Episode 346 - ZK in Review: Decoding 2024 & Predicting 2025

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 so today we are here for a special little episode um I'm still on break but I wanted to return for a end of year 2024 look back and a looking forward episode I'm here with most of my

co-hosts uh tun guo n are here with me hey guys yay hello hell what's up we are only missing Kobe I think we've actually done this almost every year sometimes we've broken this down into two episodes doing like a look back episode and then a look forward episode so this time we're going to try to combine the two of them um we're going to try to focus Less on like a month-by-month play-by-play which we did do once um and a little bit more on like General themes what went well what didn't go as well and what could be coming in the future so I put together a few little qu actually chat GPT helped me put together a few little questions about the past what went well an I using AI in 2024 yeah exactly who

would have thought that's really a change uh well we used it in 2023 when we like modded my voice it was more you were more you were you left gave in you didn't give into the Borg then you were like freaked out by the Borg I was scared AI God uh was not sparking Joy but apparently it sparked enough joy that you actually used it like not ironically this time which is impressive okay so here's the first generic chat GPT question that I was able to get what were the most significant advances in ZK in 2024 I know that's a bit generic but we're starting around there so I wanted to start with research actually what did happen this year what are kind of like in 20124 what are pieces of work

research papers like implementations that stand out to you but more on this like researchy cryptography side there was a lot of movement in like hash bait snarks and a lot of like new developments so we had the whole um Circle Star Saga oh wait that was this year [ __ ] it feels like a year like more a year ago that's crazy are you sure that wasn't end of 2023 cuz I'm pretty sure I had or on so I checked before uh oh you did okay yeah yeah they did their first like investigation into M31 in 2023 and we had these like read Solon codes over M31 and then in 2024 they had the full-fledged like Circle Stark and the stew implementation come out you

also have like stir were are things that came out in 2024 yeah uh more recently there was Blaze so there's a lot of work in like this area of research and that's good and that is good yeah well actually it also sparked a whole other narrative this year which was the hash versus curved and like like hash based snarks or curve based snarks and this of like hash has won wow and I think that's interesting to look at revisit chat about I don't know yeah I I remember I mean we had a an episode I believe with uh David Wong where he had a a hot spicy prediction that he was like hash face snarks are dead and I was like are you sure about that please contrary intake yeah he should have waited till the end of the year for that one yeah I mean no

I think it was a great prediction because it was kind of fun to to get into the the weeds of it why the the thoughts were but it it's funny cuz it's like these are not like things that are like exclusive right like they're not you don't just get to like work on one and to the detriment of the other or something they're like kind of like just different things so it's funny seeing some Wars around them anyways exist all the time like every single roll up we see on ethereum rolls their proofs into like a gr 16 or like proof right so they do coexist and they're almost like they they need to coexist and it seems like it got pretty spicy at the end here right with the the Google announcement I don't know T actually probably has some context on on that more cont than IA

actually paid attention to the thing but well I just thought the marketing in the blog post was a little bit incendiary so I like I feel like that already turned me off to like how accurate the result was cuz the paper is like a four page PRL paper and it's like doesn't really say that much or at least the original paper I mean the the nature paper is also a little bit marketing so it's like I'm sure there's something there I'm sure that Google is slightly exaggerating and like the Multiverse thing in that blog post was embarrassing like also citing David de for that like are you [ __ ] kidding me you're not citing like Heisenberg or dck or someone who like came up with this [ __ ] actually and not a guy who wrote a popsy book

like the entire thing is like pandering to like TW huberman Bros like that that article anyway sorry was my I actually I want to I want to revisit this because one of the questions I'm going to be asking is like a little bit more about what went wrong or setbacks or challenges and I think I've been meaning to kind of dig into what is real and what is not real and I'd love to do it there um just bringing it back though to the research of 2024 I actually just dug it up on my ZK Summit 12 slides I did this like history of ZK research like in the intro and for 2024 this is what we actually had this was created in what is it September October maybe it's changed we had polymath stack proofs plony 3 came

out this year Circle Starks which you were right came out this year Garuda and Perry which I don't actually understand but it came out this year and both stir and were like you had mentioned those were the like fry kind of this is people starting to again go back into like fry and seeing if we can improve on what was creat back in 2018 2019 so I was actually going to add to close this like hash versus curve thing there were also developments in the curve based land this year including as you mentioned polymath geruda and Parry which are all snarks that are smaller than Groth 16 interestingly I'm not sure their like onchain verification cost is cheaper but the proof itself is smaller and I don't know that's a cool development in itself

nice something I just realized I didn't have on here but would maybe want to include I did kind of another bonus episode on my time off with Dan Bonet and he talked about some like lattice based snarks and that I don't even know which works those are but that maybe could that be something of like a 2024 highlight yeah the big one that came out in 2024 was ltis F which is sort of applying the ideas of hypernova and using Lattis based commitment schemes and so Dan goes into a bit more detail about how it works in that episode with you there's been some like other interesting developments on lates which I was quite cool which is a greyhound which essentially like does this cool thing with Labrador which is from 2023

