Reflecting on the State of ZK w/ Kobi Gurkan (Geometry)

Transcript

[Music] hello welcome back and thank you for joining us for another episode of The Strange water podcast in October 2021 I was still brand new to crypto I had heard Hayden Adams explained Unis swap on a Bloomberg podcast back in May and in August one of my friends had given me a T-Rex in a tuxedo nft for my birthday but by October I was fully in and by fully in I mean I was buying random stuff on coinbase never withdrawing from The Exchange wildly misunderstanding risk

and reading more and more and more and more and more about ethereum it wouldn't be another year before I really understood what a kzg commitment was and then probably another few months before I realized that ZK was where the next revolution in crypto would inevitably take place but in October 2021 some people already felt the certainty so strongly that they realized that they needed to get ahead of it and so a few of these people came together to create a research and investment firm to take all of the energy and the vision already growing in the ZK community and provide it with Rocket

Fuel and so roughly at the same time that I was buying soul and getting frustrated that I couldn't withdraw to my ethereum wallet geometry was born for those of you who aren't already familiar with the ZK entrepreneurship space geometry is in my opinion one of the most important firms that we have today not only are they funding some of the most exciting companies building ZK based products uh three of which by the way risk zero inama and Herodotus we've spoken with on this show they are producing research that has been critical to moving this space so far forward in such a short space of

time and so as you can clearly tell I incredibly excited to introduce today's guest Kobe girkin a co-founder and the head of research of geometry Kobe has not only been contributing to this space via geometry he's deeply involved with the ZK Community including his personal work with ZK hack and his frequent appearances on Anna Rose's ZK podcast which by the way is a required listen and follow today we have an incredibly fun and enlightening conversation on the state of the ZK industry Kobe gives us his thoughts on the development of the

technology the current state of the research and what he sees as the more promising areas of innovation we also spend a good amount of time discussing what it's like building in a field that evolves so quickly and how to design systems with upgradeability in mind not Financial or business advice but there's a lot of alpha here if you're thinking about being a builder in the imminent ZK boom speaking of financial advice one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and

then all right without any further Ado Kobe girkin Kobe thank you so much for joining us on the strange waterer podcast thanks for having me of course man this is a this is a really exciting one for me because I mean spend five minutes in the space you know that geometry is like one of the beating hearts of uh crypto and and cryptography let's be clear and uh you're a huge part of that so really looking forward to talking to you what talking to you about what ZK is and how it's going to change everything that we're doing yeah looking forward to to the conversation great so um I'm a huge huge believer that the most important part of every

conversation are the people involved so um with that as like a preface would you give us your background tell us how you found I guess mathematics and cryptography and then how you found crypto like the industry and then ultimately why you didn't run away yeah for sure uh yeah so I got into crypto a while ago and actually that was while I was studying for my masters in math and I I heard about the Bitcoin a while back like I was I was listening to this podcast called security Now um and in 2009 he was describing this this crazy thing called Bitcoin and how he

mined 50 Bitcoins on his CPU which was great and but I never got really deep into it until I had an opportunity during my masters to just give a a seminar about any topic that I wanted so I said okay that's the time that's the that's the opportunity and that's what I did and yeah ever since then I just got very deeply into the space and and got to work on a few Bitcoin stuff and managed to discover ethereum before it launched and got involved uh in in a few things there few projects did some contributions whatever I could back then uh which was very fun it was really

really fun to see ethereum starting from scratch um and you know to see what it has become today so that's amazing um yeah but if you like if we jump ahead a few years um at some point I got I discovered this topic called snarks and ZK and through some prodding of people around me which was which was very very useful and because I really loved it and that's that's what I've been doing for for the last five six years in terms of um a topic of Interest like really deep into snarks and threshold cryptography have been my top favorite topics in

those years um yeah I led the the crypto team in cello where we did some ZK light client stuff which was which was fun and also work with the eum foundation on ZK um but so a couple of years ago um more like two and a half now I started geometry with Tom H which is a combination of uh an investment fund that investing companies that have some deep math or cryptography as their basis as uh what makes them uh unique and succeed H but also research Group which comprises which is sorry which is

comprised of a few applied cryptography um engineers and uh and we use that to try to push what what we can in the state-ofthe-art and help uh portfolio companies and so on to to use cryptography in the best way possible um but yeah that that's briefly yeah well man I uh we'll get into all this in a moment but I just want to take a a second to say that um in let's say January to March this year um I had a a ZK idea and um it was essentially uh KZ G or plon as a service and um we had we met uh SRAM from enan Lair before things

