The Road to STARKs and Miden with Bobbin Threadbare

This week, Anna chats with Bobbin Threadbare about his project Miden, a STARK-based roll-up which was recently purchased by Polygon. We recap the differences between STARKs and SNARKs and the increasingly blurred line between these two proving systems. We then map Bobbin’s journey to Miden VM (now Polygon Miden), how it originated from his earlier project Distaff VM and now incorporates the Winterfell prover from his days at Facebook. Here are some links for the episode:Episode 194: zkEVM with Jordi & David from HermezBlog Post: Polygon Announces Polygon MidenMiden repoIntroducing Distaff: a STARK-based VM written in RustDistaff VM repoAirScript - a low-level language for zk-STARKsAirScript: Arithmetization for zk-STARKs, with Bobbin Blog Post: Open sourcing Winterfell: A STARK prover and verifierWinterfell repo Vitalik’s write-up on STARKs, Part 1 of 3 Support ZK Podcast on Gitcoin - last couple days to get donations matched! https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast-2ZK Tech Matching Round with GitcoinIf you’re interested in supporting ZK-focused tech or tools, including learning material or documentation then check out this Gitcoin matching round running until December 16th. This ZK tech side round is funded by the ZK Validator and some great teams in the ZK ecosystem. Join the push towards more ZK! Today’s episode is sponsored by Aztec.Aztec aims to be the privacy layer for Ethereum. They believe that unlocking programmable privacy is the next frontier for blockchains. Aztec is the first zero knowledge rollup built from the ground up for anonymous payments and DeFi transactions.Try out Aztec to send funds...