and gets it's pretty fast I don't know I remember seing the numbers and they were kind of crazy although I haven't looked super deeply into it but it's like a Le heroik base scheme except using Lis as supposed to like standard hash functions and that gives you a bunch of nice properties anyways I don't know it seems like you know they they're starting to peek out a little bit under the under the surface like these luses and things like that and you know we we'll see we'll see her goes from there although I do think next year I do have a prediction on that for next year for the lce Bas snark Starks they at least in that episode it was I understood that this makes snarks more compatible with FHA technology potentially but like lattice's are those are that's broader

than just F right like I'm assuming this all of a sudden opens it up to a bunch of new tech yeah absolutely does it also open it up to like AI stuff like ml stuff potentially tun's making a face yeah yeah I'm like that's that's that's not really related that's not talk get out of here no I'm just like that's I don't know those are very unrelated oh they are oh I mean the reason we're using laes is uh cuz we're trying to find hard problems we're trying to find things that are easy to set up for computers and hard to break and that's how we do cryptography um and so yeah that's how we do FH that's how we do we can do ZK some people are looking to do like obfuscation crucially most postquantum things are lce is the most best known

postquantum things yeah and actually there was a fun paper that came out this year a big scare so in April there was this paper called Quantum algorithms for lce problems uh in which uh the author y Chen says like hey here are algorithms that break these latis problems like Quantum algorithms that break these problems wow and for like a period of one week everyone was freaking out cuz this is a very respected author and everyone was reading through their paper trying to find a bug me like holy [ __ ] is is everything broken do we have to give up on ltis especially because ltis were being used in a lot of the nist standardization efforts for like postquantum encryption and so 9 days later someone you know reaches out to elen and he updates the paper saying

like hey there's actually a bug and I can't fix this um so the paper is still up for inspiration if people want to think about these problems um but laes are not broken yet as far as we know ooh do you think they will be though was that like a hint that they could be it was it was a close call I think there were a few people trying to find bugs and elay fixed a few of them so it started to feel like maybe maybe there's nothing we can do here I don't know these things well enough to have any form of intuition and yeah what I think was really for me interesting in that whole debacle there was this magical like organization that happened and I mean organization like the sense of like

an org that does stuff like an organization of like organization of humans that just like happened like I don't know Discord servers were launched and people were just like the Discord server was only talking about this paper and like like the channels were like different pages of the paper and different theorems people would discuss the like the it was super interesting to watch like how people organize spontaneously organize themselves against major results in kind of like postco right like I feel like these things kind of happen a little bit and weird Niche esoteric channels but seeing it be so public right like outside of labs like outside of you know just people who work at Google and no math or whatever were just spin spinning up these servers and being

like dude come join like we need whoever we can get to understand this stuff if you can explain it great if you can't explain it done like let's just try to figure out what the hell this thing is saying like how to do it and it was very fun seeing that and it's kind of an interesting you know where where's the future of like research going I think which is what was kind of limited to you know Rubes the Blackboard and whatever the Stanford physics department feels to be like a very Global thing now and that I I don't know it was just very just as an anthropological exercise is very fun to I think it helps that it was a theoretical problem and a theoretical break sure like had it been concrete I think this would have been like locked up Department of Defense like on it well

I think there's also this philosophical issue that comes with these with generally Quantum algorithms that I think is like worth pointing out as to why it takes forever to figure out if these things are correct or not when someone posts them which is like the most cryptography whether it's algebraic or whether it's hash based I'm separating those very broadly I know there's obviously overlap but like there's sort of there's sort of a sense in which there's they're very like strongly discret objects there's a certain number of objects and there's a certain subset of those objects that are valid and you want the number that are valid to be very small relative to the number that are inval about it the problem is quantum algorithms are in

continuous time and continuous space like all the operations are with some probability like you do this operation and this particular State update happens and the thing is you're trying to make this like probabilistic statement like after a certain number of operations with high probability I've concentrated onto the valid States like the things that are the private keys or whatever the problem is sometimes those continuous process these they'll always have Place some probability on the right answer but generally the hard part of showing that it's like the right amount of probability and often times how you measure that is extremely difficult in Quantum algorithms whereas in discret

algorithms it's like probability is very easy right it's like I count one set of objects I count another set of objects and I divide them I know it sounds very stupid to say it that way but that is literally what you're doing in discreet land but in continuous land it's not quite that and Geo hates continuous math so like I I point this out just more as a he's a he's he's a noted he's a noted hater of probability in continuous space no I hate measure Theory I have I've did my entire PhD in continuous land and physics This is BS but a lot of the quantum algorithm stuff actually boils down to like getting that that type of stuff right unfortunately I I have thoughts about this because you know the the the state space is countable and so

we don't need measure Theory but that's that's a different this is more of a you know philosophical quam yeah but but I I guess my the reason I bring this up is like there's two different cultures there's like the the discret land cryptography culture and then there's the continuous space and time Quantum algorithms culture and so like any paper that makes some claim like this has to use tools from both and you need people who can validate both in order for it to work which might take a lot longer than if you wrote something that's purely discreet or purely continuous wow but that's more like a philosophy of science thing of like oh like how do you know whether result is right or not and like

