZK as quickly as possible I feel like has slowed and that that feels very good in a lot of yes it sounds like kind of quality yeah and yeah exactly and sometimes I just say that that's what I'm thinking it's like right qualities there yeah um I think I agree with both those points but I'll give maybe the the unfortunate capitalism point which is that I will say investments in ZK seem to be down quite a bit yeah so if you're trying to raise the CK

fund you might have missed the boat because I think like six months ago would have been the ideal time not not that I'm not trying to be the Devi down here okay like I'm just trying to say the facts so I believe we 've actually getting we're getting that what what what's that stick the cane the thing that pulls you off stage oh what is it what are those calls yeah yeah what are they actually called the cane I think it's a cane yeah and they're just like the like hooked cane that pulls you off stage in those cartoons from the 20s whatever that is we're getting it um I've been told now multiple times I we I we need to wrap it up so I want to thank you all for listening to this panel for can we can

we end with each person on stage giving the prediction for what will happen in 2024. oh okay yeah okay okay we have to be quick though I am getting the signals okay what's 20 24. I predict we will have our first application and it will not look like anything talked about here um but it will probably be used in a way that probably discusss the purity of people working on the perfect systems Debbie Downer there's always find a way I think it's going to be gambling I think there's going to be it's going to be some type of speculatory yeah I don't have a real prediction I

mean I I think like we're just gonna see like more of the culmination of the current wave of research actually becoming more real but I I don't know if I have a prediction for what that means like you know kind of an animal level like at the base of your stem level you know like I I just it's kind of like oh cool continues um I think we'll probably see client-side proofs that are fast enough to not be too annoying like fast enough to be almost usable almost okay I I I I don't think I even have time to think of one I'm actually getting signals from people that like I think they're holding the door closed so we don't get actually thrown out all right thank you so much to to the panelists thank you so much to this audience and the questions you just gave

us thanks for uh having a live ZK podcast episode with us I think it's like kind of what it's like um and obviously thank you so much for coming to the zero knowledge Summit 10 . thank you again to this team for putting it on really and there's Agni say thank you to her say thank you to everyone here but especially Agni yeah and uh I think I'm supposed to say something thank you to the podcast team and to our listeners thanks for listening there we go [Laughter]