Episode 344 - ZK Events 2024 Recap

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero 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 NCO and I do a recap of the past year in ZK events that my team and I have hosted or have produced specifically covering ZK Summit 11 and the more recent ZK Summit 12 we chat about the talks and themes that stood out share a bit about how these events

are produced and how the program is created we also end the podcast discussing and summarizing some of the most exciting panels and specifically The Meta themes this year that got us talking I just want to do a quick shout out to the ZK Summit production team since I didn't get a chance to mention them in the episode so big thank you for working with me and producing these amazing events thank you Agy Rachel Natalia Hana and Henrik this is the crew working behind the scenes to make these events as amazing as they are and as memorable as they are so thanks to you guys uh I also want to say a thank you to the sponsors who came on board for zk1 zk2 and this podcast for the year I mean this is where the revenue for the

show comes from and I really appreciate you guys supporting us so so as some of you know after this episode I will be taking a break from the show and so this will be our last weekly episode until the end of the year my teams over at ZK podcast as well as the team over at ZK hack and I produced four major events this year two ZK Summits and two ZK hacks along with many other events content the ZK whiteboard sessions as well as this show I'm also working on another business in the form of zkv yes it's a lot and so I need a bit of time to reset I might be recording one or two episodes over the next few months but I wanted to take a break from this weekly

Cadence that said there's a lot of action going on around it for example the ZK whiteboard sessions a little plug for ZK whiteboard sessions this is a video content Series where hosts Tracy and Nico go over the details of specific ZK systems optimizations as well as architectures these whiteboard sessions are supported by the ZK grants round which was co-funded by the ethereum foundation Aztec polygon scroll Tao and ZK sync so it's been really cool to get to produce that and I do think of the ZK whiteboard sessions as a bit of a replacement to this show because it will be airing every two weeks over the next three months while we're taking a break so don't forget to check that out now before we kick off with this episode I

did want to point you towards the ZK jobs board there you can find job opportunities to work with top teams in ZK I also want to encourage teams looking for top talent to post your jobs there as well we've been hearing from more and more teams that have used this jobs board that they found excellent Talent through it so be sure to check out the ZK jobs board we've added the link in the show notes now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsors today's episode is sponsored by 01 Labs have you heard of 01 Labs they've been Pioneers in zero knowledge since its early days driving the programmable cryptography Revolution with projects like Mina protocol the first ZK powered blockchain live since 2021 Mina's decentralized platform is

creating the foundation for a new internet built on privacy and Trust from 0js their SDK for simplifying ZK development to 0 VM pushing the limits of ZK VMS ow Labs is working directly with the community to build tools that unlock new possibilities ow Labs envisions an internet where developers use programmable cryptography to create more powerful applications and that internet needs Mina visit ow labs. or and join them as they shape the future for the ZK powered internet so thanks again 01 Labs today's episode is sponsored by Alo a new era of decentralized privacy preserving Computing is here Alo a layer one blockchain powered by zero knowledge

cryptography recently announced their main net launch now developers can build applications that take advantage of Alia's unique combination of permissionless programmability and privacy start by learning their domain specific programming language Leo write and deploy your first ZK application at leo.org or head on over to al.org to learn more about their technology and what you can build Alo this is zero knowledge without compromises so thanks again Alo and now here's our [Music] episode so I'm here today with Nico we've just wrapped up the ZK Summit 12 week here in Lisbon hey Nico hey Anna nice to be here when we started prepping

this we were like let's just do zk1 12 in review but actually as we sat down to do this interview I realized that I had never done a review of zk1 in Athens and actually you and I have crossed path on a bunch of projects this year so I thought we could do a little bit of like mapping of the year in terms of events and some of the special Productions that we did yeah 100% so yeah let's start there going back to the beginning of the year I was wearing a different hat the zik hack hat and and we were doing ZK hack online we did the live ZK hack jargon decoder session oh yes yeah that was chaotic to say the least chaotic we learned a few things about you know

moderating and interviewing and and answering questions um I think for the listeners of this show we actually re-recorded that session which was in a little bit more of like a organized way which became the ZK jargon deoder episode which is actually an an episode with a video I'm going to link to that is it the only video episode yeah pretty much or except I think zk10 uh at the panel live exactly yeah we did the live panel and that is also a video but yeah usually the show isn't next on the list I think we said was ZK Summit 11 MH which you often refer to as the best ZK Summit I mean zk2 was epic

but zk1 was more so I think like for me there was just something everything came together kind of perfectly I think for zk1 the time of year the city like who was available what other people were ready to do cuz like basically when we did ZK Summit 11 we had the one day event that we hosted and then ingonyama put together ZK accelerate the next day yeah and then there were side events so it just meant for like it it really was like two solid events in our week I think also a lot of people had never been to Athens m a lot of the people that we know in Athens were so excited because they hadn't had very many events hosted in Athens and so there was this

sort of first time and like everyone was very very pumped yeah there's a surprisingly big like Greek community in crypto and cryptography in general yeah nice I want to come back to zk1 and kind of do a little bit of a deep dive into like what it was like but I'll keep going with our year so I went on after that with the ziki hack team to produce ZK hack crao which you were not at that was the one event the one event I missed yeah oh and Brussels you you weren't at ECC was that you putting it on no but we I mean we did things like there was a Zack Meetup there was like events that I was part of in Brussels right the next time that we saw each other was at Zack

