Proofs, Arguments, and ZKPs with Justin Thaler

This week, Anna chats with Justin Thaler, Associate Professor at Georgetown. They cover Justin’s academic history and discuss what led him to working on interactive proofs and SNARKs. They also take a look at several other topics such as the Thaler Book Study Group, his earlier work Spartan, comparing the security of different rollups built with SNARKs and STARKs and more.Here are some additional links for this episode:Justin Thaler Georgetown ProfileProofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Justin Thaler, 2022 vSQL: Verifying Arbitrary SQL Queries over Dynamic Outsourced Databases Paper Hardware-friendliness of HyperPlonk by Ingonyama Proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheelsA Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography by Boneh and Shoup, 2023 - Page 617 for elliptic curves over finite fields Quarks: Quadruple-efficient transparent zkSNARKs by Setty and Lee Brakedown: Linear-time and post-quantum SNARKs for R1CS by Golovnev, Lee, Setty, Thaler and Wahby, 2021 zkHack Website zkHack DiscordElliptic Curve Cryptography: A Gentle Introduction to A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography By Dan Boneh and Victor ShoupNumber theory explained from first principlesThe Animated Elliptic CurveBLS12-381 For The Rest Of UsApply for zkSummit9 here: zkSummit9 Ticket Application. Check out ingonyama.com to learn more about Zero Knowledge Hardware acceleration.Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo’s programming language called Leo by visiting