Intro to the zkSummit 4

Transcript

[Music] so I want to say welcome to the zero knowledge Summit I am so happy to see all of you here you might notice that I'm so I usually present with Frederick my co-host for the zero knowledge podcast but today I have Howard and it's awesome to have Howard here a Frederick couldn't make it over to San Francisco he has just become a father which is really awesome and I think that's a fair excuse to miss the summit this time but I expect him back next time yeah and I wanted to invite Howard to help present because Howard you've been at the summit since the beginning do you have maybe I

was hoping you could share like just a thought on what the summit was like then and what you kind of expect for this time well I remember the first time it was in Berlin and it was it was a very different time March 2018 yes yes for crypto for the markets for blockchains for all of this it was a very different time and I'd say even for the conference the speakers were much more so focused on the blockchain side and less so on the cryptography side and I think we've come very much in the other direction now where the majority is on cryptography and and there's a there's a portion of blockchain in here now totally I'll kind of go through some of our slides here I'm gonna do a pretty

rush to intro because we're running a little bit late but this event is presented by the zero knowledge podcast which is something I'm the co-host of the narrow zero knowledge podcast really originally was like a blockchain podcast and we had maybe 5% zero knowledge topics 95% blockchain and at this point were like 60 percent your knowledge topics and 40% blockchain and it's increasing and that's pretty awesome it shows that the space is just booming ok so before we get into the program and stuff we want to share a little bit of practical info about this space there is Wi-Fi here it's the SSID zk 0 X 0 4 and the password is trusted setup if you want to check there there are some

posters with these hanging in the venue's you can find that and in addition there is a telegram group called zero knowledge podcast if you just search for a telegram you should be able to find it if not feel free to find any one of us and we can send you an invite link the podcast group has over 400 people and it's done a wonderful job curating a group of active participants in there and there's there's conversations happening every day and I want to use the group today to coordinate so if you join it you can also talk about things that are happening and talk to each other and yes there are going to be people who are not here fo mowing and I'm fine with that we'll just let them good ok there is coffee all day we have snacks we bought

way too many donuts we did not realize what 90 bucks could get you in a donut shop so please eat the doughnuts they're there for you there's more than even he's over there right now so I want to talk a bit about the program the way we're doing this is we have two stages this is the main stage there's a side stage kind of like down that hallway and there's also a breakout room right there we will help you with this as to as kind of as the day progresses will point you to the the right places this is the program there's also the program you would have received the program on Google Docs Google sheets we also have the program printed out around the space so have a look there's some wonderful

lineups today of on different stages and this morning we have Alexandra giving the state of the SOG scape and from there we have a few talks today that are actually all really interesting protocols that did not exist at the last zk0 ex summit and we are now at this point where there are not only a bunch of new work coming out but a bunch of new work with different properties we're now seeing protocols for zero knowledge proof that allow you to have circuits that can be universal that support universal universally different circuits that can be constantly updated in the setup and also have even trust lessness as a property and these are areas that are not only new but also very fascinating to explore and also for this

morning program we're starting the side stage at 11:30 with a talk about private see preserving smart contracts in that side room so that's at 11:30 just keep that in mind just after the coffee break does the afternoon but we're gonna come back after lunch and share a little bit more about this I want to give a very quick recap of zero knowledge of podcasts cuz I always use this time to just say like what's going on with the podcast itself we just released this week our hundredth episode I'm very very proud of that yeah I really wish Frederic was here man oh he's watching somewhere okay and I want to share I always share some of the most listened to episodes this changes every addition what's really neat this time when you look at it is you can very

much see the sort of focus shifting more on snarks and zero-knowledge topics yeah actually almost everything I think except for the youth to update touches on them so it's pretty cool there is also something called the study club the zero-knowledge study club it's also a telegram group it's a different telegram group sort of like an onion there's the podcast there's the study club there might even be a lower one at some point but for now there's the study club this is where we do much deeper dives into the tech and we also try to do a one every month a hangout where we talk about a paper and we actually explore it and put that on YouTube so if this is interesting for you get in touch it's invite-only for now so I can invite you alright let's talk a little bit more

about the event so today we have a few topics that were covering there's DK research there's snarks there's circuits and the ZK implementations and I wish we had that like a slide from like the first edition to show the difference it was so high level we did we actually had an excited Strad who's right there doing the billiard ball example in that first edition so we've come a long way cool the event could not have happened without our amazing sponsors moving the event from Berlin to SF for this edition was a big change it really could not have happened without these wonderful companies our gold sponsors were Aztec or our Aztec electric coin company in new cipher 3 fantastic projects working

on privacy and zero-knowledge topics as our silver sponsors we had Z cash foundation parity sello and web 3 foundation I want to maybe actually give a hand to those sponsors because this really could not have happened without you I want to say very quick thank you to the team of volunteers who are helping Thank You Howard for helping me do this intro and the program as mentioned is over there and I think we should get started