how many how many people do you need to validate it whatever like how many viewers I think my version of this which is just like the standard GE moand is like actually we just don't have good abstractions for like Quantum algorithms I feel like that's like giving up no no I no no I I I mean that in a positive sense of like we should just make good abstractions for Quantum algorithms we just don't have them right like right now it's kind of like throwing away that's throwing away Decades of hard work people have done and saying oh no everything they've done is useless like it feels like not worth I'm not saying it's useless I'm just saying it's bad like bad Aesthetics and you know I have a I have a ranking of Aesthetics uh physicists are not at the

top and in fact they're not even close to the middle um but happy happy to happy to discuss further on that uh I think cryptographers funnily enough are really at the bottom actually which is also kind of funny on this term see again again again again the Geo Trash Talk hour has started right like I feel like you you got to have a little respect for for how hard people work on certain things and this is not to say that that's not important or interesting or anything like that I just think it's B not to say that you're you're you're you're you're PhD and postdoc 20 years of research aren't important but correct but it's Kanye West but for academics you know like when he I mean hey I I'll take whatever you

you know as much as I sling uh you know insults I I hope that someone slings similar insults back like this is not a oneway road but I unfortunately I still think that I am right on this uh you know this opinion is correct amazing so now I want to move on to another topic I wanted to touch on for 20124 which is applications and ZK applications so one of the challenges with applications is that sometimes they may have been proposed in previous years but only really become relevant this year or maybe only really started to be used this year so we're going to be a little forgiving in like the exact timelines for the applications like I'm trying to understand here what's really kind of emerged in 2024 what do we consider like the ZK application space today so if

we're going to be lenient on timelines then I think we can talk about like ZK TLS and I hate that naming for it but like oh my God proofs yeah wait wait wait wait can ju just cuz like I don't know if you've done an episode on this we we did an episode on web proofs yeah can we can we like disambiguate the term because I feel like it's a wrong ter DLS specifically so I haven't it's it's good explaining why it's WR I I don't think I've ever done a full episode just on that term but it has been mentioned a bunch of times so yeah what is what is the deal with ZK TLS then so the idea is you'd have some kind of plugin in your browser or you have a modified browser that allows you to make proofs about a

TLS session and even actually more specific than TLS some cases it's like https so it's like you go to your bank's website it's secured with https great now you can make a proof that your account has a balance that's higher than you know some number the difficulty here is the cryptography that's used is symmetric you don't have like this property which is non- reputation you don't know for sure whether or not the messages sent between you and the bank were signed by you or by the bank right and so to convince a third party that it was the bank and not myself we need to include someone else in this sort of proving mechanism and that's like these notaries or these proxies or these MPC nodes so this is why I usually don't like the term ZK TLS because ZK usually refers to things that have aover

a verifier and the zero knowledge property hopefully if you're using ZK correctly and then here we're actually talking about a protocol with a law more parties and so it could be a bit like uh dis TLS yeah it's a lot more like yeah NPC TLS or you don't have to use NPC you can do this with like just someone that sits on the network between you and the bank and then it's kind of like proxy TLS and this why talking about like TLS attestations is like in my opinion a bit more generic doesn't have the downsides and the pitfalls of calling it ZK TLs but also isn't specific about how you do it um I don't know what your thoughts are this is the kindest dunk I've ever heard yeah on the podcast hey I'm not here to pick fights I'm just

here to decode some jar you know that's what I do all right are there any other um things that have emerged this year I I do have a couple I mean if we're going to pick fights ZK VM actually yeah so this is what I'm this is what I'm going to say which is the fact that a lot of people have gone from working on applications to working on ZK VMS is a sign that the search process to find applications has failed and everyone wants to Outsource it to people building stuff on their VMS so then they end up building VMS instead of applications well I mean we did learn this year that like fundraising for applications ZK applications has been hard um but I

don't know if that's the fault of the state of the kind of application space or the fault of the funders at this time just because like I just mean that if a lot of people pivot from pivot to making a VM you make a VM because you're like so I want someone else to find the application and use my substrate as opposed to like I have an application right and so if everyone is going to a VM that means the search process through the application space is not going very well mhm whereas the search process and the VM space is easier you you really don't think it's just because like there's more of an upside like there's more of a business like a case that investors like and investors are kind of pushing these teams to create ZK VMS

instead of using somebody else's I mean if anything I'd say it's harder to make money building a zkm than it is building an application cuz you're now competing with a lot of other ZK VMS everything is open source so it's very easy to like Fork one and make your own ZK VM well very easy relatively easy compared to what it was like a year ago two years ago um and so I'm not sure there is a business case to be made there H well it reminds me quite a lot of like the L1 booms of yester year or the l2s for that matter where a team would have sort of like a really novel application idea and then go shop it on the market and sometimes there like Tech was missing

for them to truly build the thing that they wanted to build and then they had to build down the stack and then they ended up building more of the infrastructure and then just focused on the infrastructure but other times I do think it was just like I I really do think sometimes it was just like that was a more compelling business case for that team to be doing at that time than joining an ecosystem where you definitely get like a lower tier status like you can't you know you're not you're not the L2 you're not the L1 you're not the overarching network ecosystem anymore you're part of somebody else's I mean I think a lot of projects have had that problem in like attracting app developers which is like you know I I feel like the apps should be valued very highly but they're still