Montreal where you were a judge yeah um so you got to hang out for that one and then web 3 Summit where you gave a talk mhm and actually I think I don't know if we've ever talked about this on the show so we did I programmed an afternoon at the web 3 Summit and it was myself you and Jim and then a like J Jim Posen from irreducible and then we did a panel originally there had actually been like five or six people who were supposed to be on that block and then it just kept like we kept getting cancellations so then it was just the three of us but I thought it was really cool like a little snapshot that was I think my favorite panel I've ever been on I think we covered a lot and we I don't know Unearthed a lot of things which were I

think good to hear for people cool yeah we'll try to dig some of these videos up also for folks like I don't know if they would have caught that one so I'll add it to the show notes around this time I think was it then that we started recording the Whiteboard sessions yeah actually even around zahak Montreal oh yes true true so yeah this summer and and now we have actually have the first module out but this summer we started putting together this new season of the ZK whiteboard sessions so maybe just some backstory for listeners in 2022 we did season one of the white ZK whiteboard sessions they were inspired very much so by like the the near whiteboard sessions I want to do the shout out because we didn't invent this

format at all I mean I don't know that they invented the format but they had like pioneered the format in our space in a way um and we together with polygon produced the first season we did 16 modules Dan Bonet did the first three um at the time of recording this episode I think we have about like 30,000 views on that first video which is like for for us in in the ZK world like quite a lot it's kind of unusual um but I know that those first three modules and maybe like some of the Whiteboard sessions after in season one have become like it's where I send people if they're trying to get into ZK for the first time I'm like I think yeah if they're like oh I don't know how what is this IOP what are these

words you're using it's like watch these three modules watch them closely because after you watch them a lot of what everybody's talking about is going to make sense yeah and so this year we were really excited that we got a grant from the ethereum foundation but also like a bunch of ZK projects they came together to do something called the ZK grants round and they gave ZK hack a grant to do the Whiteboard sessions season 2 and the learnings that we had from season one was like we had done maybe too many yeah it was a lot to produce it's like a lot to do within a year also when the hosts like have other jobs like it's not their only job interview going through the videos because like ZK hack Discord has these study groups right yeah yeah

and so we'd start with a cohort everyone would stay for the first few episodes and around module I don't know 78 people start dropping off like dramatically totally and I don't think we ever finished the whole like series with a single like study group yeah exactly so even the even the the viewers for for them it's a lot so this season we decided to instead do six modules with hopefully a seventh as a bonus I'm going to leave it there because yeah I don't want to I don't want to mystery yeah I want to leave the mystery um but we have actually as of now recorded all six of our modules yeah so we have them in the bag and we've been recording them so yeah you recorded

David and Jim over at cack Montreal like right around that event not at the event But like after the event and then you recorded oh no you recorded with Jim in Berlin eh yeah correct okay okay wait who did we record in Montreal Just David just David oh cool and there was New York with Justin Taylor oh yes and Uma Roy I think yeah but those are those are with host Tracy who our audience hasn't seen yet because we haven't released any of those episodes yet but oh actually I think this show comes out the day before the second module should come out so yes if anyone's listening now keep your eyes out over on the ZK hack channels for all that um maybe just a plug we will be doing another study group we do these

where we just kind of get together virtually on the zah Haack Discord and we kind of go week by week we'll go through like some sort of content in this case we'll be watching the ZK whiteboard session videos and then getting together to discuss them and try to like analyze them ask questions figure out like if there's any you know unclear things in the videos like how we can clarify that as a group and we've this is what Nico was just mentioning with the cohorts we've done four of them for the ZK whiteboard session season 1 but now this year we're going to do it for the first time for season two and I don't like I think people who want to participate should have watched maybe the first few modules of season 1 but they don't have to have done it like

they don't have to have done those stud groups but you need a a bit of a basis of like what's a proof system and yeah there there's a few of these initial Concepts that are covered in the Dan Bon videos that are going to be necessary for season 2 we'll add a link to that as well in the show notes But continuing on with our year of events after Mont after Berlin so I guess is our next event zk2 I think so yeah oh cool and that's what we're going to be spending a lot of time on in this episode but before we do that I want to now talk about zk1 the ZK Summit that for me Remains The Pinnacle of a ZK Summit I mentioned you know just in this

intro that like one of the reasons was that we had these two events side by side that people were new to the city but I want to ask you like what do you remember about zk1 and was it also your favorite maybe it wasn't I don't know actually it's a tough one I think in terms of location my favorite it was so nice to be in Athens and especially because I am quite close with a lot of Greek people in this community so it was great to be there with them uh the content was amazing the venue I love the venue and I know you love the I love yeah what was it oh it was a planetarium but I found that there weren't many spaces where people could gather and chat I don't know I found that space quite confusing but then again the stage

was so fun like having those sort of like a un like little microphone situation was really funny but content wise I think it was huge cuz we had stir Premiere mhm um we had Circle Stark as well like very early on a lot of these like attested data things so we had ZK email present even though had presented before there was also like open ID connect which is Aptos version of ZK login which uses like similar principles there were a ton of ID Solutions presented actually there was the there was like two passport projects it was sort of the theme of that Summit I think so that is actually what inspired me to then do a talk about these at the web 3 Summit thing in Berlin that you were

hosting oh cool like that is why I ended up talking about this and actually zk1 I got to present Ary which is this work about contact discovery that I had mentioned I think the first time it was on the show like whoa what was that zk9 zk9 it's after zk9 yeah and this is work with Kobe girkin who's a co-host and Philip yvanovich who's at zkv with you so co-founder of mine yeah exactly cool um so yeah overall like super fun for me what did you think well no now I want to ask you though like was it your favorite cuz you were like H so think through the summits youve into cuz I've heard some people have said to me like zk7 remains

their favorite I don't know if you were at it were you there that was my first ZK Summit yeah okay and so it does feel special as well in that sense of like Wow first time seeing all this crowd like being impressed by all these people the venue had this like I don't know it was on multiple levels and there was this amazing like glass box essentially which was the main stage yeah looked super impressive and I just remember sitting there and drinking it all in of like oh my god there so much to learn that was held at the like it was a museum in Amsterdam that had this like the main stage just had this almost like Atrium like feel like a glass ceiling I don't I don't think it actually had a glass or maybe it did it have a glass I

don't know know the light in there was very special for sure and it was on the water on a canal classic Amsterdam and in it had a courtyard that was full of flowers because it was like tulip season in Amsterdam and there was something quite magical about zk7 um yeah but going back to zk1 you mentioned it was in a planetarium for me that was so cool like we actually got to see a planetarium show at the end we like we bought out we bought all the tickets to this Planetarium and gave it out to people and we picked the show I mean the show we picked did you go to it did it was a bit it was dorky It's Tricky cuz we had people in the audience who are like really into

like true cosmol or whatever you call it like they're they're actually into that was so wrong that's not the word they're into astronomy but anyway they're like actually they know about this stuff and they you know this was made maybe for like an audience of 10year olds so so it wasn't necessarily the highest quality planetarium show but the people actually who ran it were wonderful I remember the food not looking that special but tasting amazing that was like a funny Quirk of the of the event um the talks that I remember are also the stir work which was like for me I mean I know that there had been work on the original fry with like deep fry and then deep Ali I think those were the the

