 Good afternoon everyone. As Evan said, my name is Albert and I am delighted and honored to host this panel Which is ambitiously titled what to know about zero knowledge But first I need to apologize To all the cryptographers out there oops, we did it again We took a term from cryptography and how should I say it? Expanded what it means And I'm very sorry Even though it wasn't my fault not even one bit. It's actually more of these guys fault But I apologize nonetheless You see as cryptographers so often remind me this already happened with the word crypto a long time ago Like six whole years ago crypto used to mean cryptography But now it generally refers to a much broader set of things such as cryptocurrency or just this kind of Circularly defined quote-unquote crypto space And here in a case of history if not repeating then at least rhyming Something similar has happened with the term at zero knowledge or zk When I thought about this I was like it's almost like someone somewhere went through an escalating series of dares Like I dare you to hijack the meaning of the word crypto. Oh, you did it Well, that was too easy because you know the word crypto currency even has crypto in it How about you do something really ridiculous like taking objectively defined terms such as zero knowledge and Repurpose it to include stuff that is literally not at all zero knowledge And so that is the first thing to know about zero knowledge It no longer means zero knowledge in a technical sense only rather zero knowledge or zk has morphed into referring to just about Anything that utilizes certain proof techniques proof techniques that give you actual zero knowledge in some but definitely not all cases So to summarize Zk used to mean zero knowledge as in I am able to prove that I know something without revealing anything beyond that fact But in practice zk now tends to refer to a broader usage of proof techniques that have some important properties Now what are these properties a very incomplete list includes precision? Correctness and succinctness for example when zk is used for privacy That's an example of high precision because you can provide better privacy when you are more precise about what information is exchanged And succinctness is another way of saying that in some instances zk is used as this compression super weapon Now compression is super important especially in a blockchain context because as we know the cost of storing data can be quite high And so that's why for example a zk roll-up doesn't actually provide privacy Rather it provides a more succinct guarantee of correctness Anyway enough about how I think about zk my thoughts are both surely flawed and incomplete Which is why I have these three fine gentlemen up here with me today Gupsheep Barry Vitalik. Thank you so much for joining Every time we chat. I learned a ton and have a lot of fun. So I'm excited to have another conversation I hope everyone here enjoys it as much as I will So let's start with some introductions Specifically Gupsheep and Barry since I figure people are a little bit familiar with Vitalik Gupsheep Barry, can you share a bit more about what you do on a day-to-day basis with you Gupsheep? Well, hey everyone. I'm Gupsheep. I work with the zero X park Foundation along with Justin Glibbert and a handful of other folks on The day-to-day most of our projects are focused on some combination of what we call application level R&D and What this roughly means is trying to skate to where the puck is going on you know If ethereum slash public blockchain slash new primitives from applied cryptography get let's say a hundred X better over the next Two to five years. What is that really going to unlock? So we help support this, you know relatively tightly knit, but You know loosely associated group of teams working on anything from applications of zero knowledge cryptography to Crypto native gaming or what we're currently calling autonomous worlds Yeah, so I'm Barry. I work with the PSE team at the ethereum Foundation And basically we work on applying zero knowledge proofs to Achieve both private private and scaling applications. So some of our projects include like CKBM We also have some like private voting some private coercion resistant voting stuff Yeah, that's that's mostly what we work on I also work with other people in the ecosystem to to build these tools out I'm in fact having a lot of fun working with some of the people in zero X park on several different things at the moment Yeah, speaking of which one of the things I really love about both PSE and zero X park is you both have a desire to solve What I would characterize as the actual problems, you know as opposed to settling for these like superficial or Defensible solutions and I've seen both of the the groups are really the collections of people Demonstrate this deep sense of responsibility For how to go about doing things and a willingness to prioritize this like collective good So just want to say on behalf of the broader ZK ecosystem, which as I noted We kind of repurposed to mean something bigger now We're really lucky to have all these groups and thank you very much for that And so on that note, let's dive in on on the core topics here today One way that I like to learn about a topic is to ask people who know more about that topic than me Which definitely includes all three of these folks here. I like to ask people what has been surprising to them What is surprised them? So when it comes to ZK What has been surprising over? Let's say the last three years, you know It's been three whole years since the last DevCon. That's a long time anywhere, but especially in this space And so again, I'll kick things off with gubsheet, but kind of have an open conversation from here Yeah, this is super interesting to me because actually it was around the time of the last DevCon in 2019 That was first getting involved in the space to begin with And when my like zero knowledge journey was first starting and at the time the thing that drew me in was basically a set of tools Built by the folks at ident3 Sir comments mark. Yes, which enabled for the first time browser-based proving and in browser ZK applications that were if not developer Friendly at least like developer possible You know, you didn't have to like roll your own cryptography for the first time And the thing that's just been continually shocking to me is and I mean it was true at the time And it continues to be true today is I think that a lot of people find zero knowledge to be a very scary term It seems like oh, you know, this is moon math. This is something you need like You know specialization in number theory to understand But really there's just so many ways to get started with zero knowledge and so many things that you can build and contribute to Depending on whatever level of the stack it is that you have expertise on And you know the space has just been surprisingly accessible for both math and CS Technical generalists overall I'd say the