ZK7: Welcome - Anna Rose - Zero Knowledge Podcast

Transcript

[Music] we are at the zero knowledge summit seven it's crazy and awesome to be here and to see all of you i do want to i don't know i kind of almost wanted you to give an applaud to yourselves for making it here yay so zero knowledge summit seven uh i don't know how many of you were at earlier versions but just to give you a bit of a backstory we did four in person and then covet hit and then we did two online last year we took a hiatus because honestly online events

are okay but in person is so much better and i just wanted to wait till we had this chance to actually meet again in person the zk summit is brought to you by the zero knowledge podcast that's maybe where you know me from it's been running for a while if you don't know about it check it out there's lots of great content there and i actually want to use this moment to tell you a little bit about the podcast so if you don't know about it it started in 2017 in 2018 it became a weekly show uh releasing every week was very daunting we managed to and for three years i didn't miss a single week which was cool but hard and now thanks but yeah but but more recently i kind of

have allowed for a few missed episodes so you may have noticed because honestly taking a break once in a while i think is okay okay march 2018 we hosted the first zk summit and i am wondering if anyone here knows of an earlier zero knowledge focused event that happened because i think i think it might have been the first so i think that's kind of cool in may 2020 my original co-host fredrik started to sort of phase out of the show i started to bring in new guest co-hosts like tyrone and james and josh sometimes giorgio's and in february 2021 we added new team members so it's not just me now there's a producer henrik who's at the back doing live stream he's also the editor uh there's now a community person

chris there's agnieszka who's helped with events so the team has grown so yeah and then in october 2021 we even launched this new thing which is zk hack and i'm going to tell you a little bit more about that in a second that's how many episodes of the zero knowledge podcast exist most of them are good i was told once like you have to have bad ones to know when you've done a good one but mostly very very good um and uh yeah i hope you check it out these are the top episodes so there are some great zero knowledge focused episodes and there's also some really recent ones who've kind of like come into the top what is it seven so for example sriram's episode only came

out i think a few weeks ago and it's it's done very well and he's actually going to be speaking later today if you want to find out more keep up to date there's the twitter but there's also a link tree with all of the channels there you can find like the job that we actually have a job board focused on zk tech jobs we have a community board there's lots of ways to engage there's a very active telegram group and you can find it all there so i want to tell you about zika hack i know where i'm giving you lots of backstory here but we are waiting for people to arrive um zk hack is this event so this was the first one it went from october 26 to december 7th that's super long it was seven weeks and in between each week there was a puzzle hacking competition

it was an experiment it was incredibly cool and it's kind of becoming its own hub in its own right and for this event we're actually going to be using the discord for zk hack that's the place so the podcast is quite general the podcast is like when i'm interested in something it's decentralized web it'll be zero knowledge tech it'll be cryptography but it's quite broad zk hack on the other hand is very very focused on zero knowledge tech zero knowledge learning that's like all we talk about there and so if you're not in that discord you should definitely join it i'm going to add the qr code in a second oh yeah now i'm going to show my nfts because that is the world we live in so i

last summer uh i had a few days off and i started to draw these little cards so this is like a deck of cards there i mean color in draw whatever it's like they look like that so there's 52 cards with two jokers they are live some of them are for sale i they're very new people who have bought there was like an art version of it anyone who bought any of those actually got an equivalent of these so if you have one of those original ones you also have one of these and my thoughts with this is they're not zk nfts they're regular nfts but we i want to use these to do zk experiments with nfts so having them maybe allows i

don't know access to some sort of private voting or something like that there's also these other nfts that we created for the zika hack any owners of these will also be included in those kinds of experiments so you might also want to check those out yeah okay you're not here for my nfts and my podcast you're here for the zero knowledge summit seven we are at uh hermitage amsterdam amazing venue there's actually three museums here and there's like a courtyard in the center it's a park uh it's been i don't know it's been really exciting to do a new event and to do an in-person event also not in my city so it's been a challenging but a lot of fun

a little bit of practical info for you this is the wi-fi and password you do actually find these signs around but they're tiny it's from the venue itself so i don't know if you want to just take a quick picture uh this is how you get online here cool this is the qr code for the zika hack discord i don't know if that would work for anyone but if you want to try it this gets you into the general zk hack discord if you'll see there's a zk summit channel that's the place where if you wanna i don't know if you're thinking of something cool you just saw if you wanna get the slides if you wanna meet somebody that would be a cool place to post and do check it out like check out the whole thing