variations yeah deep fry but then it had sort of gone quiet that line of work until stir as far as I could tell like that seemed to be like the revamp like we're going to actually tackle this part of the stack yeah yeah I mean you had the like breakdown in base folds okay which are also like hash based play number commitment schemes but yeah there hasn't been in the univ varat land like a big jump forward until stir I also would highlight your talk on Ary I would also highlight Jim posen's talk I think that was when Bas was presented at the summit I don't think we had had it at the previous one so it was great to see that and I also I didn't actually get to see this live but saw it later on the videos I really liked Alex evans's talk

yeah I didn't get to see it either actually I need to go back and watch it I think we had a panel right then I think that was the end of the day I he didn't like his spot was kind of tricky it was like near the end of the day we actually had to go back on stage but I really liked that too and then I just remember the workshops for the ID stuff being packed I think the venue was a little actually too small for us in that case like you talk about not being able to find those spots I think part of it was it was very very full actually talking about ID and all these demos I just want to make a shout out to The Rao team yeah because they recently had um Georgian members of parliament using their to scan passports and set up like

votes um that's wild yeah this is huge excited to see where this goes so yeah shout out to them nice all right I think that actually that basically is the recap of zk1 so now we can move on to the the recap of the more recent ZK Summit ZK Summit 12 it was held in Lisbon October 8th just a few days ago now yeah for me it was the fourth major event that I hosted with the team we had produced four pretty major I mean major for us like not like thousand person events but like each of them being like 100 200 to 500 person events it was quite a lot and coming back kind of to wrap up the year for me at least on the

event front with a summit is wonderful because we kind of just like love producing them now because we know we know the Cadence we know what we're doing we have a lot of the the planning and stuff already it's like baked in to what we do the way it starts is I usually make an announcement for speaker applications and attendee applications so this year the way that we did it was if you had applied early you could choose if you wanted to give a talk and you could submit the talk you could also choose just to be an attendee if you applied though you'd get access to the Early Bird tickets in the past I've done full application for the entire event including all tickets but it is actually a ton of work to scan like you know

we're actually like evalu all of those folks and this time around honestly the applications were so good most people got through I think like most of the people who applied would have been invited and so we just decided to make it you apply for the early bird you get the good price you answer a few questions for us like how would you explain random oracles to a friend question I love those questions yeah and we collect all the speaker applications in that period and that's usually that's usually starting 3 months before the summit and by the way I'm I'm saying this on the air because I'm going to encourage people who want to maybe participate in the next Summit to listen to this episode because I yeah you're going to get some insights into like how it works and that might help you you

know figure out your journey with the actually one thing I noticed a lot of people don't realize how early the deadline is to apply to talk yeah and often people like yeah message me like oh I wanted to talk how do I apply I'm like I'm sorry it closed a few weeks ago I know I do I do say that a lot like we are very loud about it in the channels and on Twitter but people do miss it usually I mean if you want to be safe we usually release the application form three months before the event and we usually close the talk submission about six weeks before the event um and yeah we do have a lot of people kind of afterwards you know trying to get a talk in and we have a short list we do we we'll kind of like receive them but we

it's like the likelihood gets lower and lower that there's actually a spot so how does one get a talk in Anna exactly I kind of wanted to have that conversation cuz you and I are both on the programming team not alone but I thought we could share a few things about what we are looking for and maybe what we're not looking for what are you usually looking for for me I mean so I tend to be excited more about like technical stuff uh and this is why it's good that you know we have a panel of multiple people looking at this um the first thing I look for is like does the title imply like some technical novelty be it like mhm on the theory side or on like building side like oh I've engineered things in a very smart way and here's how I'm going to describe it

or like oh I figured out a new way to compute this or a new poal equipment scheme yeah I think that's my first criteria so I think we're often looking for fresh content we're looking for a talk we've never heard of before and as we narrow down this the selection we actually do go research if people have given that talk before y um we don't do it on every single submission like we have to get it to a manageable size just also maybe for context like for zk1 I think we had 130 talk submissions for zk2 we had 110 we usually have about 35 to 40 spots it's not like a super low percentage that get accepted but we have to say no to over half each time and so

this is where we have also had to say no to really good talks and we've also debated some talks where it's like oh this this would be good but we're comparing and and we only have this small group of uh talk spots available yeah and sometimes there are themes that come out and you'll get for like each Summit depending on the narrative at the time many talks about the same theme yeah and those end up competing against each other more than they would compete against like the rest of the pool of submissions totally we do usually prefer like more generalized talks too things that speak to a topic or narrative or concept and we're usually less interested in talks that purely are

talking about someone's system yeah there are some some of those talks do get programmed but they tend to be less popular like with all of the committee um so that's maybe just like a note for anyone who's thinking of applying like try to find a way to generalize what you're working on think of it more like how is this a contribution to the ZK space and a little bit less like how is my particular choice and architecture the best best I mean sometimes those tarks are still super interesting like I remember um lurk at the zk9 in Lisbon and they were sort of the first ones to have designed it like the tiniest ZK VM and that they would use Nova and like these

were one of the first like folding based VMS that they were presenting so in that case they are presenting their architecture but it's also something new it's like a new engineering approach and that still feels exciting but teams that come on to say my uh Stark based VM is better than your Stark based VM because I don't know I coded it slightly differently that's slightly less interesting and again there's a spectrum right if it's impressive GPU acceleration work or CPU acceleration work back in but yeah so we do two Summits a year there's only 35 or 40 slots depending on the stages and and sort of how we design it but I try really hard not to have the same speakers speak it two in a row and the reason for that is if you only have that

number of speakers but there's the community's actually gotten bigger I want to have like I don't know like 70 to 80 slots for the year to give out to different people and so this is why and and actually anyone who's applied twice in a row has probably gotten the message from us saying hey you just spoke at the last Summit and therefore we want to prioritize some of the other speakers that is a tricky one because sometimes those talks are awesome and we're like oh that's so good but we really don't want to we I I think it's a fair rule I think it's just like it gives a lot more space to newcomers too like I think if we just had you know speakers we know speak every single time I don't know if it would be as Dynamic one thing that I I've seen you do and that I thought was