sort of seen as a little bit like a secondary like oh it's part of my ecosystem it's part of an ecosystem yeah well actually I would dispute that a little bit uh in in terms of other crypto applications that are not ZK where there's a ton of them making a lot of money like all these telegram Bots making 100 Milli year plus so like all I have to say is like I think if applications find a way to make money they will do it regardless of the ecosystem which is like what these telegram bot type of things have been kind of proving so I think it's just more like people haven't been able to get any traction and the Z AVM is like a safe fallback cuz you know what you're supposed to be building and you know if

you have a particular Vector direction of like these are the things I want to change then like you have a thing to keep moving on versus like getting stuck in the like no one wants to use my thing yeah it's kind of funny but it's like you know zbm has like feels like it's become like a well trod path versus like the applications which is kind of an open thing and it's like okay cool if we build a ckvm we'll find maybe some applications someone will figure out applications for it versus being like okay but it's funny cuz this all happened this year what you're saying of like building of zkm is not an easy task yeah true happened this year up until like end of 2023 We There was maybe just RIS zero doing sort of RIS five and now we have plenty of them yeah so when I

say like easy task I I don't mean like easy in a in a physical sense I mean easy in like the spiritual sense of like this is now a thing that like is a thing right I know it's kind of wo or whatever but but it is like a thing that people like do right which is a funny thing to say about like such a kind of Niche esoteric topic relative to not not in crypto but just in the rest of the world like but don't you find that when when a project when a like a category reaches that level like for example I I can't remember what we said last year for 2023 I was telling you this g i I didn't have a chance to listen to our episode so I don't know what we said but I'm pretty sure we would have mentioned

co-processors last year because that was we did I'm pretty sure I can even look it up the idea emerged and then within a few months a few other teams were doing it and then by the end of the year there was like a list very very long and I think a lot of those teams have since sort of like like that's their application but they've moved a lot of their effort into like another part of the stack that they're building well that's what we just saw with axium right announcing open VM so axim started out as a processor and now they're leading one of these like VM efforts that's crazy I actually didn't know this when when did this get announced yesterday okay fair fair I'm allowed not to know that I feel like I was completely out of the loop I was like what okay yesterday

no no a lot of other co-processors then end ended up moving more in the prover Network side of things and like PR networks we definitely talked about at the end of last year that was when we were first seeing those projects emerge but in the last year we've seen a lot of teams that had sort of initially pivot like pitched themselves as one type of application include aover Network to like widen their their offering basically my only thing is just like I I think like the answer to your question is there are no applications I love you you know it's like it's l literally the like that's what that's what 2024 was to me oh I mean there's one so actually thinking back to our predictions that we made earlier this year um we were

talking about like identity stuff and scanning passports and that's actually something that has been built a lot this year true there's a lot of different teams that have been able to scan passports and make ZK proofs around them um the application built on top of it I I haven't seen many um we had heard of I think it was the RAR remot team using it to do like Shadow elections in specific countries um I think Aztec some of their early wallets are looking to integrate this like from the very beginning in the wallet but I don't know if we saw yet like fully fledged identity systems and identity applications we're on the way Nico you and I talked a lot about this in our last in sort of the last episode of the regular weekly Cadence we did a a look back at some of the events that had

happened um and we mentioned the cursive presentation at ZK Summit there there's some really interesting ideas but this is in the like to me that that's in like IDE ideation phase although they are doing experiments with all of these so like you might get a chance to use this but it's not like it's in production yet in in any sort of like large scale way yeah but I guess that's exactly the kind of application research that tun was mentioning that some others have tried and haven't been fruitful with and yeah hopefully some team will find something eventually I mean there are few things that have popped up but I I don't know if they fall under the application category exactly but things like the like Celestia ZK accounts there's all

these BTC ZK rollups which is not like new but it's different I mean it's like rollups are not new but they're using I mean they're going about it in a different way and then karks which is obviously more like an infrastructure piece it's not an application per se but I I mean at Le in the conversations it sounded like that could open up some some cool things I would say one thing that hopefully will come out of all the VMS a little bit like your analogy of like the 5 million l1s is like a the VM that you don't expect will win if it's like the l1's right where it's like salana yeah exactly it's going to be like someone who you don't expect but who like developer builds better developer

tooling um and then the other thing is like I'm just hoping people kind of of like Upstream ZK into already successful applications versus like trying to build totally new ones from scratch like for use use DK tools as like features within existing applications that already have usage you're kind of starting to see that and my prediction is like 2025 we might actually start seeing that way more where it's like ZK and T's or somehow added to already useful applications as opposed to like totally built from scratch around the Privacy preserving or succinctness features I I I think like we're going to have a flip

from like oh the application has to be about ZK or privacy or succinctness or Etc and it will be like those are features that get make an existing product better and I feel like that is the direction we're moving in but you know I could be very wrong I that's just my kind of rough belief yeah I on that point I feel the same way about ZK as I do like about blockchains just like fundamentally it is like a cool insanely sick like [ __ ] wild technology that is possible but otherwise like nobody's debating you know what database use like no no front-facing consumer gives a [ __ ] about like what database you're using in the back endend of your like application right like you're not like ah like use