over on that discord we also you know we have a daily deep dive from omer who's talking about like news ek tech we have study clubs like there's a thaler book study club that's actually starting again really soon we plan on doing more of those so this is a great place if you're getting into the space yeah okay so we are on the second third floor on this floor there are three stages you're on the main stage there's a side stage which is actually all the way at the end so walk all the way down the hall and then there's a breakout room main stage and side stage are filmed if you don't want to be filmed just be aware that there's cameras everywhere and uh so don't stand in front of them and this stage is live

streamed i think yeah okay okay downstairs we have the restaurant as you saw and that's where the sponsors are as well for the breakout session by the way what those are they're not filmed they're 10 to 12 10 to 20 people the idea there is very much like a conversation a brainstorm like working out stuff so if you go to those just be ready to kind of like participate okay the program so this is tiny i don't know if you can actually see it but we do have posters hung around and the entire program is on zksummit.com if you want to check it out and figure out what you want to see this is the afternoon we have a lot of content it's going to be amazing like i want to say a big thank you to the

team that put this together this is a bigger event than i used to do like it used to be 100 people 150 people and now this is a much bigger enterprise and there's been a lot of people helping agnieszka and henrik and chris and tanya and anyone else i'm missing have been just phenomenal on putting this thing together so i want to say a big thank you yeah [Music] i want to say thank you to the platinum sponsors elio anoma and mina you're going to actually hear you're going to be hearing from them shortly they're going to do a short five-minute presentations each i want to say a big thank you to the gold sponsors aztec manta polygon risk zero scroll and ck

sync the silver sponsors ethereum foundation entropy geometry panther sismo threshold and the zero knowledge validator which is actually my company um uh also bronze sponsors axler chorus one espresso ethereal ventures hash cloak spruce web and xerox park i want to say thank you to the speaker dinner sponsor who sponsored yesterday's dinner bain capital crypto thank you so much for putting that together with us i want to say thank you also to the break sponsor geometry we're going to be announcing that at the break and drink sponsor mina who's sponsoring the drinks at the end of the day so i don't know how many people

did the application form who are here right now but there was it's this this event actually started with an application form oh yeah one one side note before i jump into our question is the zeros summit is it's a little different from some of the other um events that even i do in that all of the speakers all of the talks actually came through proposals from the community so this was not like me going out and actually picking who's going to be speaking but rather incoming and then we actually had a small committee who looked at it and put it together into a program i really like that format um so just to give you a sense for it but going back to the application form we i asked so every time i do this i ask a question how would you describe something to a friend the first one was

like how would you describe zero knowledge ck snarks and then for this one i chose one i don't even know if i can answer that this question this is a very very hard one but we did get some answers and i'm going to share a couple of them now so how would you describe polynomial commitments to a friend it's a hash of a polynomial that you can do basic arithmetic checks arithmetic checks on i'm kind of curious how people feel about these answers too um another answer is if they don't know what commitments are i would start with the concept of a game of remote rock paper scissors so this is an interesting one i give you a lock box but instead of having a single keyhole the box consists

of 20 keyholes i can give you a key for one of the keyholes and it'll unlock and present a small piece of information but in order for the entire box to unlock you need all the keys so you can't actually access all the information in the box and each of the keys are also independent alice can send a commitment to bob which binds her to a future message without revealing it so alice can prove she knew the message at a later point of time in time a polynomial commitment scheme allows bob to do arithmetic checks on them in addition and here's where we start to get a little lost an analogy between interpolation and those pulls with a slit at the end that you swing around to get a moving picture of the environment just kidding

would lead them through chapters one through four seven and then ten through thirteen of proofs arguments and zero knowledge which is a book some of you may be familiar with um i wish i had those kinds of friends actually you are in luck my friend your friend new friends are to be had here who may be able to have that conversation with you a polynomial commitment is a cryptographic device by which approver can say that this is the polynomial i will be using without having to reveal the polynomial later the approver can convince anyone that they did indeed use the correct polynomial thoughts opinions i would ask them to talk to guillermo who's there

i would say let's order another glass of wine first later on we can do that not yet it's what is it 9 45 okay all right so yeah just uh to wrap that up to keep in touch twitter link tree all the links very cool and that's the intro to the zero knowledge summit i now want to introduce our three platinum sponsors they're each gonna say five words uh five words five minutes sorry they're each gonna speak for five minutes um first up i wanna introduce alex from elio tell us a little bit about yeah elio yeah hey uh hey everybody it's a pleasure to be

here i'm actually probably going to say a few words about aelio and take only two minutes because you're going to hear from pratush here in a second who's going to talk a little more about it but i'm just going to take these two minutes to say uh thank you to anna for letting us sponsor this amazing event and it's especially incredible for me because i actually helped out with the last zk summit all online so some of you who participated in that one might remember me i was running the side stage and i also helped anna out with the zk study club which is another kind of series of events that that i've really enjoyed and so this is special for me because it's getting a chance to meet a lot of you in person who i've interacted with in various ways virtually and it's