quite nice was to encourage these speakers who repeatedly apply with good talk to get someone else from their team to give the talk cuz that also gives yeah these other team members more exposure to the community and like time to shine you know some time on stage totally and then what has happened sometimes is um I think if we've seen a project submit every time but with very similar narratives then at some point will also kind of like encourage a break at least it doesn't mean like in future Summits we wouldn't accept it it's more just like if we're every single Summit hearing from a team talking about almost the same thing then we would probably try to get a at least a break in there obviously it still has to be really

interesting but yeah there's other nuances that are tricky to describe this is I think the first time we've ever talked at all about like some of the criteria or like rules or framing that we're thinking about it is also a it's a somewhat subjective process programming a conference we we do try our best to like give space to newcomers to make sure there's not these repeat talks but we're also always thinking like what is this audience going to like like what is this audience into now what kind of themes are they going to be most into I mean it's interesting this Summit this past Summit we had two FHA talks which I haven't actually seen them yet so I I don't know how they went but I cuz we

haven't seen the videos from the other stages but I I knew kind of from other signals that like there's interest in what's going on in that corner of advanced cryptography it's not quite CK but there is a lot of overlap and so yeah that's why this time around we had we had two talks like that actually weren't both talks in the Realms of like proving that I computed something correctly in FH like proving correct encryption like using ZK you mean yeah exactly yeah like close to the realm of proof systems yeah um I think also if there wasn't like a theme or a few themes of this particular Summit I mean I don't know if it fully came through in the programming partly because we also had a

few people's like the initial curation we pick the talks that we really like we usually pick more than the the 40 or 35 spots just to give that buffer in case people can't come or yeah if there's some reason that these talks get canceled at a later date in this case like I I was definitely excited about the ZK TLS talks at the same time we actually had unfortunately a few of those not come through like they didn't get visas or they couldn't get over in time so it was like or they or they chose to go to Devcon right no judgment I totally understand I think people had a really hard time this fall trying to figure out like where to go there's like permissionless happening over in North

America at the same time as Summit and then Bangkok like a few weeks later so I get it it was a competitive space this this fall but yeah I I thought that was definitely like a narrative that this for this Summit I was excited about that doesn't mean for the next one we will be but it was just like something that I I picked up a bit was there anything that you noticed in the submissions this time um was verification layers a theme of zk2 or zk1 I I get them mied up now so I remember in one of those two Summits a lot of applications about verification layer oh yes yes yes this this one that was definitely here I think this was actually this past Summit zk2 we got a

bunch of talks that were all kind of similar all focused just on that area so that did seem to be an exciting category mhm one thing I wanted to come back on with both zk1 and zk2 was this like physical NFC experiment yeah the cursive team actually approached us for zk1 they had been doing this at I think they had done it at eth Denver they were doing things with NFC cards at NFC chips and they were like we could do something with your event and I was like I was so into that I was so excited that it was almost like the minute they asked was the minute I realized I wish there had been experiments before I'm like we're building all this cool stuff and then we don't use any of it at the summit itself and so they yeah they proposed it and so

for ck1 what we did was just like um they created an NFC card that we put in the lanyard pouch and you could connect with people by tapping their phones with this card and you can make these connections and I think in zk1 you could like generate a proof If you like met five people or more you could generate a zkp and then put posted on Twitter and for zk1 we also like we had it was actually a lot of work for the cursive team they had created individual cards for every single talk and so if you went to a talk talk you could tap the talk and then record that you'd been there and we added some description and stuff in it it was really cool as a user experience but really tough as a like

for them I would say organizer but or really the the people behind the activation also we found not that many people participated in that part so it was like as an experiment it was like okay I think the meeting people worked but the talks didn't work as well just to add they also had a really cool like uh MPC thing going on where you could go up to someone and check who and who did we meet in common and you could also check I'm guessing like which talks did we see in common oh cool yeah for zk2 um we had actually we brainstormed a few different ideas they had done I think in the in the time between the two events they had done lots of other events and experiments one had been around recruiting and we we floated the idea for a minute but ZK Summit isn't like

there is a recruiting component we have a jobs board and a lot of sponsors put their jobs up there during the summit it's part of the packages and everything but it still it's not like a pure recruiting event and it felt like it wasn't exactly the right environment for it right instead we decided to continue with the leaderboard idea so like the more people you tap you can rank on a leaderboard they use different Tech under the hood this time too like instead of it just being like how many you know which talks did you go to basically you you'd tap it you'd get an account you'd fill out your your info your socials and then You' choose which they they had a list of different kinds of ZK Tech and we're like which are most overrated you had three stars a lot of people got confused actually because

they were like wait is three good or bad like is it a lot of stars means they're good things or bad things they had there was a little text a description that explained how to use their ranking system but I don't think anyone read it they just saw stars and clicked it oh man um and yeah and then again you had this sort of NPC like private set intersection thing to see like do we agree on these hot takes or not without revealing which hot up takes you disagree on I mean what I love about what they're doing is they're just they're playing with some of the most advanced libraries and stuff to do this and I think this is an audience that very much appreciates it yeah we this something different this time around was we wanted to also encourage more of that engagement last time there there is a

leaderboard for how many like connections you made but no one like there was no nothing to win you just would be like top of the leaderboard and like I got really competitive at ck11 and like became I think I won but I won nothing starting just before the final panel running up to people be like I got to tap your thing I want to tap your thing but for zk2 we actually another company of mine zkv put together or like decided to kind of offer some prizes to encourage people to actually make these connections and there was one person who immediately like from the start was like like clearly very into this and was on the mission to win first place and they did Evo shout out to Evo who got the

first place uh in in terms I think he made like around 80 connections or something I don't know how genuine these all were but yeah something else that was cool this time is they had these rings that you could win and that is like that's going to be so cool to see what they do with it so basically there's a there's a chip in the ring and so then you could yeah you could put your socials you can like basically do very easy contacts you know if someone wants to get in touch with you they can just tap on your ring um but I think they want to do some cool stuff with that as well I'm really really excited to see what that team is up to same same actually their talk was also very insightful I found yeah I want to just continue with one extra point

