'Introduction & Evolution of ZK Ecosystem' - Anna Rose

and our first talk is going to be fermana who's going to give us an amazing introduction of this ecosystem so i'll let our co-host anna take it away thank you very much so i'll do a quick screen share here we go are you seeing my screen we are all set perfect can you hear me okay i'm guessing yes cool so hi i'm anna i want to quickly introduce myself i'm the host of a podcast called zero knowledge podcast i used to and we'll do again an in-person event i used to do this by biannually called the zk summit so since we can't meet in person yet i am very excited to participate in this event today because it's really it's like the best folks working on zero knowledge are here today with us so my goal with today's talk is um it's it's quite a short talk and i won't be introducing what zero knowledge proofs are because um elena who's going to be speaking next elena is going to be speaking next and will actually be giving a proper introduction to what zero knowledge proof is instead what i want to do with this is actually look at this evolution of zka use cases and what the g and kind of give a sense for what the gener general landscape looks like and maybe why scaling and zero knowledge is so important so zero knowledge and blockchains came together and i would say like the first big use case for them was privacy and the second big use case which we're going to be talking about today is scaling when you think about this sort of privacy context for zk and blockchains there's two main ideas that were first introduced and actually maybe one which is private transactions zcash really popularized this idea of private transactions using zero knowledge proofs to transfer funds from one account to another in a private setting another idea that was introduced soon after was this idea of private computation so actually being able to do computations sort of behind zero knowledge proof and that would allow kind of enable a lot of new and maybe more expanded use cases going forward now i'm going to give you a list of these are all kind of related still to privacy it's taking those first two ideas and pushing them even further there's like a number of new projects that are emerging all at different stages so uh kartik mentioned the zk games dark forest brian's gonna be speaking later about that um there's this idea of using zk for self-sovereign identity maybe with password management instead of having passwords live on a third party server there's something called selective disclosure where you're actually sharing one small amount of information maybe even for like auditing purposes or regulatory reasons without revealing anything else um there's something this is very new but there's something like private amms that are being proposed so this is the idea of incorporating privacy into d5 something that previously people thought would potentially break these models there's like some new ideas around that that are coming out soon there is private voting in the form of macy that's an ethereum based project and there's also a very new use case that i am very excited about which is this idea of private staking or private delegation uh henry de valence from a project called penumbra has just prepared kind of a first draft of what that looks like but yeah as i mentioned this all of these are very different levels you have sort of on the privacy thread you have theoretical research proof of concept implementation and adoption these are this is not perfect obviously these are kind of like moving around quite quickly but you can see like in terms of privacy there's a lot of use cases at different stages now when you talk about scaling it's a bit of a different picture i feel like with scaling what you see is more projects building and developing but maybe less use cases so far so here is a version of the l1 l2 l3 paradigm now i know that i know this from having many conversations this definite these definitions seem to ebb and flow like sometimes you'll say that an l2 solution as we're calling it like a zq rollup is actually an l 1.5 i don't know i'm gonna go with this okay i'm just gonna i'm gonna keep it for now but anyway l ones there's some l ones that are actually using zero knowledge proofs in their core to to scale so i think we're going to hear from filecoin later you're going to hear about like examples of how they're using it there's examples like mino where it's actually using recursive snarks all the way like that it's all built around zero knowledge proofs and now when we're going to be talking about l2s right here as mentioned one of the big differences between the privacy side and the scaling side is you just see this kind of explosions boom of new projects using zero knowledge proofs for this scaling activity oh yeah and so like i said there's not as many maybe but this the whole idea of like scaling comes from a need and the fact that we needed to use zero knowledge proofs for scaling meant that it actually pushed the entire field of zero knowledge forward in a way that like privacy alone didn't seem to it's it's kind of actually unfortunate it seems like privacy isn't nice to have always but in this case it was like a must-have and that's really what pushed it forward and so then my question to everyone is like what's next and i think at events like this this is where you figure out what is next what's next for privacy what's next for scaling and maybe what is that next stage of zero knowledge research and vision that pushes the space even further so if you're interested in getting involved i'll just share a little bit about like the ways that you can basically get involved in the community um if you join if you want to join us join our telegram group or youtube you can find us on twitter and all of those links should be there there's also a newsletter that i'm sending out monthly called zk mesh which is a rundown of all of the zero knowledge stuff so check that out also do you know stay tuned for the next zk sessions which is a monthly event i do and hopefully one day a proper in-person ck summit and you can find all of these links here i also just want to mention that i've been running these zk jobs fairs so if anyone's interested in finding a job look out for the next one on may 19th cool okay so i'm at the end of my presentation i think i might have two minutes i'm not sure go for it okay well i i don't have anything more actually i just don't know how to fill it this was no i think then we're back on schedule okay good we're good to go uh thank you so much for uh for setting the context um and uh i think uh this kind of sets us up for our next car