More than just a podcast…
Just over 3 years ago, myself and co-host Fredrik Harrysson launched the Zero Knowledge Podcast. We didn’t realise this at the time, but this little podcast project would bring us in contact with some of the top researchers and practitioners in the field of zero knowledge cryptography. It would also help us better understand and map all the innovation going on around blockchain, decentralised technology and this novel cryptography that is our namesake — all of which have the potential to change the world.
As you may have heard in this past week’s episode, Fredrik has shared that he will be leaving the Zero Knowledge Podcast as a regular co-host. It has been a real pleasure working with Fredrik and, I think it’s fair to say, we are both proud of the 3 years of content we created as a team. …
UPDATE FROM ZKValidator:
NEAR has just entered Phase 2 of its mainnet launch and we are happy to share that the ZKValidator is one of the first validators to be live securing the network. We have also joined as a member of the NEAR Validators Advisory Board!
This brings the number of networks we validate to four: we have been live on Cosmos for the last 11 months, on Kusama for 9 months and on Polkadot for just over 2 months.
You can find our NEAR validator as well as instructions for nominating the ZKValidator here.
The ZKValidator is unique in the validator space, in that it acts as a community-driven privacy & zero knowledge research advocacy group. Our goal is to focus on this singular topic across networks we work on. …
On Friday Aug 21st 2020, in the midst of an extreme Berlin heat wave, we convened the first meeting of the ZKValidator Polkadot Working Group. We had at the table a combination of implementers, researchers and community representatives from Parity Technologies and Web3 Foundation. Participants included:
- Fredrik Harrysson, CTO — Parity Technologies
- Robert Habermeier, Co-Founder — Polkadot
- Alistair Stewart, Researcher, Protocol design — Web3 Foundation
- Jeff Burdges, Researcher, Applied cryptography — Web3 Foundation
- Fabian Gompf, VP — Parity Technologies
- Raul Romanutti, Kusama Community — Parity Technologies
- Will Pankiewicz, Master of Validators — Parity Technologies
- Anna Rose — ZKValidator
- Will Harborne —…
Just this past week, the ZKValidator was voted onto the Kusama council! Thank you to those who voted for us. We look forward to being part of this decision making body.
As we have described in previous posts, the ZKValidator is a purpose driven, privacy-focused validator operating on Kusama. With our role on the Kusama council, we intend to vote in favour of initiatives and actions that will make the network more viable, with a special focus on evaluating proposals related to privacy and the use of zero knowledge proof systems. …
UPDATE FROM ZKValidator: This past month, we went online with our Polkadot validator nodes and are now part of the active set! This brings the number of networks we validate on to three: we have been live on Cosmos for the last 10 months and on Kusama for the last 5.
You can find the nodes as well as instructions for nominating the ZKValidator on Polkadot here: https://zkvalidator.com/polkadot
The ZKValidator is unique in the validator space, in that it acts as a community-driven Privacy & Zero Knowledge research advocacy group. …
Last week, on March 22 2019, we held our latest Zero Knowledge Summit in Berlin.
Like previous events, this edition was intimate, curated, and very Zero Knowledgey. Unlike previous summits, this edition was primarily focused on zero knowledge as a mechanism to enable blockchain scaling (instead of previous editions that were more focused on the privacy aspects of these systems).
Like previous events, this edition had an amazing group of speakers and workshop hosts. It also had our legendary Park Bench Panel which remains one of the coolest ways to better understand the pulse of a room, and sometimes that of the larger community. …
On Sept 5th, we held the Zero Knowledge Summit — a gathering of 150 researchers and devs working in the Zero Knowledge, blockchain and privacy spheres for a day of talks, chats, workshops and breakouts.
Almost all the talks were sourced directly from the community and the day was packed (here was the final program).
This text was produced by Zero Knowledge, a podcast hosted by Anna Rose and Fredrik Harryson, which explores the decentralised technology that will power the emerging Web3 and the community building it. The podcast is made for developers and technically-minded people looking to educate themselves on the inner workings of the space.
“Everybody in this space talks about how the Blockchain is “trustless” and “transparent”. It is (almost) certainly true at a programmatic level, software verifying data, but those two assumptions fall apart when you confront them with the actual end user experience.” …
This post was written by Anna Rose & Uli Siegmeier
“Building interfaces on moving images is easy,” said no one, ever. As we have learned in our respective companies, both dealing in video, building interactive interfaces on top of video or animation is a challenge. Add 360° degrees to the experience and you open up a whole new world of problems to solve and interface opportunities to explore.
Heading into SXSW last month, the question we had on our mind was: what will the future interfaces look like in VR, when the limitations of traditional screens are abolished? One panel that explored this was “Human-Centered Approach to VR Interfaces“, featuring independent VR artist Isaac Cohen, Timoni West Lead Designer at Unity labs, Ken Perlin of NYU, and moderated by Dustin Callif of Tool of North America. The combination of these perspectives — that of the artist, the designer and the researcher/futurist — definitely helped to better frame the conversation around designing in a 360° space. …
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