second thing that kind of you know is very complementary to that is that As a result the space has been moving much more quickly than we originally or at least I initially would have expected And I know Barry has a lot to say about like ZK EVM with respect to this But you know, I look at my old notes from like 2020 or 2021 when I'm trying to flesh out What are some of the open like application level R&D directions and I remember like last year? I wrote something like we had a student pay and who built out linear regression inside of a snark And we were thinking oh, you know, maybe like five years in the future It'll be possible to put a neural network in the snark and you know lo and behold actually this past Sunday Which was like not even a year from when I'd written that We had two teams that presented on their work on building like MNIST and you know various Classifiers inside of the Halo 2 proving system. So this stuff just keeps accelerating and accelerating accelerating Yeah, so thank you Brian like just to build on what you said I think that like on your first point about like getting into the space I think one of the like most powerful ways you can get in now because we have all of these high-level tools You can black box out a lot of the crypto components. It makes a lot more accessible Okay, but to answer the original question the thing that most surprised me was yeah, so for three years ago I didn't really think that ZKVM was possible. I thought that it was like just going to be prohibitively expensive and like Over the last three years. I've sort of learned that like oh well Actually, we there's a whole bunch of extra scope to kind of optimize and improve the way that we can Arrismatize things so that makes me like very optimistic for the future when like okay, we okay I think that we can do ZKVM now and I like the next set of things that are going to be difficult like neural networks and like private social social graph groups and things like that are going to be super exciting to explore Speaking of ZKVM's you know metallic you wrote and classified them in a fairly recent post of yours And I know you've got a lot of thoughts. What are you thinking about ZKVM's and how they're going to intersect with the future of Ethereum? Well actually so before I answer I should mention there's one really important word that the crypto space has butchered that you forgot to mention Which is inflation like remember how in you know good old traditional lands inflation actually refers to like changes in the price level of Commodities in terms of an asset and we just like totally portrait it a change it to refer to the total quantity of an asset Yeah, that's us. We're great But you know the ZKVM question I think it's fascinating because Like if we step back and just think about you know, like what is the ideal kind of technical vision of a blockchain? Like what would I yeah, you know love to see a theorem look more like 10 years from now, right? like the Kind of vision that I think I gave a couple of days ago is Imagining a world where everyone you know it whether they're a validator or there's someone else they run a node and they just run a Node on their phone so you know if you want you can even stake a million bucks of eth on your phone and Every 12 seconds a block comes in and that block contains 3.6 megabytes of data And you know you download 3.6 megabytes of data because these days a plant and phone plans are getting faster and faster You end and you hash it and then you check it against one snark You know that checks like like three or four polynomial equations and then that's it You just know that the block is correct. All you have to do is just take 3.6 a mix of data download it You know she do a few hash it do a couple of polynomial checks And you know you magically know that this is the correct block right so in that kind of future You know running a node becomes vastly easier if you're in becomes much more decentralized It becomes like this very Theoretically nice and clean system in a lot of ways, but in order to get there like we would basically have to take the entire Ethereum machinery both the consensus layer and the execution layer and stick it inside of a snark and This is always something that we've like known is theoretically possible because ultimately everything is a polynomial. I'm you know I'm a polynomial. You're a polynomial but It's a polynomial is the next term we're going to repurpose Exactly. Yeah, so the problem but the challenge in practice has always been like oh, you know How many constraints is it going to take how much efficiency are we going to eat as this actually viable? but you know since we saw a plonk in 2019 and we saw the I think plonk like unwalked a huge number of things because that plonk was like it wasn't just a protocol It was like this medicinseptual leap when you could start separately thinking about Which polynomial commitments do you do you use to enforce your polynomial equations? And how do you convert when you want it what you want to check into polynomial equations, right? And like you can do answer those two questions completely separately And so you know you can have you know traditional plonk with a KZG traditional plonk with you know fry and Starks You could have you know pluck up with KZG pluck up with Starks and like Basically just to research those two directions separately and and then we've just seen all of these amazing improvements You know if it's we've seen pluck up which is that amazing for Solving like pretty much all or making pretty much all kind of all traditionally snark unfriendly computation into something That's like maybe only medium snark unfriendly and then a couple of other improvements And then you know we've been seeing all this amazing work on zkvm's at the same time all this amazing work on Compilers to try to make it easy to compile things and then at the same time there's a whole bunch of companies that are quietly working on ZK EVM asics I'm you know kind of hoping that now that mining is gone the you know the miners are going to retrain and become developers like literally And you know we're going to have amazing Companies that are going to create like you know super fast DK proving hardware and like maybe in five to ten years Well actually get there and you know you'll be able to like you know run a full note on your phone and like you know stake as much I mean if as you want to just like download 3.6 megabytes hash it and like check a couple polynomials, and you know You got a good block We will have some time for predictions So I'm excited to hear what you actually want to put your foot on the ground for when it comes to what miners will do in The future that's an area that I don't think I've heard much from before Okay, and I guess building on this Natural question for myself, and I'm sure many of people in the audience like how do you all see ZK? complimenting the future of Ethereum that can mean a lot of different