Zero Knowledge

This week, Anna is joined by Soubhik Deb, Head of Research at EigenLabs, to explore Yukon, a platform for collaborative AI-powered research. Soubhik traces the project’s origins to ECDSA.fail, a competition launched in response to Google’s work on more resource-efficient quantum circuits for breaking secp256k1. They discuss how researchers and their AI agents build on one another’s submissions, turning traditional research into a multiplayer process that can iterate at machine speed.

The conversation then explores Yukon’s expansion into ZK proving, inference optimisation, coding theory and mathematics through challenges like SNARK.fast, better.codes, mlx.fast and lighter.fast. Soubhik explains the importance of well-defined problems and verifiers for AI-driven research, and shares Yukon’s vision for an “AI-native scientific institution” where humans and agents collaborate to accelerate discovery.



Related Links
Yukon.org
ECDSA.fail 
Flock Challenge
The Proximity Prize (better.codes)
Mlx.fast
Darkbloom
Lighter Prover Challenge
ECDSA.Fail: Open Autoresearch for Optimizing Elliptic-Curve Point Addition in Shor’s Algorithm
Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms
Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations 
ZK Podcast Episode: The Quantum Question Panel – Live from zkSummit14!
ZK Podcast Episode: Quantum Advances, Hybrid Signatures and SNARKs to the Rescue with Dan Boneh








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This week, Anna and Kobi are joined by Ron Rothblum, Professor of Computer Science at Technion and researcher at Succinct. They catch up on Ron’s move from theory into practice, including his work on the SP1 zkVM, Jagged Polynomial Commitments, and a recent Fiat-Shamir attack that exposed vulnerabilities in practical uses of GKR. Ron explains what the attack revealed about Fiat-Shamir’s security assumptions and why it prompted changes to deployed systems.



The conversation then explores Ron’s recent work on faster and more efficient proof systems, from Blaze, TensorSwitch, BOLT and Veil to Flock, a proof system for batch proving Boolean computations. They discuss how new approaches to polynomial commitments and error-correcting codes can improve prover performance, before turning to snark.fast and ZK-Golf, experiments using AI agents to optimise provers and circuits. Ron shares what these efforts reveal about AI-assisted research and engineering, and how pushing proving closer to the speed of ordinary computation could unlock entirely new applications for verifiable computation.



Related Links
Jagged Polynomial Commitments (or: How to Stack Multilinears)
The Random Oracle Methodology, Revisited
Blaze: Fast SNARKs from Interleaved RAA Codes 
TensorSwitch: Nearly Optimal Polynomial Commitments from Tensor Codes 
Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations 
VEIL: Lightweight Zero-Knowledge for Hash-Based Multilinear Proof Systems
Bolt: Faster SNARKs from Sketched Codes
zkGolf Website
Proving as Fast as Computing: Succinct Arguments with Constant Prover Overhead 
SNARK.fast Website
ZK Podcast Episode: Error Correcting Codes & Information Theory with Ron Rothblum
Fiat-Shamir via List-Recoverable Codes (or: Parallel Repetition of GMW is not Zero-Knowledge) 
Delegating Computation: Interactive Proofs for Muggles
How to Prove False Statements: Practical Attacks on Fiat-Shamir












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This week, Anna catches up with Richard Liang from Peer, formerly ZKP2P. They trace the project’s evolution over the past two years, from their initial ZKP2P product that used ZK email proofs to connect Venmo payments with on-chain USDC, to their use of ZK TLS, and most recently, their move to using TEEs (trusted execution environments) and the rebrand to Peer. Richard breaks down what motivated each shift and how the team has navigated the trade-offs around privacy, speed, and UX.

The conversation then explores Peer’s current approach to connecting traditional payment platforms and stablecoins, including why “ephemeral privacy” makes TEEs a compelling fit for their use case and what the move away from ZK has unlocked. Richard and Anna also reflect on the broader evolution of ZK from an experimental technology into infrastructure that increasingly underpins real world applications. Finally, they discuss Peer’s expansion into payments, its ambitions to support more currencies and fintech platforms around the world, and how AI is changing both the team’s development process and the possibilities for agentic payments.



Related Links
Peer X Profile 
Peer Pay X Profile
Peer Website
Announcement of ZKP2P becoming Peer
Peer Docs Repo
ZK Podcast: ZKP2P with Brian and Richard
ZK Hack Lisbon 2023
ZK Email
ZK Podcast: Is ZK dead? Or has it just begun? With the ZK Pod co-hosts








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This week, Anna and Guillermo are joined by Patrick O'Grady, founder of Commonware. They discuss his journey from Coinbase and Avalanche to building Commonware, a Rust library of composable primitives for blockchain development. They explore Commonware's "anti-framework" philosophy, why it gives developers control over every layer of the stack, and how its modular approach differs from traditional blockchain SDKs.



The conversation then turns to consensus research, examining how changing assumptions around Byzantine fault tolerance have unlocked faster consensus designs. Patrick explains the motivation behind Commonware's new protocols, Minimmit and Multimmit, discusses the influence of Simplex and Solana's Alpenglow, and shares how Commonware combines engineering, research, and cryptography to build the next generation of blockchain infrastructure.



Related Links
Commonware
Minimmit: Fast Finality with Even Faster Blocks
Commonware blog post announcing Minimmit
Simplex Consensus: A Simple and Fast Consensus Protocol 
Commonware docs - Simplex Consensus
Patrick O’Grady’s X Post on Multimmit (July 2026)
Multimmit: Extending Blocks for Faster Finality (draft)
Alpenglow GitHub Progress Updates
Golden: Lightweight Non-Interactive Distributed Key Generation








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In this episode, Anna and Kobi are joined by Alex Hoover, cryptographer and Assistant Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. They explore Private Information Retrieval (PIR)—a cryptographic primitive that lets users query public databases without revealing what they're looking for.



They trace PIR's evolution from its early theoretical foundations to modern, practical constructions, unpack key variants like batch and keyword PIR, and discuss emerging blockchain applications, from private state queries to Merkle proof generation. They also examine the latest research making PIR increasingly practical, and why it could become a core building block for privacy-preserving systems.



A quick note: Alex mentioned during the interview that preprocessing in SimplePIR is independent of the database. But it is in fact independent of the queried index, and does depend on the database. He asked us to highlight this correction



Related Links
One Server for the Price of Two: Simple and Fast Single-Server Private Information Retrieval
Don’t be Dense: Efficient Keyword PIR for Sparse Databases
The two papers that introduced client-side preprocessing:PPY18
CK20




Piano: Extremely Simple, Single-Server PIR with Sublinear Server Computation 

Simple and Practical Amortized Sublinear Private Information Retrieval using Dummy Subsets 

Plinko: Single-Server PIR with Efficient Updates via Invertible PRFs (builds on Piano and RMS) 

Doubly Efficient Private Information Retrieval and Fully Homomorphic RAM Computation from Ring LWE (LMW23) 

Lower Bounds for PIR with Preprocessing from Blackbox Cryptography









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Read transcript