ZK Hack Montréal: Welcome presentation & Intro to ZK themes (ZK Hack team)

Transcript

Hello. Hello, folks. How are you all feeling? Good afternoon. you doing? HEY HEY HEY. YEAH. IT'S SO NICE to see you here in Montreal. I don't know if you know this, this is my hometown. So, oh, I'm going to get a little ZK hack sticker. People have been asking me about this jersey. This is not This is like This is a private school jacket. I did not go to this school, but I did find it in a flea market here at least 15 years ago. So, I thought I'd wear it on stage, but we're going to make it a ZK hack jacket.

I don't know if that works. That works. That's All right. Um I want to ask the folks here, uh is this the first time that you're in Montreal? Who's here for the first time? Oh. Wow. That's fantastic. Thanks guys. Thanks for coming over here. Um what do you think of this venue so far? Is this wild or what? Nice. Good stuff. Cool. Okay, so what we're doing today, we're starting off, I mean, the ZK hack Montreal event. We're going to be hosting workshops for the next few hours, but this session is really just a very short introduction to the to the event and a little bit to ZK. We're going to be back on stage later at 6:45 for the actual kickoff of the hackathon.

So, right now it's more like the slight intro to the workshops. So, we wanted to start with a little bit of a description of what ZK hack actually is. This is ZK hack Montreal, but the project is a little bit bigger than that. So, yeah, hi guys. I'm Gael with ZK hack team for, well, a while now. Oh, yes, I should introduce I'm Anna. I'm one of the co-creators of ZK hack. I also have a podcast called ZK podcast and a company called ZKV, ZK So yeah, ZK Hack has a whole the the purpose of ZK Hack is to onboard people, educate them about ZK, and you know, have them learn about it. So we have a lot of projects. We will actually come back to that later tonight, but one of these is IRL hackathons, and that's why

we're here today. So the website zkhack.dev is the main entrance door to the ZK Hack world. So everything we've produced, all the events, you can find them in there. And the other very important door to ZK Hack is the Discord. We're going to bug you with that all throughout the weekend, but we're going to communicate a lot of news, a lot of information about the events on the Discord. So if you did not yet, please join the Discord. In the general channel, let us know that, you know, you're here. We're going to give you a special role so that you see the secret channel.

That's a lot. Yes. The Discord is truly where we need you to be. When you join that Discord, just make sure you like say somewhere in the intro channel or general that you're here for the hackathon, and we're going to add you to the private chat for the ZK Hack Montreal event. Um if you can't if you don't get a chance to catch this right now, just go to zkhack.dev, and there's a link directly to the Discord there, too. Yes. So welcome to our the fourth edition of this IRL hackathon series. The last ones we've done were in Lisbon, Istanbul, and Krakow. So we've been taking this around the world. Um at the ZK Hack IRL hackathon series, there's been over 100 projects built.

We're incredibly That's so far. come. More to come. Um yeah, and and just maybe something that's unique about this event. It's like a ZK focused event, but it's chain agnostic. And I think we are in a way one of the first of this kind. So it's been really great to get to know the hackers in this particular space. And there we go. So yeah, we're here to learn new stuff about ZK, experiment with new tooling, and also to meet other people interested in ZK or programmable cryptography in general. So, yeah, really don't hesitate to mingle together, ask questions to people. That's what we're here. And we're also here, of course, to build something over the weekend, a prototype, an application, an implementation.

That's why we're here. So, yeah, don't hesitate to engage with the other participants, also the sponsors, so that we have amazing project on Sunday. As mentioned, you're here in this amazing theater. This is the Real Art Theater. Um today we're going to be primarily on this floor. Um I think we might for the kickoff have you go to the balcony. You may not realize there is a balcony, but it's kind of amazing. Um there is also the hacking room that's upstairs from here that we're going to be opening after all of the talks and stuff. Um and actually I think I might even have a map. Let's see.

I do. So, yeah, the hacker room is actually above this one, but obviously this space, as you can see, there's plugs on every table. This is also meant as a place to hack if you want to. On the top floor, we have kind of like a quiet room. I think there's like three yoga mats. You can kind of like run around, lots of empty space. True space. Yeah. On this um oh, yeah, we are currently here. Or there, actually. Um that's the main hall. To get just to give you a sense for where we are though, I think you've probably already seen the sponsor area, which is just that way.