things, so I'm just gonna throw this out there and Whoever wants to kind of run with it, please do one so what one of the ways I think about for why ZK is a Natural complements to blockchains is that blockchains give you Censorship resistance and you know Guaranteed execution and a couple you know a couple of other guarantees But at the cost of two really important things one is scalability the other is privacy Well, what what two properties are in a ZK snark some exactly tailored for Scalability and privacy right so it's like they two almost fit together perfectly like you know these pieces of a puzzle And you know one just like completely solves the weaknesses of the other so I think you know They're a perfect fit and like there's a lot of applications where if you just if you only have one they don't make sense But if you have both they just suddenly start fitting together like the way that I think about this is that like Blockchains are creating these massive data sets and these data sets are available and public and there's so much rich Information that's going to be there It's going to be very in like in order for in order to allow people to make like proofs about this information You need privacy and you also need to sink this so like there's some things that we can do already Like we can use tools like semaphore and hand on to to make proofs about like that that you you're part of a group But like this data is so rich and and the way that it's rich is it has social connections and interactions And like what I want to see us do in the future is to start to explore ways to make To make proofs about this kind of like shared network data that I don't know all the private information about But I can work with a group of other people in order to make a proof for example that oh I am two steps away from a certain person in the social graph That's like That's where I see some really exciting things coming in the future and a neat thing that I'll say real quick about that is The transparent the basically fully transparent nature of a blockchain in its history This has been one of those classic examples of something that in some context is a feature and in some context It's a bug But it's neat that in this context we're looking at ways to make it a bit more of a feature because like you said it's an incredibly rich and Verified data set arguably the richest most verified data set ever produced and the ability to kind of work with that Using proofs in various ways is just something that is going to be really interesting and I think it's something that you've got a lot about so Yeah, maybe I'll I'll give two framings for I think the equivalent concept But from a slightly different angle because I think that these are useful when thinking about like what kinds of applications might be powerful in the future The first is you know to dig into that complementary Framing of what ZK and Ethereum have as a relationship One thing that is interesting about ZK taken You know just alone is that in some sense ZK proofs are stateless So I can prove for example that I know the pre-image of a hash that is contained in a Merkle route but you know, why would someone care about that particular Merkle route right like a common question actually that we get when we're introducing new developers into ZK is like Well, can I use a ZK proof to prove that I like know some private key of an account at this block hash? Or like that I know some sort of fact about a smart contract on Ethereum and the answer is well like you can't do that directly because ZK proofs are just like mathematical equations Math is not aware of the Ethereum blockchain However, what the Ethereum blockchain does is it allows us to come to consensus on what's important Which I think is kind of like a little bit of the flip side of some of Barry's and Barry and Vitalik's framing So we imbue a certain Merkle route or a certain block hash or cryptographic accumulator with meaning And that's what gives ZK proofs their power That's what gives the K proofs like their semantic meaning and then the second kind of framing that I would think about is You know, this is to go off of Albert's comment block chains are it's almost kind of like an accident that in order to build something Like basically a consensus engine that we can all agree basically on a certain state route or something like that All the data has to be transparent And I think that that's not necessarily like that's not intrinsic You know, we can use these new tools like ZK proofs or witness encryption or whatever else To build systems where we can still come to consensus But we don't have to make like every single thing public which is actually like a really limiting thing in the design space of Coordination mechanisms that you can build Yeah, can you expand on that a little bit because one conversation that we've had with for example various more traditional tech companies is this idea of Making the data that they have, you know private and literally their database is Available but not available in the conventional Well, we just reveal all that because they're obviously not going to do that But available in the sense of being amenable to proofs and other things that people can then use outside of those systems Can you expand a little bit about how that might work either at a high level low level really? Whatever it's been top of mind for you there. Oh, yeah One one thing that I think could be really interesting is like what if we took I mean This is super blue sky far out, but knowing how fast the case going maybe it's not actually as far out as we think Imagine we took some traditional web-to-social company that's got an account model whether that's like Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or something like that and on these Services maybe what we could imagine is like the service provider would produce a state route for everyone's account now It's not going to necessarily show all of the underlying data That is underneath the state route because that might include like your password your password hash But at the very least what they might publish is like a Merkel tree of a bunch of account state routes now What you the user can do is your personal data is still private to you and the service provider Like whether that's Twitter or Facebook or Reddit The actual data only a hash commitment to that data is being shared But you can start making zk proofs that everyone knows Are actually valid and are using an attested to Datasets you're not making something up so you can prove for example that like I am in this Facebook group I'm in this subreddit. I have this reputation Maybe I can carry that reputation from one platform to another platform And that I think is a really interesting like interoperability mechanism between the web-to-world and the web-three world Yeah, and one thing I want to note about that is sometimes people hear this idea and they're like Yeah, but the company they can just change their