ZK languages with Alex Ozdemir

In this week’s episode, Anna has a one-on-one chat with Alex Ozdemir, a PhD student at Stanford researching formal methods, cryptography and distributed systems. Alex’s work is closely tied to the world of generalized computations within zero knowledge systems. He is one of the main developers of CirC, an infrastructure framework for building zero knowledge languages. In their conversation, Alex and Anna take a bird’s eye view of the current landscape of zk languages and libraries. Alex explains the history and current state-of-the-art of circuit-building tools, touching on libraries like Libsnark, Bellman and more comprehensive tools like Arkworks; hardware description languages like Circom; and the more dev-friendly family of RAM-register languages like ZoKrates, Pequin, Cairo, Leo and many more. Here, the race is still on as a number of academic and business-oriented teams grapple with limitations to memory access & performance given by zero knowledge proving systems.The latest Gitcoin Grants CLR matching program is live! Gitcoin is the easiest and most effective way to support Zero Knowledge and help us produce great content every week.With CLR matching, each contributor counts. Even $1 goes a long way thanks to the quadratic funding concept. To top it all off, Gitcoin supports zero knowledge-native payment solutions like ZkSync!Click here to reach our Gitcoin page.Here are all the links for this episode:An intro dive into the world of zero knowledge languages and ZoKratesCircom and Hermez with Jordi Baylina, Zero Knowledge episode 145zk-SNARKs for Scale with Matter Labs, Zero Knowledge episode 72zkStudyClub about CirCzkStudyClub on Polynomial CommitmentsStarkWare’s Eli Ben-Sasson on STARKs and Cairo, Zero Knowledge episode 96Pratyush Mishra on all things Arkworks, Zero Knowledge episode 169Alex’s Stanford page and paper on CirC.Thanks to this week’s sponsor, Mina Protocol.Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain, creating a private gateway between the real world and crypto.The layer-one protocol replaces the traditional blockchain with a zero-knowledge proof, ensuring a super-light and constant sized chain that allows participants to quickly sync and verify the network.The entire chain is, and always will be, about 22kb — even as it scales. And SNARK-powered dApps, called Snapps, allow access to verified real world data from any website for on-chain use.The ecosystem is growing fast ahead of Mina's upcoming mainnet launch, with validators and community members in more than 120...