had gotten super huge and he had told us like hey look like we don't necessarily want to do the kzg commitments for Igan da if we can Outsource that um would you be interested in doing it and so just bringing this up to say um that Venture didn't end up working out we had some it wasn't the right fit with the co-founders but like The Shining beacon on the hill like the number one that we wanted to talk to and be involved with was geometry so that's very flaing and again as as someone um a little bit about me I entered crypto in 2021 I heard Hayden Adams on a podcast describe Unis Swap and my brain just completely broke on the concept of

ethereum and yeah I've uh been down the rabbit hole since but um you know my journey has basically gone from like I was bu this time two years ago I was buying cardano and polka dot on centralized exchanges is and um before before you saw the light you know yeah well before I even realized it they were different things a theum and cardano and all this stuff I anyway so um it's I guess one to just remark on how quick this space moves but two just to like really Hammer home um what geometry means to like this corner of this very small space is uh you know again I really mean it when I say the Beating Heart of cryptography and ZK and so um just thank you no thank you I'm I'm

blushing here if people could see you yeah I think that uh you know when I got into this topic it was more about privacy um back then the people who were talking about scaling were more academics and it was more like an idea it was not super practical for scaling back then but it was definitely something that would have been a good end game um but back then it was prac practical even if slow but it was practical for privacy and that's what the zikas team has been doing um so I was first of all I was interested personally in zash like something that I've heard about and I looked at and it

it was definitely mind-blowing it was very complex for me to digest back then and uh and I I really wanted to stay in the Affinity of that area area um and in in parallel back then I was working on very non ZK stuff I was working on a multi signature wallet actually back then and I then had the opportunity to get in touch with people who were creating a company around snarks for back when when it started it wasn't super clear for what but it ended up very shortly after to be snarks for

identity and and yeah that that was a really unique experience um because I got to work on tools that were very very in a very nent form and everything was was unsafe everything was undocumented you had to figure figure out things by either reverse engineering or reading papers but to to give some credit to the zikas team they have a wonderful spec that's maintained up until this day and that has been a really great reference for ZK people um

one one of the best ones in that area in that era um and yeah we managed to build cool cool cool circuits that would solve interesting use cases around identity and yeah I think that that that the fact that you could do something completely private without revealing anything in a way that was non interactive because I knew I knew of simpler protocols that would be between two people or that would be for like blind signatures and things like that but for General computation and inclusion proofs that that was completely mind-blowing for me it was

mind-blowing that it would be at all efficient I I would would have expected it not to be practical at all and and I guess like that was the case right like that was the case before the before 2010 right so it wasn't practical but it became practical and that that was amazing to see so yeah yeah well I think one of the like you you've been on the other side of the table table but on the entrepreneur side once you start getting into these uh pitches you know you have the same little quips and one of the things I used to like love to say was that you know cryptography as a science like we invented back in World War I and two to basically encrypt and like hide messages and then for what 80 or 90

years like we thought this entire science and mathematical field was just to get better and better encryption and then in 2009 or 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto comes along and drops a white paper and says actually there are two use cases for cryptography and I think like what we're now in the era of is realizing like the world doesn't work in twos it works in it's things work for one thing or things work for end things and like right now we're really figuring out um like what those end things are and you made a comment about back when you found zcash how like nothing really worked and like all we could do is build just for the sake of building I mean it's it's

kind of funny how far we've gotten and how things haven't really changed because like and you're you're over there investing in these companies like I'm so proud and impressed of what people like succinct Labs or inuyama or cisic or any of these companies are doing but let's be real what everyone is just doing is we're not really sure what these tools are for let's just build them and make them as performant as possible and make them available for like the application May yeah I I think that you know some of it is definitely right I think that um a lot of companies are working on infrastructure um without clear users but a lot of them already have some clear users so yes maybe there are

different levels of users right like um you could already say that there are some users that are interested in blog space if you talk about it in in in the abstract and I guess layer 2 is already sold for that for the users that need blog space it doesn't really say what the blog space is for but there is already some clear demand for that and yeah it's it's uh it's obvious that there's a lot more to explore in terms of applications to to end users I I agree with that um but yeah it's it's clear that there is um some growing demand for some applications so like you say Unis swap was something that was uh

unique and widely used and um I guess we'll talk about that more later on but I do see um a growing number of crypto or let's say onchain native applications that might make sense now that didn't before um which which might mean that it's good to have been patient and not not pushing things too fast before yeah for sure and I think the important thing is to stratify between like users what we're talking about cuz I think we're clearly at the I just on this podcast I interviewed uh Herodotus and like they clearly have users but they're other blockchain developers and