To get to the other floors, there's a staircase at the end of that room, and then you go up. I mean, there's signs and stuff for that, but just so you have a sense. So, yeah, some ground rules. Um no smoking in the premises, please go outside for that. We're going to be open tonight until 11:00 p.m. So, please keep the venue clean at all times. Uh we do have a rack at the entrance, so if you need to put your jacket, put it there. Uh just be careful with your valuable. We will decline all responsibility in case there's an issue. of it's self-serve. We didn't actually have the plan to have a coat check because we thought it was summer.

Yeah well. Um but apparently weather had a different idea. But, yeah, that's just sort of just to keep track of it yourself. And yeah, watch your steps. As Anna said, you have plugs everywhere, which means there are wires on the floor. Someone actually tripped earlier today, so be careful with that. There are floor wires. Yeah. We'll be yes, having coffee and snacks all day. Probably you saw that, but that's in the sponsors area. Tonight, thanks. Dinner tonight at 7:30 with the full meals on Saturday and the breakfast and lunch on Sunday.

I just want to highlight our snacks. So, Lou and I is a bakery that is very close to here. They have very, very tasty snacks. We have them all day. They're also going to be doing our breakfast. They're gluten-free and vegan. But, which some people are very happy about. But, but one of the reasons we wanted to also bring them up here is that there may be traces of nuts. So, if anyone has a nut allergy, we just really wanted to highlight that for you. If you we have coffee all day, but if you're looking for like a cappuccino or something, you can also visit them.

They're about two blocks away. So, maybe not today since it's raining, but yeah, tomorrow if you need a little walk. Uh Yeah. So, yeah, you have the password for the Wi-Fi in here, but also on the walls. I mean, if you have any questions anyway, you can find the team members that will help you with that. We have white shirts with team in the back. And so, we here at yeah, to mingle, but also to have fun, to take pictures. Yeah, like this guy. Please check us out on Twitter. That's our username at underscore underscore ZK hack underscore underscore. Feel free to use this hashtags ZK hack and ZK hack MTL, so that we have an easy way to find all the very nice pictures you're going to take. And more generally speaking,

you can find all the information about the event on the website zkmontreal.com. So, this is where we are in the schedule for today. As mentioned, this is just like the intro to ZK hack. It's quite short. We're following this with two workshops. Then at 6:45, we have the ZK hack Montreal kickoff. This is the moment when you're actually supposed to start hacking. Well, at 7:00, sometime in there. So, what we want you to think about this day as is like really you're supposed to be learning from the workshops, meeting your teammates, working on the ideas, kind of sketching out what you want to do. But, we really don't want you to deploy code just yet.

Um I have a slide about it, but I think it's later. Um I want to say a big thanks to the team that put this together. Maybe we should just give everyone a round of applause. I'm going to say more later about this. Um Many members I mean, I think a lot of the members of this team have worked together before. Quentin's sort of a new addition. We're so excited to have you be part of this. Very cool. So, what we wanted to do what what I wanted to do with this intro was kind of set the stage of ZK, talk a bit about the state of ZK. I think most of the people here know ZK very well. You work at companies that are focused on ZK, you're familiar with the concept. But, I in like promoting the event here, we also

learned that a lot of the Montreal crowd wasn't as familiar. So, I want to give a little bit of a background on what ZK is and or was and is today. So, ZK, zero knowledge, was invented I think in 1989. It remained relatively obscure, really in the realm of theory and academia, until we discovered its potential for private payments and scaling. And then it kind of took off. So, I was thinking back to what ZK looked like in 2019.

Um ZK the ZK knowledge podcast actually started in 2017, but really took off in 2018. But by the end of 2019, there was like a burgeoning industry. And I remember thinking like, "Wow, there's so much ZK stuff now. This is amazing." Now, this is not fully complete. There were probably more projects than this, but like they've either they've either pivoted or they've shut down, but these teams still remain today. And yeah, we had at the time we had private payments with Zcash. We had sort of privacy projects that evolved into L2s with Aztec and ZK sync. And we had a ZK-based L1 in Mina, which used to be called Coda.

So, that was the map in 2016. And just filling in these three blocks, this is like all the new projects that have emerged since then. So, already you're starting to see a lot of activity. But obviously the map is much bigger than that now. So, this is the map of ZK in 2024. Now it's okay. I just want to highlight a few of the types of like the categories in ZK. So, like we have identity, we have gaming, we have ZKML, we have ZK TLS, DeFi, cross-chain, hardware. So, these definitely were not there before.

