ZKV presents... Privacy on Polkadot - Intro with Anna & Will

Transcript

[Music] so i want to say a big welcome to the privacy on polka dot event that we have for you today what we wanted to do with this is bring together the privacy community here on polka dot and get to know some of the teams that are building with zkp's and other privacy tech i want to tell a little bit of a background story on how kind of i got involved in all of this because many years ago i actually worked at parity when polka dot was still just a polka dot paper um and it was there that i started something called the zero knowledge podcast that led me to the zero knowledge community that eventually led to the zero knowledge validator

and so it's pretty cool to be able to kind of hang out with all of you again and get to know you know how far the polka dot community has come since that way back then so a little bit about zkb and we are going to talk a bit more about it but the goal of it is to always push privacy and zero knowledge tech on the pos l1s that we work on and the way we do that is to create a space like this to connect and collaborate um this event oh actually i need to just this event is actually brought to you by sorry this event is brought to you by the zero knowledge validator which is a validator that is already running on polka dot and kusama if you weren't aware aware you can actually find us on the validator list

and you can add us and the cool thing about doing that is when you add us to your list in a way you're passively supporting the cause that we stand for which is more zkp and privacy tech on the network and our rates are very competitive so you probably won't notice the difference a little bit about the agenda today will's going to talk about the zkv's mission uh it's going to be followed by a fireside chat between myself and fabi from parity and dieter from web3 foundation and then there's a series of lightning talks where we're going to actually get to know some of the teams that are building privacy tech on the network and after this we're going to do a much more interactive breakout session style uh part of the event and there's going to be three different breakouts

running in in parallel and it's up to you to kind of choose which ones you want to participate in and actually those will be quite interactive so we're going to encourage you to come up on the stage and talk and and sort of start to brainstorm around some of these ideas so i want to pass off the presentation to willnow great so um just before we get started on the main event i'm going to talk more about what we actually do as zero knowledge validator um and as anna mentioned we run on polkadot a validator and if you nominate us um or any of our validators you are basically supporting this mission and our mission is to really champion zero knowledge

and privacy technologies in the entire ecosystem and we do that in a few different ways um but we're a small team so anna who just introduced herself of course um is really involved in everything to do with zero knowledge um i'm will and i'm the founder of diversify which is an exchange on ethereum but which uses uh stark proofs to scale up and have a very high transaction throughput and very low cost per transaction on layer two and tor is working in applied zkp's um also for the ethereum foundation and we also work with a couple of other people around ecosystems focused on specific networks and doing specific um research but for various of the initiatives that we

that we do and those initiatives are generally all aligned with this mission of really championing at every level of the polka dot ecosystem um the kind of zero knowledge research and applications that use it and so we draft in champion proposals and we've done that across several um different different blockchains now for how privacy can be a higher priority in governance we also advocate both with developers and members of the ecosystem for privacy and that can act as a bridge between researchers and like the developers or implementers who may want to actually build with this um with zero knowledge proofs for example

and several other initiatives which i'll go into a little bit later if you want to skip forward and um in terms of this event specifically the reason why we really wanted to to put it forward and actually we hope this will be the first in the sort of series of these events is to introduce ourselves and what we're doing to the wider polka dot community and also discover what the privacy ecosystem that's being built up and that there are so many teams now working within polkadot looks like um we actually did a report last year uh talking with lots of the kind of core ecosystem builders um then about what was happening in in polkadot which we published and you can go check that

out on our blog but things are moving really fast there's so many so much new stuff happening and we want this is also a chance to kind of hear about what those products are and who's building with this technology and we're hoping this can really set the scene for a really vibrant discussion and uh privacy focused community hopefully to help host more of these and and really make sure that there's support from the community about why privacy is so important for polkadot and all the opportunities that it um could bring for doc holders and everyone else who's working in the space a few other initiatives that we work on include a zero knowledge hackathon which is scheduled for autumn this year if you're at all interested in that please do

reach out um as that's still in the planning phase um also an open report about all the legal challenges and opportunities in adopting privacy and zero and using zero knowledge proofs uh in blockchain blockchain um i mean this is an era which we know and has spoken to many people sort of puts people off often from working on privacy applications or with zero knowledge proofs but it's something we think shouldn't and we're working on uh on changing that and also we support projects with that we're getting early stage funding uh whether that's by introducing them to to investors or helping them helping them apply for grants so again reach out to us if you're at all interested in that so i want to say just a quick thank you

to kind of the group that is supporting in for this particular event and that's actually the polka dot treasury so just recently we actually wrote a polka dot treasury proposal and it was passed i think just like a few days ago like last week and it was really cool to actually get to go through that process to you know participate in you know not just getting kind of a regular sponsor to to help us to help us run this event but actually go through the governance you know process on polka dot itself it was just the first time that we kind of saw all the steps and then the reason we wanted to do that was in general we want to be able to do this either for initiatives that we're

heading but also help other people who might you know want to ask for funding with our experience doing it this the first time we can definitely help teams who might be out there thinking oh you know i want to do something related to privacy and how do i go about it and this is where we want people to reach out to us we are also waiting for the chance to potentially be a curator on like a joint uh polka dot like subcommittee and i know that there's some work being done by the team to be able to enable that and so that's maybe something to look out for as well in the future the ability that you know we'd create almost either a privacy subcommittee or an events focused subcommittee that would help us to like also like channel some of the funding towards this work

now i mentioned the xero knowledge podcast that's the podcast that i am the host of uh that is also the media partner for this so the videos for this event will after after we're finished will be on the zero knowledge podcast youtube channel so head over there if you can't watch all of these and you want to catch them later there also is a feedback form that we want to share i wanted to sort of mention it now and not just send it out at the end we want to hear from you about like how important privacy is potentially uh what kind of events you want to see what you want to see from us and so this is a way for you to kind of give us some feedback right off the bat and we'll be sharing that i think throughout the day in the different chats

so yeah i want to say a big thank you for participating and thanks for coming we're very excited to hear from all the teams and to learn a little bit more about privacy on polkadot