Episode 328: ZK on Bitcoin with Alpen Labs

Zero Knowledge

Summary

In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Sims Gautam and Liam Eagen from Alpen Labs. They dive into the world of Bitcoin L2s and focus on how ZK can be used to incorporate strong connections between Bitcoin and new execution environments. The group then explores BitVM, covenants, the distinction between the Bridge Operators and sequencers in this model and how this differs from how these actors work in Eth L2s. They then dive into SNARKnado, including what is happening under the hood, the ways in which this system offers round-based fraud games mixed with ZK and which agent provides DA and more.

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Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• Bulletproofs++: Next Generation Confidential Transactions via Reciprocal Set Membership Arguments by Eagen, Kanjalkar, Ruffing, Nick
• Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More by Bünz, Bootle, Boneh, Andrew, Wuille, and Maxwell
• Zcash Website
• Protogalaxy: Efficient Protostar-style folding of multiple instances by Eagen and Gabizon
• cq: * Cached quotients for fast lookups by Eagen, Fiore and Gabizon
• Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin by Miers, Garman, Green and Rubin
• Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (extended version) by Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, Garman, Green, Miers, Tromer and Virza
• Monero Ring Signatures
  
• Blockstream Whitepapers
• Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity by Ben-Sasson, Bentov, Horesh and Riabzev
• Ordinal Theory by Casey Rodarmor
• BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin by Robin Linus
• BitVM 2
• BitVM Website
• Jeremy Rubin Blog on Lamport Signatures
• Introducting SNARKnado by Alpen Labs

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ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here.

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Episode Sponsors

Gevulot is the first decentralized proving layer. With Gevulot, users can generate and verify proofs using any proof system, for any use case.

Gevulot is offering priority access to ZK Podcast listeners, register on gevulot.com and write “Zk Podcast” in the note field of the registration form!

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

Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/.

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