For this particular event, we have a number of teams that are in these different categories. We haven't covered the whole thing, but we you can see they're sort of spread out into these different um yeah, types like ways of using ZK. And I've I organized it a little nicer so you could actually follow me here, but um just to cover it, this is also by the way this these are our partners for this event. We have members of these teams here with us. They're here to answer questions. Some of them are going to be doing workshops. Many of them are going to be doing office hours tomorrow if you want to ask them more questions.

On the L2 front, ZKVM, there's Polygon, although Polygon has also done tons of things. Like, this does not do justice to the different places where it's contributed. We have verifiable compute. This is a relatively new category, and here we have top sponsor Risk Zero on site, as well as NovaNet. In terms of L1s and and sort of ZK-based chains, we have Mina, which is by O(1) Labs, and we have members of the O(1) Labs team here. I should actually Okay, is are Where are the Polygon people? There we go.

Yeah yeah yeah. Where are the Risk Zero people? There we are. Okay nearby. Mina O(1)? All right. Very cool. Then So, then we're getting into a very new category, which is like the ZK supply chain with the proving marketplaces and proof verification aggregators. So, in the prover marketplace, you have Gevelot. Where's the Gevelot team? There. Oh. In the back. Hi. Um I wanted I I will probably do this, just so you know, I we will do this something similar like at 6:45, so don't worry if you missed this, but you should probably identify which teams are here and who you want to talk to if you're building with them.

the NovaNet people up there, by the Okay. Oh, NovaNet, sorry. Yes. Very cool. Um on the proof verification So, does there any anyone from Aligned here? There's somebody back there. ZK Verify? Yes. Very nice. Okay, then we have a very new category with ZK-TLS. Where's the Plutos team? There they are. Cool. Um private compute, Aztec Noir. I don't know if they're here yet, but we know that there's some Noir folks who are going to be here.

Uh Lambda was doing the I don't think they actually have anyone here today, but um they're an R&D auditing firm. We have Celestia as well on this list as a sponsor. They're not exactly ZK, but they do have ZK projects within their ecosystem. They're a data availability solution. And you know, if you wanted to work with you know, with their data availability, we're going to have at least one actually do we have someone from Celestia already here? I know there's somebody coming. Okay, he's not here yet. yet. Um we'll do this again at 6:45. Flight delays, flight delays.

No, actually I think he's he is here. Um we also have 1KX as a sponsor and they all of their bounties involve ZK safe and that's specifically around the concept of wallets. Then Bushi Capital is our last sponsor to mention here. They don't have a bounty but I wanted to just show this map to everyone. Maybe we can give a round actually. These are our wonderful partners. Thank you for coming. Thanks to them. So going back to the initial question, what is the state of ZK? You know, with all that activity, so many new use cases, it feels like ZK is now crossing into a new frontier. Very much like you go back to that time when it was pure in academia, then it started to accelerate as it found these initial use cases.

We see it sort of crossing into all sorts of industries now. It's going past blockchain. It's really fascinating. So it's very cool to be here. Okay, so with with all that, we've seen that we have a very nice selection of, you know, sponsors here. You're going to be able to use the tech of. So I want you to go very quickly um you know, going through the the the different angles you can have like as a hacker depending on which language you know and what you can do with it. So let's start with our top sponsors, so Risk Zero and Polygon. So Polygon has uh this proving system Plonky3 with all the stack that comes with and they're offering like a bounties if you're able to build an app with it. So that will be particularly um good for all the people

who know Rust. Same thing goes for Risk Zero and their ZKVM. You will be able just knowing Rust to build uh a ZK application. For For who come more from the web development angle, uh you will be happy to hear that 01 Labs has a a library called 01.js that allows you to build a ZK application using a TypeScript. With NovaNet, uh the idea behind NovaNet is this concept of ZK Wasm. So, using their engine, you can basically, as soon as you can compile into Wasm, you will be able to use uh their engine and you will be able to build an app. So, whether you come from Rust, Golang, C++, TypeScript, or actually even more than that, but you know, it's not exhaustive, but uh there there are ways to use that tech.