mongodb I'm not going to use you because like sorry you know like fundamentally there's like a boring technology my values yeah yeah yeah like it's just like a boring like a very fundamentally boring technology for the it's like okay cool like yeah we use use this like cool cryptography stuff to ensure that my privacy is preserved sick like and it is very cool like for for what's worth it's insanely cool like the fact that we can even do it is insane but it is not the point like it's it's kind of like in an instrument to like doing the thing rather than like the thing itself and so I with tun's point I think that's that's a it's a healthy thing to see where it's like cool like the tooling has become good enough that I can just like incorporate this in the way I want or

the way I find interesting into the app and I never have to think about it again so far as it's like the properties I get are cool or useful or whatever I I just realized GMO and Nico you guys released some work recently and I don't know what category that falls under yeah is that an application or is that research I have no idea I'm glad you that's a great question and and I do think like we probably deserve a like a lot of you know a lot of time and space to really dive into what you guys are have have recently released but do you want to just quick summarize it and then we can maybe do like a full episode on it sometime soon okay I'm going to I'm going to give a quick setup and I'm going to say the thing so there is like

this funny thing that I've been ranting on I believe I've done it here in the podcast which is you know right now we have kind of multiple ways of building um like zero knowledge proofs one of which is we use a VM a ZK VM another one is I'm sorry I when I say ZK I mean ZK and the like Royal sense of ZK you know the like lower case z uh so CN proofs and I've been ranting about like look there are things that we use all the damn time like literally so much that it is unbelievable that we are going to just eat all of this overhead to like prove that a certain thing was done correctly so in the case of let's do the case of Zoda it's like one of the things that happens a lot in Celestia is we encode

some piece of data right and we would like to show that that encoding is in some sense correct or close to correct or whatever right and the first thing you say is like cool like we have this very sick and cool proving system which is either ZK BM or we have like an General proving system where we like build some circuits and you go and like press enter and you generate your square right which is you know takes like a second on the laptop and then you press enter on the you know zkm or ZK proving system and like let it run for many hours and then out comes a proof that like the thing you did was correct right but but the point is the the the difference in time that it takes you between doing the thing that you care

about doing you know which is a few seconds and proving that that thing that you just did in a second is correct is like a thousand 10,000 100,000 x so more like more time yeah more time right so like proving the thing is like somehow even though it's kind of an incidental thing like I just want to show you that what I did was correct like now it takes like thousands 10 thousands hundreds of thousands than just like doing the thing itself which is kind of silly and yeah it's easier to Pro it's easier to verify and stuff but but fundamentally it's that so one of the rants I've always had is like okay in some sense there are certain you know it is easier to build on a zkm which is why everyone's building zkm so but you should be able to kind of

go down to the bare metal and for certain very important applications we should be able to construct specific you know proving you know I don't know what to call them and like not a system because it doesn't prove everything but like a specific algorithm such that like the amount of time you spend doing the thing and the amount of time you spend proving that the thing you've done is correct is very small right cool and that's what you guys have built so specifically yeah in the case of Da we've built what we think is the first like purpose specific succinct proof cool which actually does a thing that like people are are using right now like they're doing right now on in the case of data availability which is we want to prove that like some

thing is not just like close to correct encoding but indid has this tensor property of this like weird encoding and it has these like additional data availability Properties or whatever yeah just to be clear like not exactly the first year right there's these great papers from ethereum Foundation um like benedi ragner and Mar Mark simin U and I think Ma matus H Anderson who look at this problem um but they with the way they do it in call incurs like a a constant overhead cost on the network so in their system like the network is going to be be sending the same thing to every single like node uh whereas we sort of relaxed a bit the definitions looked at it maybe I I'd argue a bit more holistically and realize we could get rid of that overhead and so that's sort of the main point of the work cool

correct correct yeah so we're not the first on to do it overall I think the first and specifically is to do it in a way that's zero overhead where cool constructing the proof and having done the thing takes the same amount of time and take the same amount of space so which is weird and like not obviously you can do anyways that's a whole other thing for later problem we can talk about another episode potentially yes um very cool so now I think we're almost at the end of the 2024 look back there was one point I did want to cover which was were there any technical barriers or challenges that the ZK space faced this year I think 2022 was the ofac sanctioning of tornado um last year I honestly can't remember what the challenge was but I'm

sure we said something earlier in this episode we actually brought one up that was at least suggested right here at the end of the year which is quantum Computing will ruin uh lipic curve cryptography and I I have to be honest like I I slightly fell for it I thought like o maybe this is a thing I mean we know it's going to happen right it's just a matter of timeline it's when and yeah I think we still have a lot of time one thing that oftentimes happens I think in research where you have to build physical devices is if it's not really a general purpose device it's built around solving a particular problem really fast but it might not be particularly fast for other

problems like maybe the only problems it can encode are like things that are represented as an ising model well a lot of computations if have to embed them as an ising model it's extremely slow gigantic High overhead Etc right like so my point is like there's a lot of devils in the detail to like how the device is implemented what it's built around being used for what the benchmarks are and how it's real world performance on like lateral problem solving like problems that aren't exactly the one thing was designed for work and generally the quantum 4A transform SL Shores algorithm type of stuff is not the Benchmark

everyone cares about um it they generally care about these like hardness circuits like these like worst case circuits you know if you've for the cryptography audience if you ever studied like IO or garbled circuits you could think of there being a Quantum version of that that represents like a random garbled circuit and you need to like solve some something that looks like satisfiability for it that's considered the gold standard or like the hard to prove that you've done something that a classical computer can't do um and those types of things are very different than the Practical things so you might have built a device around like winning the benchmark like beating the Benchmark but you that that device might actually be still kind of not super practical for doing like