database however they want so why is this useful? Well, if they publish a state route they at least can't change things after that And by the way a very natural place to put that state route would be on a decentralized blockchain So I think even though it isn't anywhere near the same as like the ethereum blockchains history We still get something there that is I think quite interesting and the ramifications of which we really haven't even scratched the surface I'm kind of moving forward here Building on this whole like let's just talk about different topics build up different vantage points to try to learn more about it One game I like to play is what I call the underrated overrated game Which is simply to say what do you think is underrated in the space right now? And what do you think is overrated in the space? So maybe let's start with with underrated and again, I'll kind of throw it out there for anyone to pick up So I think that when we think about this question. We need to think about it in like different contexts I think that like if we're asking this question in the context of like the Western world that I Think that in the Western world we tend to over as overweight the value of financial privacy Whereas like our societies are like for the most part free and the The most important thing about our society tends to be like who speaks and who gets to Be part of discussions and how decisions are made and how we decide what to do So I feel like that's much more important So then then the kind of financial privacy applications So in the Western world, I think that like it's social private social media and things like that are much more interesting in the developing world It's completely different right in the developing world. It's just so so important to have financial privacy That it's like yeah, like one thing that I kind of was really surprised about was we're running like a quadratic funding round at Defcon I'm like a lot of the people have like just serious problems with like Private information and they're just really really reluctant to share their that information. So, yeah, that's that's what I think That's really interesting also because and I think really fitting when you consider even this dev con Where it's located and a lot of the themes that have gone into it Which is when you try to say whether something is underrated or overrated It's also by definition a matter of perspective Where we're looking at things really affects things a lot of times something is underrated or overrated because it's Relative to you know, something else that might be drawing more attention. We're not getting enough attention Continue to love to hear other thoughts of you like what's underrated or overrated when it comes to ZK underrated is probably Applications of ZK proofs in areas that have nothing to do with what we consider to be the traditional crypto space so, you know Government records of various kinds. I mean the example of like proving things inside of social media applications I mean even I mean Even games, I mean like possibly supply chain stuff like there's just a whole bunch of Areas where like maybe it also makes sense to put a blockchain in sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't but like even if it doesn't It often makes a lot of sense to stick as there are knowledge proofs in as well Yeah, absolutely. I think that's super underrated at least from my personal perspective, which is a lot of what we're calling ZK Doesn't require a blockchain as we've noted. It's very complimentary But there's a lot of situations where you straight up are no longer constrained by Operating on top of a blockchain and as many people here are very familiar I love the blockchain, but it can be quite constraining to work with at times So that's something I think will also unlock innovation in new ways Yeah, I was actually going to jump off that as well I think that a lot of times when we categorize DK use cases today Well, first of all, there's a huge bias towards use cases that are related to the blockchain somehow these things have become You know almost synonymous like uses of ZK and usage of ZK on a blockchain But the second thing is then when you dig into the categorization We often break down apps into their scalability applications and there's privacy applications But I think that we're going to see a third category of thing that is like not quite either of those emerge in the near future, which is this idea of like ZK snarks is interoperability technology and this might sound a little bit weird because interoperability is typically a word that we use More for you know, when we talk about smart smart contracts talking to each other But there exists, you know a rich set of basically cryptographic claims that actually you know As a matter of fact exists in the world outside of blockchains as well, whether that's you know the signatures in your like GitHub commit history or like the signatures that you know various like Communication service providers, whether that's like messaging services email services, etc. used to authenticate your messages or signatures on blockchains themselves and one of the crazy things about snarks is that they turn these Signatures into things that can talk to each other So we move from this world where like the RSA signature algorithm can only be understood by other parties that are running You know the RSA signature algorithm to being being able to put the RSA signature algorithm Inside of a snark which is sort of this like general purpose Programmable cryptography construct and you can do things like I either contain this RSA private key to this github account or I possess this ECDSA private key to an Ethereum account And you can start making these like cross platform claims I think that that's something that's underrated and hasn't been thought about enough and you know There's there's a number of like PSE and Xerox park teams that are thinking about these things They're actually going to demo this week. So if you want to check out a you should ZK email project I think this is a really really awesome one in particular Yeah, just to build on what Brian is that so Brian was so one thing I think that is underrated in the space is that that We are We're having a lot of social media experiments happening and like I think that social media will will make internet discourse become More collectivist and less individualistic and like the the reason that I think this is that is that because When you're part of a group When you're when you're making like private claims when you're making proofs that you're that you're a start part of a set when you Make a post You need to you need to consider about the rest of the group, right? That like you tend to become more like protective of that group because you need to be careful about its perception and Like a representative of it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so you speak more as part of the group as opposed to as part