Zero Knowledge25 Mar 2025

The Founding of Zero Knowledge Systems with Austin Hill

This week, we present the third installment in the Zero Knowledge Systems story. In this episode, Anna chats with Austin Hill, one of the original founders of Zero Knowledge Systems. They explore the company’s early days, Austin’s background in tech, and what this scene in Montreal was like in the late ’90s. The conversation covers fundraising during the dot-com boom, Zero Knowledge Systems’s ambitious vision for internet privacy, its flagship product Freedom, and how the company pivoted from a broad individual privacy mission to a more focused B2B approach. They cover Austin’s journey after ZKS—including how he discovered Bitcoin, co-founded Blockstream, and navigated the challenges of building a business around open-source infrastructure. He also discusses a new project he's involved in, which ventures into a completely different field—material nanotechnology. We encourage you to check out the first two episodes of the series here and here before diving into this one. Related links:

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Minimmit, Multimmit and the New Consensus Frontier with Patrick O'Grady

This week, Anna and Guillermo are joined by Patrick O'Grady, founder of Commonware. They discuss his journey from Coinbase and Avalanche to building Commonware, a Rust library of composable primitives...

5 Aug 1h 12min

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) with Alex Hoover

In this episode, Anna and Kobi are joined by Alex Hoover, cryptographer and Assistant Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. They explore Private Information Retrieval (PIR)—a cryptographic pri...

29 Jul 1h 4min

Alex Ozdemir on where Theorem Provers and ZK meet

This week, Anna and Nico are joined by Alex Ozdemir, Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, to explore the intersection of formal verification and zero knowledge. They begin by revisiting the evolution ...

15 Jul 1h 1min

Sergey Gorbunov on TEEs and the Arc Privacy Sector

This week, Anna speaks with Sergey Gorbunov, Engineer at Circle, about Arc, Circle’s new EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, and its approach to a TEE based on-chain privacy. They begin by revisiting S...

8 Jul 1h 7min

zkMesh+ Exclusive Clip – Benedikt Bünz on the threat of AI

Last week on the show, we interviewed Benedikt Bünz, Chief Scientist at Espresso Systems and Professor at NYU. The conversation ran long, so we're releasing some of the extra material as an exclusive ...

1 Jul 6min

Pushing the Limits of Proof Systems with Benedikt Bünz

In this episode, Anna and Kobi speak with Benedikt Bünz, Chief Scientist at Espresso Systems and Professor at NYU. They start with a quick update on Espresso's architecture, its role in delivering fas...

24 Jun 1h 8min

Announcement: zkMesh+ Exclusive Clip – Vericoding and SMT

No main episode this week, but we’ve got an exclusive bonus clip for our zkMesh+ subscribers! Continuing our conversation from last week, Wyatt Benno (ICME) describes the world of 'vericoding' - the n...

18 Jun 1min

Building ZK-Powered AI Guardrails with Wyatt Benno

In this episode, Anna and Nico chat with Wyatt Benno, technical founder of ICME Labs. They trace Wyatt’s start into ZK in the ZKHack Discord and Justin Thaler’s study group before diving into ICME’s e...

10 Jun 1h 7min