about the sort of interactive part of the summit so something else that we tried out this year was like in my intro I presented this map of ZK which is what do you call these like industry Maps where you just have like different categories and then you show different companies in the categories I guess and this is the second time or third time actually I'm showing this map on a stage it's changed every time and that was kind of the message I wanted to share was that like when you make a map like that it's always slightly out ofd because you probably don't know in that moment that like the status of every single company on that map and they may have changed since you did research on them we were trying to kind of

crowdsource this map from the audience during the event zkv put together this magnetic poster mhm where it had these different quadrants and different categories and then we also had these magnets with the company logos on them and people could place them in the category that they thought they fit in and what we learned from that was like I mean we did have some teams that we thought were in some category but learned through this we're actually moving towards another category we learned about new projects because people could actually come and like write a new team onto one of these magnets and so we learned about a bunch of new ones we learned that some of these projects are really unknown in our ecosystem because people didn't know where to put them um there's others that

were very well known in our ecosystem and would move around a lot and I think the zkv team has taken photos and stuff of the different boards oh nice so throughout the day exactly and like how it how it changed so I hope to get a chance in the next few weeks to see yeah what that looked like in general I kind of want to do a call out for future Summits too like people who are working on experiments like the two that I just meent we just mentioned like the NFC cards or a map of ZK or something like that they should get in touch with us kind of early in the process to see if we could incorporate it because I'd love to have more ZK stuff that people can actually touch and do something with at the summit this is the perfect place to

do stuff like this I guess even if as a sponsor you have a booth like that's also you have a nice space to do stuff like that for sure yeah I would I would encourage the sponsors for next events to also see if they could be inspired by some of this stuff it's really cool I think what we should talk about now is a little bit of the content what is the core what's the point of ZK Summit it's really to get together to watch and learn about some of the newest you know most cuttingedge ZK research or techniques or proving systems or applications so this time around I mean Nico neither you or I have had a chance to really see all of the talks so we're only going to be able to really talk

about the things that we got a chance to see yeah all the talks for the summit will be coming out actually around the time of this airing and in the next few weeks so you know I might highlight some more on Twitter as I get to see them but yeah let's let's jump into what we did see and what you would highlight as talks you liked or themes you liked or yeah yeah so this is absolutely not like an exhaustive list cuz I was mostly mainstage during the day true you were hosting yeah yeah yeah that was super fun actually but yeah the things I wanted or when I was taking notes about like how did I feel about ZK Summit uh the themes that came up were like the war talk the cursive talk there seems to be like a Resurgence of hash Bas versus

elliptic curve like this debate is still ongoing with interesting inputs then you mentioned the FH sessions and at the end the panel also like I don't know there few interesting signals in there for me cool yeah I think for me I mean I would also highlight the word talk I think I'm saying that right it's spelled wh iir for the listeners um where it it rhymes with stir I was told so I think we are saying it right um and I had a lot of fun on the panel so I also had a chance to see we had two IVC talks folding and I'm trying to remember if we actually covered it that much in previous Summits I'm not sure that we did well actually I presented sangria at zk9 in L yeah true

oh you're right you're right okay so it had been on the stage before yeah yeah we got to see and oh we also had yans gr speak which having him join this Summit was fun yeah that I have in the I hash Bas versus CTIC curve actually like it's it's part of that theme uh I have the IBC talk and Ariel's talk about like this repeated computation with global State they fall into that theme for me uh which we can you know zoom into at any point yeah why don't we yeah so hash based proof we obviously had war on stage premiering very impressive and we can have a whole other little discussion on war um there's also at the same time a lot of papers that just came out on

eprints um one called Blaze uh one come called Deep fold and these are all like new panoma commitment schemes in hash land that seem to all be super fast okay and at the same time you have Aztec who actually had two talks at the summit being like we're doing IVC we need lipti curves uh it's ride or die you know with lipti curves yeah so you have also Nexus and Yan scth talking about memory checking and IVC and so they're also using these additively horor commitments which you get from elliptic curve so it seems like the debate is not completely over uh and that there's a new chapter opening up I should also mention there's shath CTI has another two Works

unfolding that just came out like nebula and neutron Nova Neutron Nova yeah yeah the naming is is beautiful the cosmos all over again yeah amazing so yeah there's there's a whole new chapter ready to be opened and a few like interesting spanners in the works like one thing which I saw was super insightful not one of your events but at SBC Ellie Benson was presenting sort of the stew the state of the stew and he had this pie chart detailing where the Prov spends time and at the end of the day fry in total accounts for maybe 10% okay so replacing fry with something faster like stir were Blaze anything else might not give you that

much of an improvement boost and so this new research in hash based commitment schemes is super interesting but I don't know if it's going to translate to Crazy performance improvements interesting so you feel like it in its snapshot today could only be like improvements would be sort of minimal even as we do more research to try to make them faster so again referring to that same Ali B song talk I think he says we can do at best like five times better and maybe I'm exaggerating it's somewhere between two and five from his like high chart whereas maybe elliptic curves have a lot more room for like Improvement I don't know oh I like that idea yeah and then the other spanner that I want to throw into this whole debate is

delegation right like we have these collaborative snarks so we have this model where I can like split my data in a way that you know as long as these nodes don't collude it stays secret and they can do their snark for me yeah I've been thinking about that as like a bit of a like so this goes back to this like small Fields type work that's like hash based where Bas and I think plunky and a lot of the plunky 3 a lot of these new proving systems live and then you have the pairing based which is plonk and like everything around folding and everything around lookup arguments well maybe not everything but a lot around lookup arguments is like focused on optimizing on that side I had this

interview recently with Zach and Ariel and we talked about like the battle and like Ariel had actually previously been like slightly depressed because he was like I feel like everyone's leaving pairing based stuff yeah um but when we had the interview it sounded like he was a bit happier again like actually there's ways that this is still very relevant and we're like doing cool stuff because of the like this collaborative snarks because its output could be used on these like server side as I understand it but its input could be from these client side is this true where it's like you could create you could sort of then use the pairing based stuff um the nice thing about collaborative snarks is either like each individual in a group doesn't have the