of from your own perspective So that's super interesting what you're saying is Because the will these technologies will enable us for instance to form these groups where we Simultaneously kind of get to draft off of the reputation of the group But then we also impact the reputation of that group You think or you can see how it will for instance make thinking more collectivist in Certain situations. Is that about right? Yeah, right because like I see today that like a lot of social media is is very Individualistic right a lot of people are focused on like more likes on Instagram or or retweets on Twitter and things like that I'm like that leads to these kind of incentives that are inherently about like performance But when you switch the paradigm and instead of trying to get things for yourself You're trying to gather things for your like group the people that you're speaking as part of a set of That changes that changes the game completely I'm really excited to see how that will develop. Yeah, that's super fascinating One other thing that always jumps to mind for me right now is being underrated and I think you guys have a lot of thoughts on this Is just the kind of community and ecosystem that exists in ZK right now What have you observed and maybe even compare and contrast a little bit with let's say the more Conventional crypto ecosystem if it can even be called such a thing So a couple of things that I've observed is it tends to be that like people who are drawn to the ZK space tend to be like Really technical and really just excited to learn things and do things and that's just that's really really fun The other thing that I've observed is that like I've seen like companies who are like Competitors with each other like working together so much to like train people and audit each other's code and things like that And I think that that's just really really great Yeah, maybe one thing also to jump off that last point that I see as like a difference between I think this is like representative actually of applied crypto broadly not just ZK crypto And it's true of you know the best parts of blockchain as well versus other industries is like they're a natural I Don't want to say like decentralized forces But maybe forces that encourage or incentivize like the free sharing of knowledge and information Because if you're trying to get everyone on board with your protocol Whether that's a cryptographic protocol or a roll-up what you really need is for other people to understand and trust your system So you need to be permissively licensing your code or at least you know I mean permissively licensing is going to be sort of the gold standard because then you're going to get people digging Into the actual intricacies and understanding, you know all of the subtleties and edge cases But I think that's something that's a really powerful effect Yeah, one thing I was actually reminded of this morning when Danny Ryan gave his talk is He said that I had said and I honestly didn't remember saying this but I believe him He said that I had said that you know crypto is this intellectual gravity well That's something I've absolutely felt for many years right down to the part where I literally again repurposed the word crypto there And the only other thing I've really seen in recent years that gives me that same feeling is What we are now calling ZK it has a lot of these similar Intellectual gravity well effects and I think for better or for worse like blockchains are inherently Financialized like the very invention of a blockchain is kind of introducing this incentive dimension That's orthogonal to more conventional Consensus theory and other things much of the core consensus theory actually existed well before blockchains did so you can't get away from this Financialized aspect of blockchains And and that's been great in many ways I think that's actually really been a positive for a lot of the development interest in the space But it also causes the attraction of like other forces and factors that knock on wood I think are a little bit harder to do in a zk context though I would never bet against the broader crypto space's Ability to figure out how to financialize the hell out of something but right now We are in I think a bit of an oasis when it comes to just being able to intellectually pursue Really interesting problems that are also very practically valuable and hopefully we can preserve that for a long time And and hopefully it's something that other folks in the audience can kind of get it a taste of in the future as well I Guess now that we've sort of we've scanned the space and where it is right now in a much way So the natural thing that I want to hear about is something I alluded to you earlier Which is just predictions predictions could be about something that'll happen tomorrow a year from now Decades from now. Yeah, what are some predictions? Hopefully not putting you on the spot too much here so my prediction is that by 2040 someone would have won a Nobel Peace Prize for using zero-knowledge proofs Well that escalated quickly How maybe just a little bit more about how that might work Right so basically the way I think about this is that zero-knowledge proofs can be Allow you to have like private interactions with people and that means that you're able to build trust in an environment where there is no trust and it turns out that this is really important for like a Negotiations between people so like kind of like the the the easy path to this that I see is that the the Possession of software bugs will become so serious that there will be this crisis and in order to overcome the Prices will need to prove to each other. How many software bugs each like nation-state holds? So they can use a zero-knowledge proof to prove that they know a software bug for Ethereum or for a Firefox and this will be the first step in decommissioning the Software bug arsenals that people have accumulated That's super super interesting Remind me in 18 years to check back on that but that definitely got us off on a bang other predictions that come to mind from any of you guys Yeah, I have a few maybe that are less like specific and precise than berries and hopefully and unfortunately less like inspiring galvanizing but I think you know in terms of like really large-scale trends I Think that right now and you can even see this reflected in the programming of this dev con this idea of ZK applications is Being seen as almost like a product or application category And my belief is that like these new cryptographic primitives are going to be so ubiquitous that in you know say 20 years It's like it's going to be a the case that ZK and similar primitives are just happening in the background like we're not going to call things ZK apps in the same way that we Don't call websites HTTPS apps. I think it's like an incoherent product category, you know similarly to how We had a lot of folks calling websites comms or this idea like the comm industry We're