Episode Details

This week, Anna chats with Justin Thaler, Associate Professor at Georgetown. They cover Justin’s academic history and discuss what led him to working on interactive proofs and SNARKs. They also take a look at several other topics such as the Thaler Book Study Group, his earlier work Spartan, comparing the security of different rollups built with SNARKs and STARKs and more.

Here are some additional links for this episode:

• Justin Thaler Georgetown Profile
• Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Justin Thaler, 2022
• vSQL: Verifying Arbitrary SQL Queries over Dynamic Outsourced Databases Paper
• Hardware-friendliness of HyperPlonk by Ingonyama
• Proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheels
• A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography by Boneh and Shoup, 2023 - Page 617 for elliptic curves over finite fields
• Quarks: Quadruple-efficient transparent zkSNARKs by Setty and Lee
• Brakedown: Linear-time and post-quantum SNARKs for R1CS by Golovnev, Lee, Setty, Thaler and Wahby, 2021
• zkHack Website
• zkHack Discord
• Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Gentle Introduction to
• A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography By Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup
• Number theory explained from first principles
• The Animated Elliptic Curve
• BLS12-381 For The Rest Of Us

Apply for zkSummit9 here: zkSummit9 Ticket Application.

Check out ingonyama.com to learn more about Zero Knowledge Hardware acceleration.

Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.

Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo by visiting

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