finding satoshi's keys but isn't there motivation to and not because I mean Bitcoin Keys is like the least of it's like think about all sorts of encryption that would like destroy States you know like I feel like is there is there enough motivation but but most of the positive usage of quantum Computing is not cryptography related right most of it is simulating physical system and kind like the that when Geo was myn in 201 the we were working on like you could do that like 10 to the 15th times faster or whatever right like that's like that's kind of like why people want quantum computer so Google's actually focused on the science side much more

than the cryptography side and that's also why I think like I find the marketing aspect of it very unsavory like I get it but the idea that your CEO is going on TV saying like this proves the Multiverse exists is like a little embarrassing to me say that this is that's actually why go go read the blog post it's like it is embarrassing what they released actually a thing like so maybe the marketing's wrong maybe like but is it a first step towards something or is it all fluff I mean I I for what it's worth I've only like very casually read the stuff I was interested in Quantum Computing three my master part of the PHD which is the reason why I did some of the stuff I did but I don't I mean

I'm sure it's like a nice step towards the same things that everyone has cared about for a while but it is a step it's not obvious to me that this is like an enormous I think the biggest thing that was very interesting was kind of an A positive claim that they made which has kind of Fallen by the website Wayside which is this um in Quantum systems there's a big problem with erors that kind of they get accumulated in the in the system and at a certain point your signal becomes mostly noise right so you can't you can't use it in any like ful way if like too much noise gets into this like I don't want to get too much DET but too much noise gets into the signal right uh and then the point is like what they showed is as you what

what normally happens as you make the systems larger you get more erir but here because of erction they were able to like not get more air or like less but it's not just that so what's interesting is here as the system gets larger you actually get less air and and that's error is what you're saying right e r r o r like r r o r not air yeah yeah no not air like generic oxygen or like nitrogen with oxygen erate yeah so what that was what was weird that was like what was like oh [ __ ] this maybe is like very do you know anyone who's like checking this or like how does this get verified there's a lot of trust me bro

and Hardware like that's that's just a fundamental truism right it's like you can't really verify the hardware the fun part about physics is actually just it's shocking how much of it does like not reproduce um which is very weird because everyone holds physics as the golden standard of reversibility because some they're used to they're used you used to not be able to be become Stanford's pref president by faking your results for 20 years unfortunately that's true nowadays to be fair yeah yeah that was well that was like biochemistry I know I know but like I mean it's a societal value thing that like other challenges and setbacks I'm going to just say like I think we just highlighted one which was like applications almost like reverting back

to infrastructure which was not something we were hoping for this year we were hoping to see like Standalone application um is there anything else yeah I found that competition got a bit nasty true maybe it already was but it got a bit nasty it always was it just wasn't on the surface it always was it just categories like the the l1s or the L the rollups was last year's battle right yeah yeah but communication's got a bit nasty around it and that's I think unfortunate for the whole space and I think it is a challenge moving forward like how are we going to make sure that the nature of the size of the ecosystem sadly and like the money on the line it attracts more

of that I think T you had sort of hinted at the rollup road map uh in our pre in our pre-c conversation here I I basically think like fundament and like I I'm biased now CU I'm writing some small note on paper on this but like there's actually this fundamental annoying problem about rollups which is if I have a system that has n rollups in the worst case the amount of transaction demand that I need to make up for the Lost Revenue to the L1 grows with the number of rollups so like in a world with a th000 rollups I basically need a th times the transaction to compensate for like L1 lost Revenue due

to which makes total sense actually yeah it it's sort of like you know you're you're taking away all this meev auction stuff which pumps up the revenue like if you look at salana where like the revenue is huge from that and if you look at how much competition you get from having all the rollups uh you you sort of get this like lower bound which is like kind of annoying so I I I think that the idea that there's going to be a million rollups and you you're going to need you know the the the services sold to the rollups like da and stuff are going to be valuable is like a lot harder of a claim to make in 2024 when you know you look at the rollups it's concentrated to the top three or four um it's clearly not like the ecosy rollup

ecosystems haven't figured out how to like not just be tricycles that happen to have a a bridge a validating bridge to to main net um and I I just generally think like there you know as as great as you know a lot of things that are within ethereum are like there is a sense and like I'm again this is this is sort of like one of the reasons I've been thinking a lot about this wri about this is like this you know everyone on Twitter will be fighting about are rollups parasitic to ethereum or not right are they removing all the volume and demand and then no one wants to hold the asset whatever there's a sense in which it's true but only if the transaction demand for the whole network is below some

threshold and the problem is we're kind of below that threshold like we just don't we don't have enough demand to justify if if you look inally it's like kind of actually kind of weird and that's why you see kind of I think the success of like the salana and move type of stuff right now compared to some of the things in the although this isn't zic just like one of the this isn't this is rollups but I think the ZK rollups have an even worse version of this right they have a higher cost base rate theying they cheap to of other things that the current ones have so that means they need even more transaction demand