also exciting for me because you know i've anna kind of did a good history of the arc of how these events have developed and just looking at the sponsor page pages should tell you how far the space has come in just the last four years i mean zk summit one i mean how many sponsors were there one sponsor right so like that's probably about how many zk companies there were right zcash ecc or something right um but no it's it's incredible to be on this journey together with all of you and be part of a technology that i think is really going to uh going to change the world and it's fantastic to see all of you in the audience here doing amazing work i'm looking forward to hearing all that work that you're doing and again that's why elio which you're going to hear about more from pratice but

we're proud to sponsor this event thank you very much very cool next up we have evan from mena i'll get the slide but [Applause] cool thank you anna uh so i'm evan i am the ceo of the mia foundation and a co-founder of mena protocol it's great to be here today um like people have said um four years ago this would not have been possible and it's amazing to see the growth in the space and all that's happened since to make an event like this possible and thank you anna so much for putting it on um it doesn't happen easily we know and

thank you to you and the organizers for making it happen um i guess i just want to briefly say um some things on mina and zk in general like i feel like this is just a very important time for zero knowledge proofs it's like a moment when it's maybe moving from something that's nice to something that is more broad and that's like a very special moment to be a part of as well as i think a huge opportunity for what we can bring to crypto with privacy and i think in particular when you think about web3 that plus privacy plus the security of zero knowledge it can both unlock so many new applications as well as i mean at least i hope um bring something that allows crypto to build something that is actually

competitive to web 2 in a way that is is meaningful something i'm very excited about so uh very looking forward to it briefly on mina so we're a protocol building a cryptocurrency that's kind of inside of a zero knowledge proof so it's easy to verify and also makes it easy to program your knowledge with just typescript something we're very excited about to get like this broader zero knowledge thing happening we have a um a program where people can learn how to program zero knowledge proofs is just typescript using mina so if you're curious about that i encourage you to check it out we have already done a first cohort that was successful we want to do a bunch more so that we can like really make it easy

for a lot of people to program with zero knowledge proofs and spread the word on it we'll also have a grant program coming out soon after that so it's a good opportunity to learn how to program with zero knowledge and typescript with mina so you can then get grants and stuff and yeah i mean we're also hiring obviously check out qr code if you're curious if you want to work on like the core cryptography and support of like what goes into mina's cryptography and like ecosystem that's a good place to check out um so thanks for listening to me for a few minutes thank you all for being here i'm really excited for the event and thanks again anna [Applause] [Music] cool

all right and i want to invite chris to the stage to share a little bit about anoma welcome chris thank you it is great to see people in person in the past two years we've had zero knowledge conferences like in the sense that you only had knowledge that someone was you know operating under this discord handle and like they had posted solutions to the cga cat puzzle and they clearly knew what they were doing but you had like only that knowledge i don't like zero knowledge conferences i like maximum knowledge conferences i was even thinking about you know it feels kind of ridiculous to have like public sponsorships for zero shouldn't we have like zero knowledge sponsorships how does the noma zero knowledge sponsor something but then also sponsors are

like what do sponsors get they get like knowledge so it's a bit odd i don't know if we need zero knowledge sponsorships either but it would be interesting um enoma is a zero knowledge project uh both in the sense that we use zero knowledge and that we sometimes have it seems like a sufficiently vague definition that no one has any idea what we do so this is like meta-zero knowledge but some specific parts of that that we're working on uh are uh different layers so we're working on uh in part a layer one for human coordination which i realize is like a product definition not a zero knowledge definition but that includes a circuit for generalized private bartering it includes a proof system kind of a variant of plunk up it includes an intermediate language vampyr

which joshua from menoma will be giving a talk about later today and all of these layers we would really like to standardize because we are lazy and if there are a bunch of people working on the same thing or who can like kind of agree on something or can agree on a modular part of something like an intermediate representation such as fanpr um then all the better because the protocols don't really compete with each other and it's hard to get this stuff right so particularly we're working already with ck garage on our implementation of planck and i know there are like 15 implementations of planck that i know about and they're probably 15 that i don't know about and they're probably 15 more that nobody knows about because there's zero knowledge implementations of blanc but

it's like zero knowledge in the other sense right um so if there's like some possibility of slightly reducing the complexity graph of slightly different implementations of hopefully in essence the same thing or something that could be modularized we would always be happy to do this and happy to like work and set up sort of neutral governance bodies uh wherever those opportunities arise so if you're interested in that please come find me otherwise i just want to say thank you to everyone who organized this event all the other sponsors and all of you [Applause]