 Hi. Hello. Today I'm going to be talking about zero-knowledge proofs and how zero-knowledge proofs kind of enable beautiful coexistence of privacy and transparency. First off, my name is Anna Rose and I'm the co-host of a podcast called Zero Knowledge Podcast. I also threw an event called the Zero Knowledge Summit, and the next one will be in San Francisco on October 26th, so I hope to see you there. This is FYI. I have a podcast. I'm not so used to giving public speaking where there's no editing, so please bear with me. Alright, I'm speaking. This is B10, and I believe this is the privacy track, so I'm sure you've already had the zero-knowledge proof defined for you. I'm assuming that most of you know it. But in case you don't, zero-knowledge proof is a technique for showing that a statement is true without revealing any additional information other than the fact that the statement is true. So, for example, if I know a password, I could potentially prove to you that I know a password without revealing what that password is. You just know that it is true. With zero-knowledge proofs, you'll have a proof and a verifier. The underlying information is kept secret, private. The verifier knows that the information is accurate despite not having an entire picture. In this case, there's no need for a third party to act as a certifier that this is true. The zero-knowledge proof itself, the cryptographic underpinnings, will confirm the truth of the statement. Here's a little example. Later tonight, I might want to go to a karaoke bar, actually, and I learned that the drinking age here in Japan is 20. Now, I'm way over 20, but I may want to prove that I'm over 20 without revealing my age. I could potentially do that with a zero-knowledge proof. Here, the bouncer would know that I am over 20, but he wouldn't actually know my age. In this talk, I'm going to be outlining privacy and blockchain, as well as transparency and blockchain, and how zero-knowledge proof interacts with both of those. First, let's talk about privacy. Privacy and the blockchain. Blockchain isn't actually private on its own, but adding zero-knowledge proofs can make the transactions on a blockchain private. The first example of this was the zero-cash paper written in 2014, where they actually proposed a model that allowed for confidential payments. Since then, there's been a lot of protocols that have emerged where they're using this underlying idea, and they're creating, for example, Zcash, they're creating a shielded account model. What that actually means, going back to my example with the bouncer, if I have to pay my cover, I could potentially pay the cover from my account to the bar's account, and no other information would be made obvious to the bar's account. For example, the bar would not know what I've transferred before or what I plan on doing in the future. The bar would not know my balance, and yet, using a zero-knowledge proof, I could guarantee that there's no double spend. So I could guarantee that I have those five tokens that I'm transferring, and that I haven't transferred five tokens twice, although five tokens for an entry, if it's ZRML, if it's Zcash, would be very, very expensive. So I'm hoping that my night tonight is not going to be that bad. All right. So in a traditional payment system, this makes total sense. Like, you should not have to reveal what you've done before and what you've done after. And, like, say I was a business and I paid your invoice, I would not want you to then be able to see other invoices I've paid in the past or plan to pay in the future. And so here we can see why privacy is valuable for the blockchain. And I think if we want blockchain to be adopted on a large scale, it definitely needs to be secure, accurate, but private. Okay, so now let's talk about transparency in the blockchain. When you think about, like, Bitcoin and other distributed open blockchains, you will see all the transfers being made. And even though it's just account numbers, there are, I mean, I think we all know this, there are methods for tracking money on a blockchain, either using on and off ramps like exchanges or cracking mixer-like systems. There's analytics companies dedicated entirely just to figuring out who's who on the blockchain. In fact, criminals have been caught because they use Bitcoin, not despite it. And that's actually a really good thing. Like transparency is a good thing. You can actually see all the holdings, you can see all the transactions. If you want, you can actually keep an authentic copy of the ledger. Transactions are mutable and you can see them yourself. In this case, you can actually audit any transaction and there's no middleman needed. And that means you know where your tokens are going, how they're being used, and who touches them. But if you think back to the traditional financial world, large banks and other institutions would use customers' funds in ways that the user may not be aware of and in ways that the user would never want. And so there's definitely value in this transparency into these larger systems. And this is why transparency is valuable for the blockchain. Okay, so now I've outlined the tension between these two forces. There's privacy and there's transparency. We want some of