and if you look at them they have much less don't they make money through like these provs like having Pro like doing proofs on chain kind of okay okay so yeah the the real question is is will ZK get more in my head and this is sort of like a a like again more philosophical question but will will ZK get actually used in applications when the cost of proving is and the the actual proof generation is the valuable part or will it actually get used when proving basically costs zero so you're saying like we're heading towards a zero cost anyway so like the it won't if if we're heading towards zero cost that's how you

get distribution and so like it's but I do think the DK rollups that are live now are in this weird kind of Catch 22 where it's like the cost is high now so like they have to somehow get more transaction demand than like base or arbitrum and like that seems very unfeasible in in4 yeah the hard part for me is like betting on ZK costs remaining high and then people paying for it like feels very much like betting against the Improvement of technology and the Improvement of like proof systems which like if we've if we've learned anything over the past like literal 4 years is that those things feel like they're going to zero extremely quickly maybe there's some fundamental limitation why this time is different uh you know and

like all the stuff but I I have a I do have a hard time with this it's like if you're depending fundamentally on like the economics of proofs like costing some minimal amount like I feel like I have bad news against betting against technology like we have literal super computers in our pocket to question lots of projects actually cuz like aren't Pro networks sort of like based on that too I'm not saying they won't be valuable necessarily I'm just trying to say the following statement which is like in proof of work the the value of the hardness of the process is important to the network that's right it's in fact one where like by not by not adding in new technology to the network that's

right you you're kind of making the creation process more valuable but in everything else where it's a technology thing if the technology improves the cost has to trade claims that are like in infinite time and infinite resource world like you could spend as much money and as much time to get to that advancement so there's obviously going to be some time period where that's not true but where those two kind of things meet where the production cost is as valuable as like the consumption cost in some sense is like the thing that you're predicting and I just sort of think ZK has like a weird cost it's and unless it can increase its

transaction demand like ax it's like it is it does seem kind of like it's always going to be a a loss to the non CK version at least for rollups just for rollups just for rollups so we just have a few minutes left in this episode but as I had said at the beginning I really want to touch on 2025 and what could be coming in the zekk space for 2025 predictions people don't we love them um I again sadly forgot to check last year's so I may accidentally say the same thing again I have a feeling one of those would have been more applications in 2024 yeah and I would at least like in a hopeful sense pitch that forward um but yeah what do you think what do you think

is coming up in ZK in the new year I think for me it's more of a wish list than a okay prediction but I want to see proving for people you know no more proving for big servers for rups I want to see proving for people I want to see it happen on your phone or if it's not happening on your phone I want to see it delegated privately um yes but yeah I I want people to actually build on phones kind of in the same way it's easy to fall back to building a VM it's also easy to fall back to building proof systems or applications well no tools yeah for Big B servers y it's harder to build them for phones that's my number one item on the wish list and I think that's also what a lot people are going to be

targeting yeah I mean I think I had this prediction last year too which is like client side proving like come on like what are we doing like what are we doing here like this is supposed to be privacy software not like SAS right like we don't need a rack somewhere to like do the things for us we have supercomputers in our pockets we should just use the super computer in our pocket to do the thing like come on anyways I'm very mad about this uh and I agree put the ZK back into ZK correct I see 2025 as being a time of certain kinds of like almost like like the experiments and pitches from 2023 and 2024 I hope go live enough that we get to see if they work or not so these include some of these categories we talked about like the co-processors like the prover networks

there's the verification aggregators like these are interesting but they they've felt so far somewhat unproven the economics aren't as clear exactly how they interact with the different systems they plan on interacting with isn't completely clear how many there should be if there's even a market like these are kind of questions that I feel like I've been having for many many months and and maybe like more than a year and I'm hoping that in 2025 we start to see the answers it's not to say they'll be good or bad it's just like that's kind of what I'm hoping would be like we get some sense for these things I'll give one instead of a a predict you know I gave I guess earlier prediction that like ex an existing application will be a better user than

any new application uh and I count rollups in the new application but let me tell you the most successful usage of cryptographic techniques in terms of a money-making application in crypto year I think I know what you're going to say I take guess each of you you get one guess I think it is a project I'm not a big fan of okay okay no then it's not what I thought okay it's not you would have known what I meant okay I don't think I I I actually don't I don't know I don't know I don't know your opinion alth I I I do think it is that but well for me but okay guess give me your guess give me your guess total number of proofs economic no no in terms of using cryptographic tools on a mobile phone for an end User it's worldcoin isn't it

I think worldcoin Bonk bot Mak makes way more money what bot B bonot is done completely in te oh uh on mobile devices made $300 million last year although T holy [ __ ] wait that's incredible you should read the bbot te architecture it's actually quite I was I was quite impressed uh for for like something that's like doing meme coin Trading so this is where my point is that like all the stuff that like people are spending money on I think eventually will see you'll get the seep in of like mobile privacy um especially as people are using way more mobile apps for crypto like as weird as it is to say no one has gotten more mobile app usage of

wallets than meme coins which is like kind of scary and sad at the same time but fast stock trading it's like Robin hoodie what the worst outcome for ZK in 2025 what's like a bad thing that we're afraid of rollups are the only consumers of proofs no applications I mean there a worst case outcome but I don't know like for me the probability that that happens is zero you haven't talked enough ZK VM teams they all think that rollups are the best customers no they're they're by far the worst like I don't know I find it hard to believe that we're not just going to be like slinging proofs from our phones all the time in the next like 10 years I also do think it might be we said next year not 10 years next year next year