so like if we think like in close in we can build products that have users but um I think we're still pretty far away from figuring out like why grandma would ever care about this technology yes we have a lot more work to get to Grand liary yeah cool so I guess um now is like a kind of good time to Pivot into like the state of um ZK as it is today so one um I think as a good jumping off point your work with zcash what you were kind of pointing at is that you were realizing that the technology and the math and the concepts were at a point where we could um apply ZK cryptography to General computation so can can you talk a little bit about like what does

that mean I guess let's try to address that for people um that don't live and breathe uh ZK but what does it mean to be able to like compress and project and use ZK for computation and then let's talk a little bit about what that means in a um you know modular blockchain world yeah okay so let's try let's see if that's the angle you were aiming for so um IM imagine that you have a program that you run local and you usually write C code or rust today or whatever and then you run it on a server you you put it on AWS and you run the code and you get some output

from that code U maybe it was some neural network maybe it was just some financial application whatever um but you really trust that it ran correctly right and what ZK allows you to do is exactly get the guarantee that given that you specified the program very clearly that you wrote the code uh correctly and clearly and you specified what is the in what are the inputs and what are the outputs um that are are related to this program then you could be sure that you offloaded that program correctly to a server and I think that

that's a good mental model for developers that are out of ZK to think about ZK generally and and I think that the first papers or the first ones that were um aiming for practical use in ZK and I think specifically I'm thinking about the Pinocchio pgr 13 that's exactly what they're talking about they're talking about the use case of off loading to Cloud um and that that's kind of a thing that you could get from examp for example from either trusting AWS or that you could get that from trusted hardware and but if you just want to

trust math for that you are also able to do that and that's kind of the the mind-blowing thing for ZK and so I guess like I'm just going to hop in here to a hard question um but how do you think about convincing people everything from the end user to the intermediaries to the developers to everyone that this kind of like concrete provable trust matters and I I'll give you an example that we have today right like basically every computer application that you download online like how you what you should do is download any open source application you should download the source code compile it yourself and then

check read it if you're capable but at the very least you should compile it yourself hash it and then check the hash against what the like website says is the commitment of the code which actually doesn't usually work right because like you don't have the terministic builds yeah well how about this I'll tell you I don't know if it normally works because I've never done it like 99% of like users out I've done it it doesn't work yeah so I guess my question to you is like we live in this world where we already have like kind of these paradigms and these tools to achieve just like the very basic forms of what we're building towards and it seems like no one cares how do you think about um just that reality as we're like we're pushing full hog into the ZK world

no I think that's a really great point and I think there's there's a lot to bridge here um specifically I think that if you talk about Mass adoption and the web to space if we call it like that um it takes a while to to change trust models in my opinion and for a while when when the internet started we worked with completely plain text internet right like we we we just had HTML Pages go go very transparently on the wire and people could could just sit on on on in your neighborhood and change the web

pages and insert viruses and things like that I I I remember doing that in like Network hacking courses and that was really fun yeah I actually studied computer science at Stanford and one of the courses they had was essentially download wire shark and let me show you all the things you can see exactly exactly but if you do it today you don't see a lot right that's that's the thing and there was a huge shift into having everything run with DLS and now everything is encrypted and now now we see this nice um lock or the nice um green check mark we actually don't see the green check mark anymore because it's so difficult that you don't

need it anymore um but that has happened it took a while together but that has happened and I think similarly we we've also seen that even more recently so let's talk about encryption again like we have Google Drive and we have other kind of storage and we put everything there and we don't really think about whether Google can scan it or see what's there and what's going to happen if it gets hacked and the data centers um and and the guard there goes and looks at the hard drives um but even even if you look at what

happened I think it was a year ago maybe it was a couple of years ago but Apple introduced end to endend encryption to iCloud and that's something that is really really unique that end users they just need to enable one one thing in their phone or in their iCloud account and then you have end to endend encrypted um everything um which was really really cool and to me it was a bit unexpected even um but what I'm trying to imply is that the the trust and the kind of reduction in trust it happens it happens slowly but it

happens and I think eventually that's the that's the end game so that's what happens it's it's just that we we have to push for it as an industry and not just in the blockchain space I think that's just specifically in the blockchain space it's easier because it's a very skeptical space in general and you want to and and you have like these fundamental assumptions that yes my layer one is trustless so I can't start adding very and trustful stuff there so you have to already make everything trustless and that pushes the boundary of what you need to do with cryptography and other Technologies

um but this reduction in trust happens globally in at least in some levels and I think it will just keep happening um it's it's the natural thing to do but it will take a lot of time to get to to Grandma let's say yeah yeah I mean I I definitely for me the bet on ethereum is like really a bet about a changing world and a world it you know let me just speak for America for a moment and not get political about it but like trust is completely breaking down like I don't care if we're talking about in our personal relationships with our