our data to be confidential. We also want some key information to be verifiable and auditable. And even though it seems contradictory, zero-knowledge proofs and blockchain enable both of these things. It's kind of cool. So yeah, in this example, what I want to do now is talk about a few examples of how zero-knowledge proofs and blockchain could potentially help with compliance and trust-building for the end user. Now, when I was preparing these slides and this presentation, I wanted to use examples from like healthcare or phoding or even taxes. But in fact, a lot of those are not very developed. And so instead, the focus of these examples are in the financial sector. And I think it makes sense because there's so much activity on chain that could be verified. It's like all the numbers are there. And so I think a lot of these systems will first emerge through the financial sector. I want to talk to start about compliance. This is probably a bit of a dirty word here in this audience. But I think this is actually really cool. Like, what you could do with zero-knowledge proofs is you could potentially cryptographically prove like a fund could cryptographically prove that it's operating compliantly without having to disclose all the details of their actions. And at the same time, regulators could be given visibility in general fund information, but not access to other confidential stuff like investing activities, LPs, or terms. A lot of these examples come from a specific project called Fondora. Actually, this talk was inspired a little bit by Ben Fish, who is one of the co-founders of Fondora. In one of, I think I did an interview with him. And in that interview, he just sort of mentioned like how you could actually use zero-knowledge proofs to do selective disclosure. And I think that is one of the powers of this technology. And Fondora, what they actually do is they use zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation, which they related an equally powerful tool to provide both privacy and transparency. And I think the key here is the selective disclosure. It's not that everything is transparent. It's not that everything is kept private. You actually can allow certain information through and keep other information private. So the first example that I want to share is this idea of ensuring KYC. So KYC, know your customer. This is something that you need to do if you're running an exchange, if you're buying cryptocurrency, if you're doing investments. What you could do here is actually prove that a participant has passed a KYC by a third party. So what you do is you basically take a whitelist and a whitelist of addresses and sort of your selection of addresses match that and then provide a proof saying like this, like these addresses are on the whitelist. However, you wouldn't actually be disclosing which addresses, how many addresses, and you wouldn't, no one looking from the outside would be able to tell who on that list has been kind of let through. And so here you see this selective disclosure. So another one would be to prevent capital management fraud. Funds could demonstrate statements about flows in and out from addresses belonging to investors versus investments, and this could actually prevent Ponzi scheme and embezzlement. So another example would be, or sort of a couple examples, are providing better business practices for trust building. So here's another example where you could communicate better with investors. So you could actually share more information without revealing the details. You could provide a liquidity profile of a fund's current asset holdings using a public database of assets and liquidity profiles. You could share general information about a fund's asset without disclosing which assets are actually held, or you could do something like a proof of solvency where you could actually demonstrate the value of asset back tokens. The value of the tokens actually exceed the liabilities, meaning like the fund is solvent. It actually has the funds it says. And you could actually do that without revealing how much or what they are. And this is a really exciting example, which is you could actually use a zero-knowledge proof to issue stocks on a ledger, and you could actually track these through secondary trades, except to the outside, no one would necessarily know that you are tracking them. You could see where they're going, but outwardly, like, no one else could see where they're going. They wouldn't be able to track them, only you'd be able to track them. And you can actually do that using zero-knowledge proofs as well. So some other use cases that I kind of mentioned quickly before, and like, in general, this talk is very much trying to find ways for us to think about the powers of zero-knowledge proofs, and I hope that this actually could inspire you to think about more ideas. And so other ideas that have been floated are things like taxes and auditing, supply chain management and voting. There is a project called ZK Ledger from MIT where they did a lot of work on the auditing front, but as far as I know, there's no implementations yet. And in general, a lot of this stuff will need, like, I mean, you'll have to get a lot of authorities and regulators on board. I sort of picture