full secret to produce a snark but together we can produce it or I have my whole secret but I don't have the power to compute the snark so I'm going to split it up give it to a few people and they can can collaboratively do the snark on my behalf whether it's pairing or hash based doesn't really matter okay the the thing here is it gives you this power to delegate in a way that's potentially privacy preserving ah would that then mean though like you could do if you could do it with hash based then it's more like you start to add the Privacy into the hash based ones whereas like previously we just thought oh if it's being proven server side there's like you lose all privacy because you're always going to have to send what you need proven to aover somewhere else who's work who's working on very

optimized Hardware correct yeah there are different flavors of privacy there depending on what like trust assumptions you make but I think private delegation is going to be an interesting chapter to open interesting but does then does collaborative snarks not help the pairing based argument where does pairing based still like I mean I guess what you were saying is like pairing based has more optimizations to go so it might be competitive but like yeah have any other like yeah I didn't really explain why I was saying delegation is uh playing a part in this debate and the reason so Aztec we doubling down on elliptic curves because they say they need very small proofs because they have this peer-to-peer Network and these proofs are going to be roaming around the peer-to-peer Network and you need

them to happen client side in a low memory uh environment so either a browser or a mobile browser and so they're saying we can't have these large ffts that we usually have with something like Stark or Circle Stark uh and we need to be some Che based and have like this elliptic curve commitment or use IC so that's their argument but now if you have delegation well hey I don't need to do the proof on my memory constraint environment I can send it out I keep privacy and this collaborative snar can produce a small proof wow so yeah whole new chapter I think opening up all these Works especially the new ones I mentioned like that just came out on ePrint we're going to have to dig into and understand the ramifications of but

yeah I think we could maybe point to zk2 is like for me the beginning of this chapter who nice I want to talk about the panel M but is there any other talks or anything you want to highlight before we move on to that yeah I also wanted to come back to the cursive talk so we talked about their experiment but obviously with an experiment comes some findings and this talk that they gave was about obviously not the findings of the experiment on the day but the one from zk1 all these other conferences and one thing they brought to my attention is not only are mobile Prov like a low memory restricted environment it's also an environment that doesn't stay live for very long people tab their card they press the

button of like yeah let's do the intersection of who I met and who you met and then they don't want to just stay there and look at the loading bar so they close the phone and that's it and that actually kills the computation process yeah that liveness component mentioned cool yeah and it's something I had not considered at all which is actually very important and where delegation actually help helps them so their solution here was to say we're not going to do NPC between these two phones CU it has many rounds of communication it takes a long time we are going to locally encrypt using FH send it over to a server and the server is going to compute over these encrypted uh inputs and then send data back so you don't really need to be live for super long you just need to be live for encryption

and then live a bit longer for decryption and yeah I thought that was super interesting the sort of assisted MPC kind of vibe and kind of the same thinking of Delegation but for NPC that's so cool the other cool idea from their talk was this idea of digital phones m I don't know if like you picked up on it too much or if you found that fun well we talked about it as well on the panel oh nice like digital pheromones to explain how they've explained it it's the idea that pheromones usually are like you know chemicals in the air that cause members of the same species to act a certain way it's usually I mean it's usually described in the context of like mating where animals out in the wild will have

pheromones that they release that will attract members of the opposite hey it could also be stress or to alert about danger like true okay fair but anyway in this case they talked about digital pheromones which would be like something on your phone that as you maybe through proximity maybe through other means but like let's use the example of like you walk by someone that has some sort of application on their phone and you have the application you've like identified some interest or something some pherone digital pherone or like signal is sent between those things that you're notified to that's the way I've understood digital phermones I think it's like in their talk they were kind of covering these like categories of almost future yeah future applications

for advanced cryptography it's not only ZK that would have to go into something like this maybe not even at all it's not yeah yeah they have the scheme they call Trinity which combines like ZK MPC and witness encryption okay yeah and yeah I think they used it for their like recruiting experiment um they had similar ideas and what I found super cool it's like it's not even an interactive thing is I can drop my phermones mhm like drop this thing and to most people it won't mean anything but to some it will have meaning and they can decrypt whatever is in there and interact with it yeah and I think that's such a cool design space and that was actually something we were exploring on the panel later on was like I mean the panel just

to to say what it was about and we'll add like the link to these as they come out too but it was it was meant to just talk about future ZK applications and those categories that we still wanted to Define on that map of ZK the part that had been like miscellaneous we I didn't know how to define what some of those projects did and we wanted to sort of tease out where we might see fut like projects working in the future I think the naming will probably change over time there'll be some sort of like tangible application or some yeah like something very human yeah you know I'm thinking like ZK ID like something we maybe already know will be the category name but I think the concepts of digital phermones they also had this unbreakable

consent and narrowcasting that they had mentioned in their talk that we mentioned on stage in the panel as well um it was really fun to kind of dive into those but for going back to the digital fairmon I think I had given on stage this example of like it already sort of exists in a bad way with adte today um where you know they are people like there's apps that are tracking your location and they might be tracking other people's locations and they like you know there are thirdparty applications that can do some of this matching for you but here it would be done without that third party ideally that it would be done because of some cryptographic thing yeah on your own device that's like being notified it's very similar to um all the

contact tracing apps when Co first broke out um so there were like very non privacy preserving ways of doing it and like some governments were very happy to like yeah sure we'll just uh collect all the data encrypt it so that only we can see it and trust us and we'll delete it after this whole thing which obviously didn't fly super well with the photography Community um and you had very privacy preserving ways of doing it of like I'll drop something on your phone which will be meaningless but if a few days later I identify myself as being Co positive you would receive a notification you wouldn't know who I was or when we met you'll just know that we cross paths within a few days and you might want to keep tabs on your health

for a little while see if anything happens exactly so very similar at least at the human level feels like a similar interaction that's cool some other topics that we covered in that panel was were actually like applications that were enabled or opened up because of the concept of coars um we had ash from TSO on the stage so we had you know someone who's working directly on it helping us with that category and we also were exploring different kinds of signed data and in prep for our conversation I was actually watching a bit of this panel and I realized I forgot to ask a question so aush was on this panel with with me and he's the co-founder creator of ZK email we started talking about

signed data which is what ZK email is based on like it's it's based on the concept of you have signed data therefore you can do kind of like cool cryptography with it and have some proof of of of its Provence I started to ask him some questions but I realized I focused more on like the signed data part and less on the what you can do with it right and I realized now watching it I'm like oh I wish I had asked more what you can do with it so that's actually the topic of the talk I gave at web3 Summit nice yeah so I can give you a quick rundown if you want sure sure let's do it and we'll find this for the for the listeners too we'll find the talk so once you have signed data we pretty much always do the same

thing we give a zero knowledge proof that uh the data contains something of Interest so either like my name if we're doing zkid or um my balance if we're doing like ZK email I don't know like if I get an email from my bank uh so I'm going to prove that the content is somewhat interesting I'm going to prove that it's been signed by a specific Authority so like in the case of ZK email like whatever domain same to the email so it could be venmo for like the ZK P2P stuff or even like for ZK login you say I have received uh a signin token which is actually just signed data from Google uh that contains my usern this this o off is that what you're getting yeah the open ID stuff yeah so