relationships with our government like it's just I I can't even really put it into words but like I'm watching the world fall apart and like nation states and like the way we found consensus and coordinated not working and then like literally my my favorite thing to say is if I ever am looking for proof for aliens like Satoshi Nakamoto is an alien like he showed up while trust was breaking down to like give us computer-based trust like so I guess I guess I I take your point that um it when these things happen slowly and they happen in the background but then suddenly one day you boot up wire shark and like it's everything's gone yeah and sometimes there's a push back right

sometimes there's there are some bills that we need to back door encryption but usually and hopefully it will not work for the long term MH and how much do you think about how app like when you think of the entire realm of ZK cryptography how much is ZK cryptography a technology that is associated or related to blockchain and how much of it is like much more general purpose about like all the other stuff we are like finding ways to use compute yeah I I think that's that's another great question I think again blockchain found the use case for ZK really appealing and we started with privacy

and and then eventually the the very big use case that is now being Z case being used for is scaling um and both of these play very well in this trustless and skeptical world of blockchain um and leaving that aside even though there are growing growing number of use cases in the blockchain space itself because we just have let's say more data or that we have more diverse use cases or we have history like you said you mentioned erus and we have history to read and process and things like that but if we're talking

about how it would look like for um everyday stuff and The Wider space um I think that the technology itself in terms of what it could provide is very useful and one example that I really like and that has been talked about more in the last couple of years but also actually not not only in the last couple of years but also many many years ago even before ZK became practical U would be the the topic of I guess proof carrying data and specifically this way of provably showing

transformation on Med media and without revealing the original media itself so for example if you have an image that is signed by a camera and then you take this image and you do some approved transformation for example you blur faces or that you crop and but you can show the provence up until the original camera and that's something that um that bunch of groups who worked on aan trummer back many many years ago and Dan Bonet more recently and Daniel Kang and that that's a super interesting topic

and it's again becoming much more practical right now and potentially even more important with proliferation of fake news and AI content and things like that um and once once we get into um the realization that we need to start reducing our trust more and more I think that these tools would find more more concrete use in the wider space but the caveat is that currently and maybe rightfully so we are we are allowing ourself to offload our trust to some other

corporations so for example yeah so for example if we're about proving this transformation of images and blurring and cropping we could also do that in tret Hardware like sgx and we say okay you know I already trust Intel to run my financial transactions in my bank so maybe it's okay to also trust them to um to prove to me that they cropped uh images correctly um but I think that once we get into very adversarial um scenarios or very um adversarial environments more correctly

that we have much reduced trust then this would be places that would be more natural to to adopt these things um and from there it might be the way to to get to a wider usage but there there's a big challenge in making it um developer friendly user friendly and that's something that that we have a lot more work to do yeah no I mean I think everything in this conversation will always point back to like how early we are and so I think um and you know there's something so special so so so special about crypto um I don't know

about you but I was at Stanford SBC um in August and like that to me was the moment where it it just clicked how special things are where you go to a conference and it's literal professors who are like writing moon maath like the day before go up on a stage and present out their research and then like a ton of kids in the audience are writing it down trying to figure out how do I implement it today like how do I put and I don't know if that's like a function of like how we're a little outside of like the regulatory environment or that there's just like a weird amount of energy or maybe it's like the inner ational of our um our little cohort but like there is just something like so

like Dynamic and fast and changing that like I think if anyone asks me as like hard a question as like well what are the uses of ZK outside of cryptocurrency I would say like I don't know like we have barely scratched the surface of cryptocurrency um well we'll get there when we get there uh yeah yeah yeah and I think we have some seeds but we have more more to to do and we have more more to to to develop in the in the culture in the sense that we we need to make sure that we don't trust the people we shouldn't trust so I guess with that as a good Pivot Point like let's talk a little bit about like the um State of the Union I guess for ZK today so can

you talk a little bit about like what are the most exciting um like things or advancements that are being worked on uh in the ZK space at least from your perspective right now yeah I I think that that a lot has happened in the last few years like really really a lot so for a few years we we had only one proving system that was widely used like we had growth 16 and Starks and like a couple of them right and those were very specific you had this and you had this and that's it you know you you were good you could you say I want a transparent snark I go to Stark and I want um something that has a trust I set up I go to grow 16 that that's it you know I'm