going to move instead to this world where you have this like massive space of applications and coordination mechanisms that require information asymmetry which turns out to be a really really fundamental primitive and how that information asymmetry is Created is not going to be the focus. It's more going to be like, you know much like today We have e-commerce sites or like storefronts or landing pages or browser-based games These things rely on the existence of DNS or HTTPS, but we don't call them again comms or HTTPS apps today One kind of medium inspiring one I guess that's a little bit less Intense to someone winning a Nobel Prize But I think it's still Importance to recalibrate our thoughts around is that I think Over the next ten years that it will become recognized that a ZK snarks are at least as important to technology as watch hands are well, that's very that I think that is depending on your point of view perhaps as exciting as the Nobel Peace Prize like I I'll think the Nobel Peace Prize an amazing thing But I'm also kind of curious to see if we can you know build up even alternatives or other, you know other sort of recognition Immersionally so You you sort of alluded this earlier with some of the complementary stuff like how ZK complements blockchains When you say as important That also implies like how do you think blockchains are important? You also talked about that so maybe can you tie that together to help us understand it a bit more sure and so I think like you can look at at ZK both as Massively enhancing what blockchains can do and possibly even being unnecessary ingredients in get in a blockchains Be getting to like the real high-scalable levels of high scalability that a lot of applications require And you could also think of you know ZK applications beyond the block blockchain space, right? So for the first one like we know we talked a lot about roll-ups. We talked about ZK VMs We talked about you know my dream for the look and feel of running an ethereum validator in 2032 and No Prototypes of this may even come much much faster than 2032 I don't know. You know these people are insane but the And you know without this kind of technology like it would actually take a lot more sacrifices to get blockchains to you know Hundreds of thousands of transactions a second, right? So that's the first part and then the second part is just a You know the the kinds of things that ZK synarchs would enable like even if we just Imagine a world where like blockchains as a technology don't exist and it turned off and you just asked the question of like Okay, you know the world is dominated by you know, Facebook and Google and you know, whatever stuff the Chinese government supports and I know we're stuck with that but you know, how do we make at least some of these better, right and that's The well, you know giving people privacy guarantee is a while at the same time being able to compute over Information is a huge right being able to have financial systems that prove solvency to people is a huge having a social media systems where you can vote anonymously and Actually have a credible guarantee that your vote is being is being included or even just like a guarantee that like let's say Yeah, you know instead of Twitter having some opaque proprietary algorithms. What are has an algorithm that's actually open source and That but then also Twitter actually being able to prove that it's following its algorithm like that's huge, right? so Even if we kind of you know turn off blockchains and just like you know imagine like what's the difference between a world with New ZK and the world with DK like it's really kind of epochal gains and you know things like privacy and just being able to have a more you know freak and Open and cooperative world in just so many ways, right? And then once you had blockchains on top then you know The gains are obviously compounding yeah, one thing I think is really cool is I think we're Passed the point where we're worried about whether blockchains are going to continue to be a thing so to speak But I remember even several years ago Telling people look no matter what happens with blockchains part of its positive legacy on the world is going to be they're really Complimented and accelerated research and development in just cryptography more advanced cryptography Which is really what ZK is kind of becoming this like again like I keep saying catch all term for But since we have a bit of time to like dig in a little bit more on the future I don't know how far we can get in the weeds on this What are some of these other sort of ZK adjacent future technologies that might be interesting, you know Like homomorphic encryption or indistinguishability obfuscation or just other stuff in that category anything that like jumps to mind is just like Keep an eye out. Maybe not too much of an eye out because we are pretty far from some of this stuff But yeah, any man hops of mine for you guys. Yeah, so the way that I think about this is that Yeah, so my my answer is MPC and why I think it's so important is that I can you say what MPC is multi-party computation And the reason why I think this is important is that CKP is that you make proofs about secrets that you know I'm like it turns out that there's a whole bunch of things in our world with secrets of that only I know like I know my private key for my github commit keys But our world has much more private information than that, right? There's all like the richest information is to do with like social networks and social interactions And if we want to make proofs about that we'll need to be able to make proofs about shared secrets And that's what multi-party computation lets you do it allows you to make proofs about about shared secrets So I think that we can leverage these kind of things to make this kind of like Proofs of connection in social graphs where you don't know anyone's connections other than you yourself your own Well, I think the big kind of prize of prizes in cryptography that it's so worth talking about is obfuscation, right? Because obfuscation basically lets you turn a program into an encrypted program But where you can run that encrypted program and it has the same outputs on the same inputs But if that program the original program source code had secrets inside of it the encrypted program would not let you extract those secrets It would only let you just run the exact code on this on the yes secrets and the inputs and give you the outputs, right? So the reason what one way to see how obfuscation is so powerful is like pretty much any other cryptographic primitive can be done with them up with obfuscation, right? So, you know if you want to let's say get turn like Make signatures out of obfuscation, right? Then the way that you would do it is you would know it say you take any symmetric signature scheme So like you know take something where you just like generate a big hash and you know, you know add the data To the hash just like some