ZK login and oidc and that's it we always do the same thing prove that the data is interesting that it's been signed by an authority of Interest as well and that's it you can then throw that into any system and hopefully that will unlock some meaningful interaction yeah but that's that's the part I wanted to explore is like what are the interactions like what does that mean oh I see what you mean okay so not the technical like how do you do no no no yeah it was more of the like okay so cool you know ZK email plays on the fact that like emails have some sort of standard signatures in them that you can like use but what if you could sign more stuff gotta and that's what I focused on is like how do you sign stuff instead of what does it mean if you sign

stuff like what what could you do with it if actually I think a did give a couple examples but that was something like that's just a design space that I feel that the folks over at psse and maybe the cursive team and probably the ZK email team and the Aptos uh signin or Aptos keyless and theu yeah ZK login ZK login like I feel like all those folks are thinking about those things I'd love to do more brainstorming around I just love to be like yeah thinking about it maybe all the attested microphones and like attested cameras work in the same way right like yeah the date that was signed it's of Interest or it's been processed in an interesting way and here's appr proof nice yeah

maybe I'll have a chance to think more about this on my time off yeah which is coming up after the show actually there was another thing you brought up in the panel which I thought was super interesting this idea of like being able to leave identities behind oh yeah and you were saying like I'm really glad that my MySpace disappeared but yeah I think that's a big big issue if we're going to put stuff on a like immutable Ledger that lives forever you know yeah like how do we leave identities behind how do we have this right to be forgotten that's a big deal in like gdpr and that kind of Regulation and it got me to think that like in web 2 this is a bug like Myspace no longer capture their attention it wasn't intentional like it was a bug for

them and they were sad cuz people had left like the thing was dead and it was like fail I mean same with like Facebook these days is a bit dead like if you scroll through Facebook there isn't much going on um but with like all this privacy tag that we're looking at leaving identities behind becomes a feature cuz only I know that my identities are linked and so I get to choose when I drop it or where I drop some part of it and know this framing suddenly like unlocked something for me a bit there was one last point that I felt we talked about and this actually came up you know I don't know if you were there for this we talked about the trust and trustless the lack of Institutions and that was inspired by the podcast that you and I did I think or people had

spoken independently to our know but like we covered that in an episode that we did I I guess like a month and a half ago or two months ago for me that has really stuck with me that that conversation it remains like it was just the first time I talked to anyone that was critiquing the trustless narrative because that had been what I like the only thing I had really been hearing for about seven years so I was kind of like yeah like I think he just the framing of trustless can be amazing and Powerful but pure trustless like comes with some things that don't actually like create healthy societies um even though there's this belief in like we can we can just make

code and then we can trust code and then that should be fine in in practice there's so many problems with that yeah I think Ash has a great line on the panel which is like even if you have like a phg and cryptography you cannot go and check all this code yourself and trust that it works I mean you could try you could audit everything but that's like a big ask it's five lifetimes no one oh yeah and no one like no one can do it all and even if you can do some then people have to trust you that like cuz there's people who can't do it so like they're going to have to rely on someone who says yes this is like fun fine don't worry there's no back door it's not broken but yeah to come back to your point I think it's great that this

trust infrastructure idea is growing and being thought of by people because that will help us build useful things you know and yeah I think you also quoted Alo on the on the panel saying like we need to build for aspiring bar owners rather than like Stadium Builders yeah I don't think that was me who brought that lineup but yeah it was a good one no I think it was Andrew from cursive and you can see actually in cursives work how these ideas of like trust infrastructure and local firsts come up right totally yeah they had that narrowcasting Concept in their talk and we mentioned it also on the panel which was like instead of broadcasting everywhere it's like being able to choose small audiences but again

not dependent on being on a chat app that's owned by somebody else being more like you can choose a selection of your community that you want to hear a message but do it kind of on your own yeah I really liked that panel it's funny this is the second time that aush and I have done a panel of this nature this year so at modular Summit during the ECC week in Brussels this is Nico you weren't there but we haush Tracy and floron and I had a panel sadly it was right while mert was speaking over on another stage at the modular Summit and so our stage had I kid you not four people in the audience it was it was a

rough one but it was an amazing panel so you got four on stage and for in the audience yeah pretty much um but it was such a good panel we talked about applications and it was s it was really fun I'll try to dig that up too funny thing about that is the four people in the audience since we've done that talk like I've met two of them who've like come up specifically and been like that was the best panel I'd ever seen so like we were really good okay no one was there but we were really good um this time we definitely had a better audience for that last talk I was so impressed that actually people were still into it like we had just had a

full day full of very dense content but we had a good we had a good crowd for that last uh panel at the ZK Summit 12 and it it felt a bit like an extension we went in a different direction we talked much more on the other panel about like the zy TLs use cases and ID and stuff because of who was who was there and this time I think we went much more into this trust environments and the narrow like the smaller communities the bars andless the stadiums that's so cool I mean I think that sort of wraps up the review of zk2 for me as mentioned we have the videos for the summit coming out over the next few weeks so you know check out the YouTube channel for the

show because that's where we're going to be putting them before we do sign off from the show though I do want to just do a shout out to the sponsors of the CK Summit um something I think a lot of people may not realize is like the ZK Summit is not I actually said this in my intro but the ZK Summit is not you know supported by a single network with a token a foundation you know it's not like there's some person who's just granting funds to make this happen every single Summit is built from the ground up where we you know every time we reach out to sponsors and we see who's interested it's always a different mix we have a lot of teams that have been repeat sponsors and come back and we really really appreciate it this also