okay fine yeah maybe next year fine all right I'll I'll give another best one best one would be like well kind of best I don't know if this is that great but like some existing huge monolith technology company starts to be deep like ZK becomes like a deep part of their sack which is exciting because it would be like then the the number of people touching it would be very cool and like this Tech would go further the bad thing is is like obviously this the whole Spirit would change potentially and like the fix the focus like it would almost be like that that company could almost absorb all of this work we've been doing building out you know the ideas around this and then just kind of like take it sort of as their own which would be a bummer

um I mean you were in music before Anna so maybe this analogy is going to help like resonate with you like when you're in like underground Indie circles you love the kind of music you're doing and you want it to be pushed out to as many people as you can but suddenly when becomes MRE and when like Main Music sort of appropriates that kind of Stu it becomes unol and it is what you wanted in the first place but then when you get that you're very sad about that that is so to me I completely yeah underground from the 9s Indie from the 2000s yeah yeah yeah I think we should be okay with it I'd be happy to see it Go main I'd be happy to see you know Apple wallets have

a crypto wallet in then you can sign with face ID super great uses te on the device already wonderful kind of sucks for the Indie developers but it's good for the end user yep there may or may not be at least one large company doing this but it's fine yeah I I feel like there are there already are like Cloud flare I know Cloud I would actually put money on cloud flare using they always they just used it in a really tiny way but I as in like using more like using recursion for instance like I would actually if anyone uses at first another worst outcome then is like a a very bad big project or big company or big entity or state or something using it like maybe that would be the the opposite it's permissionless and there's

no good or bad here actually worst outcome some kind of like huge breakthrough but gets patented and then like what I I worry about fhe for this by the way guys too many patents in fhe not going to name names but someone I think they might kill their own industry if they don't like open it up a little bit more is there anything you guys want to share about like what's coming up for me nothing specific just more research hopefully honestly just like I feel like I spent the last year falling out of closer to cryptography stuff and getting back more into I think that's cuz cuz I think it really is back def pilled once more I think before we sign off I just wanted

to share a bit about this show is as well because as you know we've been on break and we haven't been releasing as regularly although we have released one a month which is cool um so yeah the plan is you know after taking a bit of time off I had a chance to I don't know get a little bit of inspiration going a lot of these new use cases and directions these are things that I've been reading about and so I'm really excited to come back to these interviews and to start up the show again the plan right now is to start uh releasing again around mid January I don't have anything scheduled yet or recorded so maybe we have to push that back by a week but that's what we're looking at sort of mid

January I'm still not sure if I come back weekly like every week all the time but we're I'm sort of playing with the Cadence and we'll figure that out over the next few months but yeah I mean I just I feel like taking some time away what it made me do really was just it made me start to miss these interviews and obviously seeing you guys my co-host but also so digging into these topics I find it always very challenging intellectually it's broadening in a lot of ways instead of sort of narrowly focusing in on my day-to-day it's really great I think one of the challenges I've had is like being super super Hands-On and operational on the events front and R like running these three companies but yeah I think in the new year I mean I

have an amazing team around me uh with Gaylord and quent over at CK hack Agy and Rachel and Henrik and everyone over at the podcast also the entire zkv team who's who's really rolling right now so I feel like yeah in the New Year I'm going to be able to focus more on these episodes which is something I really want to do okay and then I have one last thing I want to share which is about the events coming up so in the New Year in 2025 there's already two events planned one on the zck front which is for zik hack Soul this is going to be in Korea right around the Biddle week so if you're in that part of the world in April the event will be happening April 11th to right after eth Taipei right before

Biddle and so if yeah if you're there please join us if you are one of the ZK hack community members and you've been at all the hackathons I hope you'll put that in your schedule for the new year if you have never been to a ZK hack hackathon but really want to check it out yeah join us as well Korea's pretty amazing I've been there once and it kind of blew my mind I think it may be yeah one of the coolest places I've ever been so it's very cool to get it get to do an event there the other thing and maybe more relevant to this audience is ZK Summit 13 we have our location we have our dates and I'm very excited to share this with all of you the ZK Summit 13 will be happening on May 12th in Toronto this is the first time we bring the

summit to Canada and the second time we bring it to North America but the last time we were there was in 2019 so this is pretty exciting to be doing a ZK Summit in North America yeah it's happening right around the consensus event as well well just so you know though we actually found this location and scheduled this before we knew about that so it's not meant to be kind of piggybacking on that but it just kind of worked out that way yeah so I hope I'll see a lot of you there put that in your calendar just so you know that we won't even be opening applications or anything until February we want to get sort of fresh research for the talks and also just generally we tend to do that in more of like a thre Monon window but if you're going to be there if you're

planning on being there just put that in your calendars already and and stay tuned on all the channels because that's where I'll be sharing more all right guys thank you to all of you for joining this sort of finale to the to the year on the ZK podcast this special episode where we looked back and looked forward yeah thanks for being on thank you sad to be here thank you for having us I want to say thank you to the podcast team Henrik Rachel and Tanya and to our listeners thanks for listening