really simple thing then you would take the Private key just like is the encryption key of that and then the public key Well, you would stick the encryption your key into the obfuscated program and then you would set it to decrypt And you just published the office or so you set it to encrypt and you'd publish an obfuscated encryptor Another one is just is zero-knowledge proofs themselves ironically, right? You'd basically just you know literally create an obfuscated program Where you'd be able to just like stick in a piece of code and it would run that piece of code and sign it With a key that it has internally and give you the output, right? And that gives you possibly the best possible ZG snark because to verify and get a super simple to verify You literally just verify one signature, right? And then you could do really fancy stuff on top like you know you could make a Encrypt data in such a way that that data can only be encrypted if someone gives you a proof that something happened on a Blockchain, right? So the the applications of that like, you know, just multiply really massively The the problem with this kind of obfuscation unfortunately is that like we've only yet Had the first formally proven candidates for this like literally two years ago And they're just insanely high and they're a complexity at the moment, right? Like it takes that it's there's like Six levels of you know protocols inside of protocols inside of protocols and there's this big tower and like actually running it We're taking you know a million years or something And you know the question is you know are the very smart people going to be able to like bring that down to the Point where it's something viable ten or twenty years from now Like we'll see I think if we get to the like something viable then you know the results of that could be amazing Yeah, and what's gonna be really interesting is to see like you said the the rate of progress here I remember myself. I think it was back in 2012 or 2013 Before I was even interested in blockchains. I first got exposed to the concept of fully homomorphic encryption I was visiting former intern of mine who also went to the same university and She described it as like for example say you have a keyboard But it's built in a way where you press a key and the keyboard doesn't know what key you pressed And yet like the right kind of keystroke Registers and then she was like oh by the way We're only 11 orders of magnitude away from this actually being viable. I was like hold on Did you say 11 orders of magnitude? He's like yeah, yeah, yeah 11 orders of magnitude But you know in the years that have passed I mean we've chopped that number down quite a bit depending on the context or anywhere from Even one order magnitude but probably more like two or three orders of magnitude away that's a lot of progress and It's gonna be like I said really exciting to just keep working on this and seeing what we can unlock And we've even seen some of that. I think like with your experience is building in in the browser Today compared to three years ago. What are some of like the numbers or rough ballpark? Oh, yeah, I mean, I think it's something like it depends on how exactly you interpret all the different computational resources But since 2018 we might say that we've seen like three orders of magnitude improvement in how large of ZK snarks you can prove in the browser. So yeah, totally to make that more concrete some of the things I've seen out of zero X park involved waiting for, you know, 45 seconds, maybe 90 seconds not perfect but Viable right like you can see situations where someone would be willing to wait, you know One to two minutes for something and that exact same thing two and a half three years ago Literally would have involved maybe two hours or just actually would not have been Computationally or feasible for other reasons in terms of like memory or things of that sort So that's to give everyone a bit of a taste of kind of the direction we've been going in at least in some subsets of this space and You know, hopefully it'll continue and hopefully Some of the folks in the audience can also get involved and help us with that and on that note a quick question Just like are there good places to quote get started? It's always like a very tricky thing even for her crypto more broadly, but I know that you guys have worked on various Resources so and then any like just quick things we can mention here And of course if you really want to get more involved you'll want to follow up more afterward Yeah, so on our end one of our focuses is like education and community development So we run these applied ZK learning groups and we're doing our best right now to get all those materials online at learn Dot zero X park dot org So that's you know an effort by various like community members and volunteers I think like Michael Chew and John Guibas are probably around here right now so that's a collection of videos articles various documents That have exercises on how to just get started with like writing your first circuits Cool, so that's a learn dot zero X PARC dot org. Yeah Yeah, so the first thing I recommend is to don't get intimidated by all of the moon mats to black box things out and to figure out What something does not how it does it and you can use that to build a whole bunch of things And as you're building those bunch of things you can figure out how the thing does what it does And like that's that's how I learned and it was it was really enjoyable The other thing that I would suggest people to check out is you can check out the privacy and scaling exploration teams website It's a plied zkp.org and we have a discord there. You can join and chat and ask questions So that's applied at zkp.org. Yes Yeah, I mean if there's I think a lot of different resources and like for people with you know different like skill levels and like different interests like there's There's environments now where that are literally online like you know zkreeple.dev I think was one right and where you can just you know literally go and like start writing the code for a ZKS circuit and like compile it and it just outputs to you a piece of solidity code that you can then you know stick on well these days not mainnet because it would be a bit too expensive, but you know some be a layer two or test that of your choice and You know you can actually kind of play around and see if you can make some simple some simple application So that's one way to learn for some people if you want to get into the math then you know You get applied zkp.org page has I think a lot of good resources zkp.science has a bunch. I mean I have a bunch that I've That I've written there's a bunch that the stark word team has written there's there's quite a lot these days like just Sometimes it even makes sense to read like multiple explainers on the same topic so you can see how they fit together Yeah, so you know depending on like which side of things that you want