I'm good um but then PL came out and that was already um a big jump because then we had Universal setups but then uh in the last three years we we had a big or huge amounts of research as to how to optimize this proving systems for use cases that are more important to to what what we know that we already need so for example um one one we had a few papers on the topic of lookup argument in the in the span of a few

months um which was already each of them already either incrementally approved on top of the other and but but by huge lips or that they they just worked in parallel and released things um just in parallel and those were very very influential in in getting us to work on on on code that we know already instead of having to redesign our programs to fit the weird models that proving system got us to to you to work on and I think one way to to see that is that um Barry Whitehead wrote a post

about the lookup Singularity which was which was super interesting and described what if we had a proving system that only had lookups and that lookups were super faster um then we could probably do a lot of or we could probably prove a lot of the programs that we run today without having to change a lot um and in some sense we we we we got to a point where we can say yes we we can use lookups very efficiently and do binary operations without thinking about about it too much and it will be hyper

efficient which is really really great um and on on the other hand we we also have seen the design of other proving systems that are extremely efficient for the things that we know today so for example for inclusion proofs that's that's actually been part of the Loca protocols papers um but if you look at all these plon variants hyper plon um and and even if we look at these topics of folding like Nova and Supernova we we just as a community or as like more that

I guess academic and engineering community has managed to really hyper optimize all of these proving systems to to what we need and and I think that we we just need to sit down now and for each company or each team that is building a product they just need to understand how to use it because we had a lot of papers and we have some implementations and all of them are correct like I don't think that there are problems with the results or the benchmarks that they got but integrating them into a specific application is still pretty hard and I think that's that is a good picture of

where we are today in terms of translating the huge theoretical advancements that we had into practical use um and and that's also a lot of what has been excepted for us to work on in Geometry we try to bridge some of that um yeah yeah wait so to summarize what you said correct me if I'm wrong but essentially like we're making incredible strides both on the efficiency and the speed of proving systems as well as coming up with some new proving systems but I think what you just said is like the interesting point where we're at is the research is moving faster than yes the company building or the application and so there you know I

know that um this is maybe your first like serious 4 a into Venture and it's like right into this field but can you maybe reflect on like how unique and special that is and like what that means as a builder um you mean in the sense of the fact the research moves so fast yeah yeah just that we're in this like weird um industry where like somehow the uh developers are taking cues from the mathematic itions and not the other way around oh I see got it actually I think it's a feedback loop I think that um I think that the fact that Engineers or company Builders um have been having efficiency problems or have been wanting

to solve specific use cases has been informing the academics as to what to look at I think that works really well there is a very tight feedback loop and especially it works well when the researchers are also the company Builders and we see that in some places but not only I think that we like you said we we have these professors at SBC they work with protocols right like they they talk to them and they collaborate and they're happy to do it like the the everyone loves to work together it's a it's a good Community um and and that is a nice feedback loop but in terms of

research moving very very fast it does affect company building and it does affect um how you prioritize or how you choose the technology to work with and let's give you an example [Music] um so yeah right we have folding and we have lookups and we have all of that technology and but now if I want to build an application today what do I need to do and what are the tools that I have at my disposal and if for example you asked me a year ago I would probably tell you you know what you still need to go to circum you still need to if you want to deploy something fast and test some assumptions and maybe get

to users you maybe want to go to circom do a Groth 16 circuit and start with that and do thrusted setup and that would be your first version that might be okay um but eventually um it really depends on the use case and maybe some use cases require you to hyper optimize from day one um but uh but the situation is that probably if you want to get somewhere fast and you want to to get to users you have to compromise and not use these new tools immediately although I feel that it's changing I feel that the tooling is

becoming more practical for let's say everyday ZK user well I guess my question for you and this is obviously going to be super dependent on like the company or the product that we're talking about but when we're in ZK world how modular and abstracted out is the ZK from the application so that you know these upgrades can be implemented like let's do a m a hypothetical right like let's take Inca chain and that's a ZK rollup right and like let's say that Inca chain was deployed that the the beginning of last year and so it's underlying um like proving system is like plonk based and now we're a year later and like there

maybe like we want to do a f scheme or there's all this like crazy interesting stuff and the Inca chain team is like huh maybe like we made the wrong ZK choice but we want to keep all of like the the rollup infrastructure that we've built like for again depending on the company like are we is is this the type of Industry that is able to like continue to build in parallel while we research or are the companies that are built today going to be tied to the tech that gets outdated very quick yeah that that's a great question so like you said it depends on the use case um but my sense is that upgrades take a lot of

time anyway even if you think about plon in general just plon and that's that's also something I mentioned on a recent ziki podcast episode I think where you have theoretically this advantage of universal setup so that you don't have to do a setup per per update in your program but actually deploying that update is really hard anyway even if you don't do a setup because you need to audit you need to stress test it you need to make sure that it doesn't have any security problems that it doesn't have any edge cases and like even completeness edge cases and that's already really really