allows us to keep the prices for tickets quite low so if you do that early bird application you get a ticket that I think is is pretty reasonable for a one-day event of of high quality we also have like the student discounts that we can give out to to folks who need a bit more financial support um we actually help other communities that can't pay pay for anything actually come to the summit as well and this is all made possible because of these amazing sponsors that come every year the ones that we had this year for ZK Summit 12 the top ones were risk zero irreducible and Paradise um zkv my one of my companies was also a sponsor on the gold front and they had booths um we had some silver sponsors like fushi Anda nil foundation and some wonderful Community

sponsors like lron CK verify snarfy argument brevis Alo and fluent I just want to say big thank you to everyone who did that for zk2 especially right now given what I shared earlier the fact that there's so much competition there's so many other events happening in October and November a lot of people are looking towards Bangkok and they're you know trying to figure out how much budget are they going to need for that so the teams that came through for zk2 I just want to say big thank you for that you know I know I know it was like it was a choice to work with us and we really appreciate it and it allows us to do these events so yeah um for future I think we kind of highlighted this for the future like if

there's teams listening who want to be a sponsor of the upcoming Summit which will be happening around I think somewhere between March and may somewhere in the world we don't have a location yet get in touch with us anytime in the next few months just so we have you on our radar and also I want to encourage sponsors or actually just future participants to think about those activations or those interactive points where people in this community can start to do something while on site because it's such a great audience and maybe we should say something about that like there is a crew that we see at every Summit and it is so it's so cool like it's like a homecoming it's like a check-in Point throughout the year you

know to just like see some friends you hadn't seen in six months or so um find out what they're working on because you know like that map of ZK described like teams are changing and pivoting and new projects and new experiments happening all the time so yeah I think it's such a cool chance to to just get together with the crew and I do feel like this I don't know why but ZK 12 for me so zk1 had a magic to it for meh but I also was slightly sick and had a fever so I was like actually finding it magical I went home middle the middle of ZK Summit 11 actually to get to rest and then came back at the end of the day but like so I was like slightly lightheaded and everything felt magical but as DK 12 I

was very healthy and it felt magical again there was actually this moment of just like acknowledging that we were here that this was special that this was like something I don't know that meant something I don't know I just had this this feeling I hope I'm not getting too sentimental hey we have to it's the last episode before the break we're allowed to get sentimental okay okay but yeah it was really it was it was like I just felt special that this was happening again and that it was such a good feeling the people were so happy everyone was really excited but not H hyperactive like the way some of those blockchain weeks are much more like thoughtful and yeah creating something so it felt great yeah it's a beautiful

Community okay on that note I think that actually wraps up what I wanted to chat about with uh the ZK Summit 12 but also all of these events that happened this year as listeners know I think I might even mention this in the intro but as listeners know I am taking a break starting after this episode I have said no weekly shows until the end of the year but I already have a sense that there's very high likelihood that there's going to be an episode in November and there might be one in December but I am really trying to take this time off to also spend time thinking about all of this stuff like that panel to me is like I mean I've had

these two panels this year three panels actually with you and Jim at web3 Summit with aush Tracy and floron and four people in the audience at modular Summit and the one that I had at zk2 and I feel like all of these I mean they're they're all exploring these sort of edges of DK and I really like that place I like that's what I want to spend my time reading up on over the the break so can I ask you like what's next or are you still going to be L like lurking behind the the scenes while you're on a break so on the podcast front like we're going to be releasing a new version of the website the current website I don't think really reflects what we're doing anymore and it was built in 2020 so it's

definitely due for a refresh we're thinking about maybe like modifying or like tweaking the intro music maybe we have done that once before by the way like if you go back to a very early episode it's a diff slightly different jingle same general Vibe cre by Henrik our wonderful editor but yeah we're thinking of like playing with that I'm also thinking about like the format for the show because the thing I love about the show is the ability to explore all of these like new topics and things that kind of go beyond what I'm working on too like with other projects but the thing that I find maybe like tricky is that it's also kind of constrained with this weekly format to come out every week it means like there's always a production schedule and

so I'm I'm just going to spend some time thinking about that format it's not to say changing it's just that I'm like is there yeah is there another way to do it m so I'm going to think about that and then I mean I have two other companies that I'm running at the same time so so I'm not really taking vacation we have zkv and we have a team over there of like nine I think we're going to be maybe hiring someone new this year so you know there's there's a lot of activity happening over there and then on the zik hack front we have also grown our team this year there's going to be at the end of the year the ZK hack online multi-week Workshop and CTF puzzle hacking competition and I think most relevant to this audience over the next few months we're going to be

releasing every two weeks the ZK whiteboard sessions the thing we mentioned early on so we've just as mentioned wrapped up the sixth module uh literally two two days ago and uh we're going to be doing the edits and we're going to be releasing them every two weeks there's already one out with Nico and Dave doing doing a like a presentation on what is ZK like actually um I loved how that turned out I don't know did you get a chance to watch it same no not entirely but I'm just happy that we put that content out there yeah it's really good I thought it was a great start to this season um so yeah we'll be spend I mean I'll definitely be

making some noise about that I will also be I think I'm like at least like half leading the study group on this I'm I think I've signed myself up to do that so I'll be over on the Z yeah I'll be on the ZK hack Discord being quite active um I'm actually going to be doing the study group myself so like I'm going to be a student of it at the very least but I might also help coordinate a little bit um and that should keep me occupied until the end of the year a very ZK holiday but I'm not going to Devcon and that's the win right if I say no to that I say no to everything so yeah there's no other travel like no one's trying to go or as far as I know

there's no other like major event this quarter and so by saying no to it I feel like I've just given myself like a bit of a pass on travel yeah um which is cool but yeah Nico I think that brings us to the end of this episode thanks so much for doing this with me yeah thank you for bringing me on as a co-host so often wanted to point out a nice little circular thing which is first time I was on the show was after zk9 in Lisbon amazing now he him again after zk2 in Lisbon wrapping up before the break very cool all right I want to say thank you to the podcast team Henrik Rachel Tanya and yonas and to our listeners thanks for listening