to learn there's like you know There's plenty of different reasons for you Yeah, just one other thing I wanted to add that like we've given examples of how you can join if you want to be developer But as we talked about earlier like there's a whole bunch of like community and Ecosystem and cultural things that are also super important and like I'm not sure how to get involved in doing that like maybe you could join some of our like Private social media experiments. There's skitter and hey and on and yeah, you can find it on applydkp.org or 0xpirex website Or you could you could explore running a quadratic funding round or things like that Yeah, there are definitely ways to get involved that don't imply you have to get into programming or math side of things Because the goal of all of this is to touch so much more than just you know those areas and really neat thing That's emerged literally since the last dev con is some of these experiments that among other things just Need and want more people to to get involved and to participate in the networks that are being built So I guess to kind of wrap things up here We've talked a lot about a lot of stuff here today. We're talking about big stuff future stuff some deeply technical stuff But one of the things that I personally Love the most about aetherium is it is that aetherium has this quote unquote a soul And so I'd like to close with a bit more of a personal touch You know, we all started somewhere We were all noobs and frankly continue to be noobs to this very day any like just stories or even fun anecdotes from What's it when you first got interested in aetherium when you first got interested in zk or anything else and you guys could share Sure, so I first yeah, so in 2017 I think I deleted my Facebook and I deleted it because I was getting worried about like the kind of surveillance data and the ability not really surveillance day But the ability of like Facebook to manipulate me with like ads and showing me Happy memories and things like that. I'm like when I deleted my When I deleted my Facebook, I I didn't realize that I kind of realized at the time But afterwards I felt this loss like I mean I lost connection to like so many people I lost like a social network that I've been building for years and that was like if I still feel that loss today like I don't know Who I went to school with like how many kids they have and things like that and like I Didn't realize that it was connected at the time But soon afterwards I got really interested in aetherium and I tried to build like a t-shirt cooperative I wanted I wanted to build a way for people to To pull their money together so they could get a bulk discount on purchasing like cool and fun t-shirts That there would be like designers and then they would get like a bulk discount So I'm like I didn't realize at the time again, but like now when I look back I feel like when I lost Facebook I sort of lost this community and since then I've been sort of searching for one And that's what kind of brought me to aetherium Thank you for sharing that it I first heard the story very recently from you and I was like wow I didn't realize kind of how deep and it Explains a lot of why you've had all these really fascinating and wonderful experiments in the social media direction And it's also just a great reminder that again The goal at least my goal and our goal here is to utilize these technologies in a way where we can More precisely get what we want out of technology and social systems and things of that sort Yeah, I can give a story about how I first got involved in aetherium Albert was actually the one who brought me into the space back in like 2018 and I remember I spent like two months over the summer of 2018 just like trying to go through and just Understand like what aetherium was and I just remember having so much trouble So fresh and you know perhaps this is like this is either an indictment of the quality of educational resources at the time But I think it's more an indictment of myself And my and my ability to onboard so ever since then Education has been a really big focus for a lot of the communities. I would say in the Xerox park ecosystem And that's why you know, I mean even just last year how learn dot zero X park or got started was I was talking with Jeff Lau from ENS who had done one of our applied ZK learning groups and He had also expressed like, you know this similar sentiment about coming into ZK and the both of us were obviously really glad that we'd like pushed through that initial like, you know hump on the learning curve and You know in no small part due to the fact that people in this community are so welcoming and so willing to share a knowledge And that's you know, Jeff ended up playing a huge part in putting together a bunch of different educational resources So I would say that like, you know, if you're like coming up to a new topic Even if you're scared or intimidated Like I myself literally took like three months to just get a picture of what the theorem even was like eventually I was like, I can't understand any of these blog posts. Let me just go to the yellow paper and like try to read it like line by line And eventually we yet we actually did end up putting together a series of resources to summarize all of that stuff That made its way up to like ethereum org among other places So, you know, one don't be afraid but also to Right after you have learned a thing is also I think the best time to to give back and really Solidify those learnings by sharing them with other people well, and I guess I'll close this out with a Much smaller sort of a just a cute story when when I first started following ethereum I mainly followed it through reddit and I remember, you know seeing this user you slash vbooderin on reddit and It was really interesting. I was like, oh this this vbooderin fellow. He seems really smart, but also kind and wise and For I think like three or four months. I literally was just like a vbooderin is probably some like 60 year old like Soviet era programmer And I was genuinely shocked when I discovered How old or how young Vitalik was at the time? But yeah, it's just really funny and interesting to reflect back on and in some ways it ties into some of these other things which is Because in my case, I hadn't really bothered to go and learn more about the person underneath it But it was it's a neat little snapshot of like, hey, you have this sort of identifier and then they're just commenting They're sharing information. They're sharing their thoughts And I was like evaluating that and only that and drawing my own conclusions I think there are positive aspects of that that we can pull into some of these like social systems and other things That we're we're trying to build so On that note, just want to once again Thank you Vitalik, Barry, Gub Sheep and all of you for joining us here today Hope you learned something. Hope you enjoyed the conversation and hope you enjoy the rest of DEF CON