hard anyway yeah and has nothing to do with ZK exactly it like I mean ZK might make it so that we don't have the the the enough mind space and enough knowledge how to look at it the best way and we don't have the tooling to to evaluate the security or completeness or other other aspects of it as well as we do in other environments um but yeah it's it's a general problem even out of ZK and updates are really hard and in things that involve private data and things

that involve real people's money you can't really just do it and do AB testing on people and and and just do um continuous integration it's not it's not exactly the situation that you can afford yourself um and and that that translates as to whether we can even do upgrades at all and I think the the answer is that it would be hard to to immediately hit the target on day one so I think we need to to acknowledge that a company will have to do upgrades

eventually um and we need to acknowledge that it will not be easy so it's hard to prepare for everything from day one but for example um like you say maybe there is modularity so some use cases will have modularity um fundamentally because the proving system will will not be the one that informs what I use for my storage Merkle trees uh so for example if my Merkle Tre is use Shadow 56 that's really generic and and and everybody uses it and every proving system will strive to to have an

efficient Shadow 56 Gadget um but if I let my proving system inform how my data structures look like so for example I use posidon and posidon depend on a specific finite field of a specific size um and that will inform what what is the hash function that I use in my data structure then it would be more painful to change it later on and because if I switch to another proving system I I like one that is just based on binary things um I I will have to change my data structures and that transformation is possible but it will

be my ation phase so maybe I will have to have a circuit that will convert every time a user uses data from the old data structure I would have to first convert it to the new one and do this migration phase or like zikas did when they switch proving systems um they had this Turn Style um migration phase where you had to unshield and then Shield again um and that allow them to to for their for their specific case it was about mitigating the risk that was from the bug that they found in the yeah in the paper but it's also just a

migration path right so that you can use so I think it's not impossible to do these changes and it's just going to be hard sometimes if it's not modular enough but to be honest I think it's okay like we have to accept that because sometimes we have to make these decision to to let our proving system inform and let it control our entire stack and just because we need to have concrete efficiency so that's yeah that's something that you have to do sometimes got it so I sounds like there's two takeaways from there one is like regular computer science stuff like build with

modularity and abstraction and then try to contain your brand new piece of research as much as possible and then secondly it sounds like maybe there's an opportunity for researchers as they're pushing forward in this field to keep like a very strong emphasis on how on upgradeability and so maybe if you're coming out with planky 5 like have a section in there on like what a migration path would like that would be safe and secure would look like yeah that that's a good idea I think I think sometimes it might be hard for like the plunky 5 to predict that because they're not involved in every applications that blany 4 was used for um but um they might have some ideas and that would be

cool to to do yeah yeah cool so um final question on before I want to talk about some of the more um like underdeveloped or under research parts of ZK but while we're still talking about the research here when you're looking forward and looking at kind of a more mature industry how how do you see this kind of shaping up do you think that like all of these Primitives and like proving systems and ideas are going to settle into like battle tested uh open- Source public libraries or is this more going to be kind of a service model that is running open- source code like do you see this more a a red hat style industry or a um like I don't know just like

JavaScript tool sty like a um JS style industry yeah good question I think that one thing that must happen is that the verifier code is open source and that we know how to reason about it and the circuits are open source um because if we don't have that we are no better than trusting some other people's code that we don't see um so that's something that we we have to have open um and if we're talking for example about prover code I think that that there there is more to play with there there is a wide spectrum of what you can do so one thing that you could do is you can release One open

source prover just that I don't have to depend on the company surviving so if for example the rest of the application is is designed correctly or designed in a way that is um exit and that you can you you can withdraw your funds when ever you want uh even if it's harder um then you will be able to do it and that's probably something that that it might be nice for companies themselves to do but also the community might be able to do that uh by themselves if the papers are written clearly if the um verifier code is easily testable and so

on um so that's something that I think would be a good model for um as as a basic step like to have to have um an endorsed or not not endorsed sorry to have um a way to make sure that there is a path to not depending on the company by by having clear specs and so on um but General I think it's it's also fair to to make a market out of it like it's okay that if I want faster provs and I'm able to for example use

proof system composition to do some client side proving that preserves my privacy locally and then send it to another part it doesn't see my data but just aggregate it and compresses it so that it's cheaply verifiable on the blockchain I think that's a part where this kind of a service model might make sense and it's okay that you can then optimize it you can then run it on special hardware and that doesn't hurt the security at all and it creates opportunities to to still push and the stateof the art and still push um and the usability and what what