For Gevulot, the proving protocol, uh you will be actually able to use their system whether you do Rust or C++. Actually, I was talking to you earlier and we saw that it might be even larger than that. So, to have the exact picture, please go see these guys. Uh Plutus uh has this library called uh Rococo that allows you to to use Rust uh and their cryptographic primitive to build new implementation and that's what the bounties are all about. So, now I had to change the shape slightly cuz we are in the domain of proof verification layers. So, whether it's ZK Verify or Line, the idea is like you would build uh you would have a proof on your application side and you

would verify it under protocol. So, for ZK Verify, that would be using Rust and for Line, you can do it with Golang or with Rust. And all of these being on chain, that's why your Solidity skills would become handy. Uh I wanted to mention another language, so a ZK domain-specific language uh called Noir that's developed by Aztec. And this language have actually been used by the ZK Safe people that 1kx have bounty for to build their ZK Safe web3 wallets. Who say web3 wallets? Of course, that's also why Solidity becomes handy. And they have like TypeScript support for it. So, that's where the shape also is becoming a bit shady. And globally speaking uh you will be able to build on-chain

application. So, again, using Solidity to interact with Ethereum or any kind of EVM compatible chain. These are bounties offered by re zero, polygon, and Nova net as well. So, that's where it becomes application development. And because we talk application, you probably want a front end for it. You don't have to. You could do CLI, but if you have a front end, it's always nicer. So, if we have any front end developers in there, who knows, well, I put the React logo here, but it could be any any framework. Your skills will get handy.

Oh, and I almost forgot. These are the languages developed by the ZK EVM team, the Spanish mafia. Uh, that was created by Jordi. So, yeah, this is the Spanish mafia. Jordi's not here, but he's here in mind with his spinning head with us. So, again, they offer very interesting bounties if you want to rebuild their e-stack verifier using PIL. And I'm pretty sure some project will use circom. So, I know you guys are not necessarily specialists, but this is still part of the polygon family. So, we started from there.

Now we're here. I know it looks complicated, but in this particular case, complicated is good because that means there are many ways for you, whichever you whichever language you would like to code with, to actually bring value to this hackathon and build something, which I remind you is why we're here. So, this is actually an ugly graph that did best like very good news. Nice. So, just to simplify quickly and make it even more simple. Basically, if you're new to this hackathon, there are kind of two angles to approach them.

You will be either building an application, so that's where, you know, if you've done some if global hackathons before or even if you come from web two as a developer, that's what you will be looking at. You're going to try and build a game, a voting application, something identity related or whatnot. If you come more from the math side as a cryptographer, you want to play with applied cryptography. That's where you will, well, maybe use a PIL to rewrite a verifier, maybe implement a new signature, or, you know, build a GPU-accelerated prover. So, these are the This is the other angle you can approach the hackathon.

So, this is a list of applications. I think we share this basically every time. We add and tweak this. It is not everything you could do, but just to give you a few ideas. Kind of These are things that already exist. We have things like ZK-ID, ZK in DeFi, ZK games, ZK social, ZK voting, ZK in content, ZK for DAOs, ZK tooling, ZK in the web, and ZKML. We want you to invent new categories here. I feel like Yeah, there have been projects that have come out in the last 2 years of running this series, which, you know, did things we never would have expected. And that's kind of what we're hoping for with these events.

This is definitely still not an exhaustive list. So, some ground rules before we close that short presentation, and we have the Risk Zero workshop people waiting. So, please, the idea is like no code before 7:00 p.m. And by that we mean like no Git commit, no Git push before that time. Before you can ideate, try some small stuff, but the official kickoff is at 7:00 p.m. For those who don't have a team yet, the size will be five people max. You know, all throughout the afternoon, we'll try and help you to find your team. So, yeah, please come to me if you need connection with people. I'll try to be the the matchmaker.

In terms of disclosure, so the projects are going to be submitted before Sunday noon. Whether it's in your online application, online submission, or when you present in front of the judge, please make sure you say if you got outside help from, you know, either like an a co-worker or anyone else working in some libraries you've been using, or if your your project is based on some previously existing libraries or whatnot. This is fine. It's not eliminatory. It just helps us help us gauge exactly what was built during the the next 36 hours the the hackathon will last.

And that's what you're going to be judged on. In our kickoff later today, we're going to talk about the judging criteria a bit more, so you'll have a sense for what we're looking for. And I think that's it. wraps us up. Yes. So that was the intro. Uh yeah, thank you so much for being with us. I don't know if you've already seen the swag that's out there, but please take it, use it. What is there? Um yeah, if it as long as it's still there. Uh we're so excited to have you on site with us here in Montreal. So yeah, thanks so much.