Smart Contracts Powered by Zero Knowledge with Emre Tekisalp

Today’s guest on the Fortune Teller Podcast is Emre Tekisalp, CEO of O(1) Labs. O(1) Labs current projects are Mina, the world’s lightest blockchain, that is powered by participants, and snarky, an Ocaml front-end for writing R1CS Snarks. Snarky is modular over the backend SNARK library, and comes with backends from libsnark. Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain, at 22kb, letting users quickly and directly access the current state on their smartphone and other blockchains, powered by the users. Mina uses zero knowledge technology, to make for a secure and democratic future we all deserve. One can build on Mina with zkApps, smart contracts made possible by zero knowledge. The SDK is based on Typescript. Users today are compelled to provide their data to centralized entities in order to participate in the modern world. Even in the decentralized side of crypto, there are growing efforts to compel users to give up their data to be able to engage in the crypto space. Mina differs from these centralized crypto businesses with zkApps, smart contracts powered by zero knowledge, to help keep the users in control of their privacy by confirming and sharing proofs of their data, rather than the data itself. You provide proof of your data, as opposed to the data itself. This helps to reduce the chances for your personal information to be hacked or sold. This allows you to be the only owner of your data. With Mina’s light size and off-chain nature of zkapp smart contract computations, Mina’s proof system can be easy to use on other chains. Currently, a bridge is being established between Mina and Ethereum, with the progress that is made here to go towards building trustless bridges on other chains as well. This will help dapps on other chains to make use of the privacy-preserving data verification, as well as the prompt proofs of huge computations and covert login features of Mina’s zkApps. Mina’s zkApps can securely connect with any website and access verified actual data for use on-chain. This allows developers to leverage data on the internet and then bring it on-chain. All of this is done without ever risking the privacy of their users. Many blockchains have become so heavy, that intermediaries are needed to run nodes, which breaks from the primary decentralization promise of blockchain, thus leaving these networks to be more susceptible to a 51% attack. Since Mina’s 22kb blockchain is so light, this means that anyone has the opportunity to easily connect peer-to-peer and formalize transactions like a full node, guaranteeing powerful censorship-resistance and security for the blockchain. For more: https://www.o1labs.org/ https://minaprotocol.com/ -- The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/