people could benefit from got it so it sounds like you're saying in this future world like it's totally valid both to say I want to start Maya chain so I'm going to like work with this centralized company that we're just going to send all of the data they're going to give us back the proofs and like that's fine but also the founders of Maya chain could decide like we don't want to work with third parties we're just going to download the libraries and use them directly and both like are valid I I think that yes and but there's also there's also some part that you that you probably want to preserve and that's some decentralization like again like not depending on the company so you

really don't want the company to hold you hostage in any way right um so you want to be able to always withdraw your fund so you need some permissionless system um you like you still need a permissionless system and you still need to be able to force transactions in even if the sequencer for some reason doesn't like you and sensors you um so you still need all of these components in order to to have this guarantees but once you have all of these components then it's okay to start offloading some of it to parties that do the proving really well I think that's fine so as long as you

have like the emergency like way to fix things like it's totally fine to go with the guys with the expertise who can do it faster and cheaper yeah and then I think think that's that's really how things work in the world in general and as long as we don't put trust in some other parties I think that's fine cool all right so let's talk about with our last 10 minutes or so here let's talk about what are the the areas of ZK and of cryptography more generally that you are like really excited about and think deserve like more attention like yeah I guess what would you say is like what is underexplored even if it's tough to monetize yeah yeah I think that um first

of all maybe things that are not as tough to monetize um but definitely one two two topics that I think will become important and I think we start we start seeing the use of them would be this topic of proof system composition I think that yeah I think that opens up the the way to to create these modular or compos proving systems that allow you to work on on different cryptographic Primitives or different functions uh without compromising on efficiency and the tooling for that is

still still in early days but we already see some use of it so that that's really cool um and client side Decay I think will be um another important thing that we may have forgotten of for a while or Not Forgotten but we may have not felt the need for a while and I think we might feel the need again soon and just focusing on getting ZK being fast on client devices like phones and even other resource constrain devices um is something that I would really want to see develop further um but but now to to get to the hard to monetize potentially stuff um

and something that that is that that might become important for people or for even companies um Ju Just in terms of them wanting to collaborate and keeping privacy would be Technologies like um MPC for example and you know if I I want to collaborate with you on let's say training a model trustless like an a neural network or that they want to collaborate with you and and and understand something that is the combination of our data because I hold the part of it and I hold the let's say the secret keys and you hold um the

public data and we want to figure out something together that's like a summary uh on my data but W with with an aggregation of the public data that you hold um those are technologies that are really really important but inherently they're very um two- party right um and when things are two- party it's it's probably a company that has a specific application in mind or that they have something that this would be really beneficial for that they would be able to push the state of thee art but I think that on the other and it might also be

that these companies will not directly be the ones that will make a developer friendly open-source library that will be usable by the community and there is a bigger tension there because in contrast to ZK which is publicly verifiable um you you don't have that Advantage um and I think that that is a hard hard uh Gap to to Bridge Over um and I think we've been lucky that some some academics and some groups still do that as public goods um but it's nowhere as advanced as as the ZK

tooling um and that's something that's that's going to be missing so I would really love to see ways to to to move that forward got it and so sorry just uh jargon NPC multiparty Computing and so I think what you just said is that what makes multi-party Computing different from like the core ZK work that we're doing even though they use like kind of the same Primitives and the same mathematical ideas is that like the whole idea with ZK is we have these output outputs that are public that they go out into the world and that anyone can verify that like even if you can't look into the binary of the prove or whatever we know does it prove or does

it not and the problem with MPC see it sounds like you're saying is that there's never this step where you're um like giving some piece of the process to the public that they can confirm and so like essentially you just have um this black box that unless you're working for the company that's implementing it you might never be able to understand or prove what's going on yeah like it's it's a conversation between the two of us and we each of us are sure that we the computation was correct but we cannot prove it to a third party so that that sucks I I will I will say that there are some constructions that combine the two um and there there have been some Works around that um but those

those add a significant overhead and sometimes that's not always needed but maybe that's the way to to push that forward right like maybe if we do this ZK MPC that is publicly verifiable um maybe maybe maybe the applications that would work on that would be able to to to get the public good part being done as well so maybe there is some way to do it through there cool and sorry last thing I want to talk about before I I'll let us sign off here but um when I entered ZK or sorry when I entered crypto back in 2021 like we were just at the beginning of really like taking this

concept of ZK and making it about blockchain scaling and rollups and all this stuff and we are just leaving this world of the purpose of ZK is privacy and I think both those things are true but I do think we've lost a lot of the conversation of like how ZK provides privacy and and what cool is happening there so with kind of to send us off would you talk a little bit about what gets you excited about ZK and privacy and then maybe if you're feeling very ambitious how that work can be applied to like core ethereum and like how that changes um just like the block space space as we know it so in terms of privacy let's say traditionally like if

