Zero-knowledge proof

Uh, but in the case of f-for example, Zcash, why would you not want your store of value or the thing where you're storing value to be private, right? Like what, what is-- Why would you not want that, right? And, and assuming you can get it in a technologically feasible way.

And obviously when ZK first sort of went to market, the tech was pretty-- Obviously it was-- I mean, Zcash was the first implementation of a SNARK in, in, in the planet on, on, uh, especially for money.

And so it took many years to actually get to a point where the latency's sort of bearable to, to be able to, um, use in a mobile setting, for example, right? Where your phone can actually do the ZK proof.

Um, and so all things equal, then why would you not-- Because privacy is just optionality.

It's choice, right? If I have a thought in my mind, it's private by default, but I can wish to publish it on the internet.

You don't have to go through some recovery process.

Um, so on top of scale and quantum-proofing, there's also gonna be a new shielded pool.

That new shielded pool is going to be, in simple terms, a simpler ZK circuit.

openglow is a brilliant name people get excited about that transaction v1 it's a bit techy it's a bit boring so people care less but at the same time every transaction on solana the maximum capacity is now three times larger has grown from 1232 bytes to 4096 bytes and that means that you can pack infinitely more instructions uh complexity and you know nuance into transactions so in the past we had simple send swap receive all that really basic stuff this is raising the ceiling on what can go into one transaction.

And, you know, the big brain developers are saying this is going to unlock a lot of doors for ZK proofing, confidential transfers, nested multisigs.

I think there's a lot more going on here now.

And if developers are excited, I'm excited because that means they can build more interesting applications.

We can get a lot more fascinating new use cases and Solana can continue to do things that no other chain can do.

What I think was most funny about this was that everyone's super excited about all this cool new ZK proofing stuff that we can do.

But the DJs ran straight out and they said, you know what we can do now is we can launch meme coins with audio attached to them.

So the first instance of this V1 thing being put into real practical use and doing something we haven't seen before is a guy just coding brah.

Welcome to Zero Knowledge.

I'm your host, Anna Rose.

In this podcast, we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web, as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online.

This week, Coby and I catch up with Ron Rothblum, professor at Technion and researcher at Succinct.

We last caught up with Ron on the show back in 2023.

And in this episode, we had a lot to cover with him.

We discussed the Fiat-Shamir attack he worked on, his polynomial commitment work with Blaze, TensorSwitch, and Bolt, as well as Vail, a native hash-based way to add zero knowledge back to Succinct proofs.

We covered his most recent work on Flock, including its role in the Ethereum Foundation's move away from Poseidon.

Auto chess on-chain.

ZK Auto Chess [1] tries to run an auto-battler style chess variant in the Auto Chess team fight tactics lineage fully on-chain, with piece placement sealed and committed via ZK proofs so no centralized server has to referee deployments, with the pieces themselves doubling as NFTs.

Zero King [2], built at an ETHGlobal hackathon, is a trustless chess app running on Mina Protocol's proving framework.

Every move is validated inside a zero-knowledge circuit, with the entire rule set, pawn movement, promotion, en passant, castling, expressed as provable constraints, so an invalid move can't be submitted even by a tampered client.

So, here is it.

We move completely three state from algebra, which is really useful in zero knowledge schemes, like I haven't included where you can use it.

So many zero knowledge schemes like SPARC, NEO, then super NEO and so on, they are all based on the sum check protocol.

So the sum check protocol is at the core of more than zero knowledge scheme.

And nobody wants to change it because it's extremely efficient.

It's logarithmic in number of steps and can be performed extremely quick.

No, tactics allows you to choose the best strategy.

Yes.

It becomes riskier when parsing it at scale becomes cheap.

Zcash and the zero-knowledge pitch Zcash uses zero-knowledge proofs, specifically a construction that lets a network confirm a transaction is valid without revealing the sender, receiver, or amount.

Shielded Zcash transactions hide those details while still preventing double spends, which is the property Pandal highlights as relevant to an AI-heavy environment.

The same cryptographic primitive, the zero-knowledge proof, now shows up well beyond privacy coins.

Ethereum scaling rollups use zero-knowledge proofs to compress transactions.

Identity projects use them to prove attributes without disclosing underlying documents.

Pandals Point folds Zcash into that broader story.

It's mind-blowing.

It's interesting your views on ZK and zero-knowledge proofs.

And do you believe that ZK, the whole concept of zero-knowledge proof is going to succeed? Do you think it has a use case or just a conceptually – For what you mentioned already, that the data is already out, its shelf life is limited.

So, Henry, you are part of an investment company, right? You have a fund?