Exploring the Fractal transparent SNARK construction

This week, we explore the Fractal transparent SNARK construction with its authors https://twitter.com/valardragon (Dev Ojha) and https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/%7Espooner/ (Nick Spooner) - both students of https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/%7Ealexch/ (Alessandro Chiesa) at UC Berkeley. We explore how Fractal works, how it improves on some of the earlier work on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTRAg6Km1os (Sonic) and Marlin, how it borrows from but differentiates itself from STARKs, as well as what they discovered while working on this paper about recursive SNARKs and what makes that property possible. Here is some of the material we touch on: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1076.pdf (Fractal Paper) https://zeroknowledge/82 (Ariel Gabizon's episode) https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/96 (Eli Ben-sasson's episode) https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1047.pdf (Marlin Paper) https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/54 (Digging into recursive snarks) https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/113 (Latest recursive SNARKitecture with Izaak Meckler from O(1)Labs) Thank you to this week's sponsor https://trailofbits.com (Trail of Bits) Just recently, a critical vulnerability was found in the certificate validation functionality on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019 This bug allows attackers to break the validation of trust in a wide variety of contexts, such as HTTPS and code signing - Trail of Bits has developed a PoC exploit and put up a website https://whosecurve.com/ (Whose Curve is it Anyway) that let's users test whether or not they are vulnerable. To learn more about this vulnerability and the Trail of Bits exploit, please check out this recent blog post entitled: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/01/16/exploiting-the-windows-cryptoapi-vulnerability/ (Exploiting the Windows CryptoAPI Vulnerability). Also keep an eye on the ToB blog for security news and explanation pieces like this one. Thanks again Trail of Bits If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm (@zeroknowledgefm) Join us on https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA (Telegram) Support our https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast-2 (Gitcoin Grant) Support us on the https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge (ZKPatreon) Or directly here: ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