we look at five years ago yeah traditionally uh um privacy has been about financial privacy and you know some people would say that maybe that's the first thing that you need and without it you don't have anything like if you don't have Financial privacy you're done um but maybe there are also some ways that we could do non-financial privacy for example if we look at our identities and we look at our onchain data and we can prove some properties about it we can prove our um trading volume or we can prove our ownership of some assets or some nfts or or whatever and we can

prove that we've participated in some event because we were ones that were hurt by the Dow hack or things like that right um so these these claims and queries about your identity are things that I I think we will find greater value moving forward um and especially um something that I'm getting more excited about recently is this import of web to identities into web 3 um because we do have signatures and we do have some cryptography um that

already allows us to import some data about our identity um and using that maybe in a positive way not no not in a way that can hurt us but in a way that can enable uh enable new use cases that that would be really good so the whole topic of identity is something that I look forward to see developing more um when when I worked on it I think it was probably um way too early to to try to do that um but I I think that there there is a chance that the time is is is close or or already

here um and additionally one other one other thing that I would say privacy makes sense and is um likely underused a bit would be would be um to to do some some protocols like auctions or like um like like trades or things of that sort in more private manner so we can do it um we can specifically look at options concretely but we can also look at votes like I do private delegations

for validators or that I would um or that I would have um um something like Unis swap but that would be batched within a block or things like for example panra does which are really cool um and those kind of smaller gadgets that allow you limited time privacy just to get to to prevent uh to prevent maybe harmful types of M or to um or or to to give you some greater assurances as

to what is result you're you're going to get um are are things that would be exciting to to see deployed yeah for sure I mean I when people ask like when I'm feeling like a little uh sassy and people ask like what is going to be like the thing that makes ethereum kind of mainstream or like what's the killer use case for ethereum like to me it's so simple right it's we already have made it very clear that passwords don't work so what's like the the killer app for ethereum is this is our single sign on machine and I think that like so much about um there's so much opportunity and noise and whatever about the financial side of uh crypto

and blockchain but I totally agree with you that so underexplored is identity and uh just like digital nativism and like what this means in a world where every single day North Korea is hacking every single database and so um that's that's like one of the things that's so small but is like so exciting to me about the technology we're working on yeah let's see where it goes all right cool man Kobe thank you so much I like it hurts me right now to end this conversation because there's so much I just want to keep RI riffing off of but um man I just once again want to take the opportunity to thank you and to let you know that um like geometry is everything that uh we can all hope to

build and I'm just so excited to um to know you and to to watch you continue to push the space forward so thank you so much than thank you it was really great to have this conversation thank you and before I let you go can you uh just tell the audience like where they can find you where they can learn more about geometry and like really specifically one I want to get across is like how do you get involved in ZK oh wow okay so um first of all if you talk about geometry the best way is to go to geometry.xyz and we have a bunch of cool articles in our notebook and and you can see the different kind of topics we're interested in and work we've done

so please take a look if anything is interesting to you reach out um for me you can probably find my my sometimes have serious tweets on Twitter so find me there um but yeah if you want to learn about ZK one thing that um that I would really recommend and that's the shirt that I'm wearing now that probably the audience will not see um which is another thing that um that I started with n and that's an initiative called ZK hack um and that's that's a place where we have a few things like we have cryptography puzzles so um so people can can learn about Advanced cryptography

protocols through trying to hack them which is which is fun and there are also workshops uh about topics in ZK across the ZK space but most importantly for learning about ZK I think is that we have a few study groups that are going on and there are study groups around the Justin teller's book which is great so it goes It goes understanding about understanding the fundamentals of how ZK and Su checks and things of that sort work and Justin tler himself is the one that's giving that um there is another group about the moon maath manual and there is another

one that's starting soon about the recent paper from um Alex and guo about how to reason about the security of um let's say I guess proof systems or through linear algebra Randomness uh which I found like a really great paper and it's a kind of um it's a kind of a shorter study group like it's going to be a few sessions but I would recommend people to come and join and learn yeah awesome well I did not know about the study groups but I will be there so thank you for that okay man again Kobe I just uh once again want to say thank you and I want to just put

out there um if you want to learn more also the best podcast in this industry is the zero knowledge podcast by your friend Anna Rose and also you are on there so often that um again that that is where I is always like where I start and uh figure out like what is happening and who is talking in ZK so once again just thank you thank you for strange water thank you for everything you do for ZK and hope to talk to you soon yeah thank you

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