it being a combined effort between funds and regulators. I don't think it would just come from industry if that was to happen, but I think it could be really powerful. Cool. So yeah, I hope that this talk has helped you to explain, I hope that I've explained a little bit how valuable zero-knowledge proofs could be for our personal and professional lives, and how it provides this much-needed balance between privacy and transparency. And before I end, I want to say a big thank you to Ben Fish, as I mentioned, from Fondora, because you really helped me work on this talk and come up with those points. I think their project's pretty cool. I don't work for them, but I think they inspired this, so yeah, I want to say thank you to them. This was a very high-level talk. The Zero-Knowledge Summit is something that I'm throwing in San Francisco at the end of the month, October 26th. If you're into that, if you're there, please apply. That will have actually some of the best researchers around talking about the details of their protocols, and so I hope that you will consider coming. So I don't know if you have any questions, or if you have any comments, if you have any ideas, that would be really interesting to hear. Also, I think there's only one microphone, so do you want to come up? Next, what comes to mind to do the Zero-Knowledge Summit? What do you do as a transaction inside the Zero-Knowledge Summit? Inside the what? Inside the Zero-Knowledge Summit. So, well, I know that there's a lot of projects that are building on top of the Ethereum virtual machine using Zero-Knowledge-proof stuff, and I'm sure you could do private transactions with them, but I think what we're talking about here is actually it's constructions using Zero-Knowledge-proof, and as I mentioned, also MPCs. So it's like you actually design systems that allow for this selective disclosure, and I think you could probably build things like that on Ethereum, but right now I don't know of any projects that are. Yeah. Ninety-three quarters is for that. Sorry? Either ninety-three quarters is for private transaction on Ethereum using Nimble and Bolt. Oh, is that a project you're shilling right now? Yeah. Okay. I don't know. Is it called? Ethereum, nine-and-three-quarters. Nine-and-three-quarters? Yeah. Oh, hey. Any other questions or comments or thoughts? It's a comment. So we are as well working with this close government to discuss the possibility of applying Zero-Knowledge-proof for the Texas, and I would say that it is an absolute challenge to convince the Financial Ministry to use this technology. It's completely another level of challenge. So all of this in this auditorium understand the power of Zero-Knowledge-proofs, but you need to prove it for the government. That's actually one of the reasons why I don't totally see it coming from industry and having industry pitch it to government, but rather through education or through evangelizing these ideas to potentially have people within those bodies come up with those ideas themselves, which may be good or bad, but I think it's good that we keep an eye on it. I have a full-on comment on that. Not that it's supported, but I think in Singapore, the financial authority did launch kind of like a national-level project blockchain, and one of the recommendations is that it's a large proof. So it's important that it's a large proof for interbank settlement. So I guess it depends on the counter. Just to give an example. I'd be curious to hear exactly what they're doing there, because Zero-Knowledge-proofs can be powerful for all sorts of things, but here what I'm talking about is compliance, where some information is revealed and some is kept private. So I'd be curious to hear exactly where they use it. There are actually examples in healthcare of Zero-Knowledge-proofs, but so far there's no examples of Zero-Knowledge-proofs and blockchain that are really working in the way that a hospital would need it to. Or maybe you have a counter example. I can pull up on the Singapore's project of moving. So essentially they are doing a kind of real-time counter settlement between banks. So this is kind of... they have passed it using Zero-Knowledge-proofs. So between banks? Yes. And I think the first prototype they are using is the Kistar Coral. So Coral is an enterprise blockchain. So yeah, and they are also related to like an autonomous dancer and all those design can be applied on India-based solutions. I'd be curious to hear from that example if there are actually... like is that designed by regulators or is that designed by consortium of banks? Yeah, so this... Yeah, so when Rachel is kind of interested in this, so it is definitely not... So in order for this kind of interest to really go live, they need a privacy feature. So they need an industrial solution. I was a bit involved. So it was basically like a call from the government that there were three industry implementations that they funded to do it. And after they evaluate and publish the results and then they iterate to a higher level. Oh, are we of three minutes left? Does anyone else have any questions or ideas? If not, then thank you for listening. And yeah, I hope this... I hope you think about these ideas. I hope you guys figure out ways to use them all.