Anna Rose (00:00:05):
Welcome to zero knowledge. I'm your host, Anna Rose. In this podcast, we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web, as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online.

Anna Rose (00:00:27):
This week, I dive into the topic of funding in the ZK space. I chat with a number of different groups who are funding zero knowledge technology in different ways. I kick off with a conversation with my colleagues, Susannah, from the zero knowledge validator and Gubsheep from 0xparc. All about the Gitcoin side round that we are leading focused on ZK tech. Then I chat with Arjun from Polygon, all about their massive commitment to put 1 billion into ZK, through investments, acquisitions, and grants. Following this, I catch up with Alex Pruden from Aleo to talk about zprize, an industrywide effort to accelerate zero knowledge technology. And lastly, I chat with Alistair from the Web3 Foundation about a newly announced ZK component of the Polkadot pioneers prize. Now there have been so many new zero knowledge funding mechanisms, funds, DAOs initiatives. I could not capture them all in this particular episode still. I hope you enjoyed this look into ZK funding. I do wanna highlight the first portion of this episode focused on Gitcoin. And I wanna just let you know that if you're looking to get funding for your project, be sure to actually add your grant to this round. I believe it starts today as this episode lands. So if you haven't yet submitted your grant, do it as soon as you can, to be included in this round of CLR matching. We've added the link in the show notes. If you wanna submit your grant, just remember to use the tag ZK tech to be eligible for the $275,000 in matching funds that we've put together for this one. Also, if you're looking to fund this kind of tech yourself, be sure to check out the grants that are available and donate today. One more thing I wanna highlight is that this coming week we're gonna be hosting a ZK jobs fair. If you're looking for a new opportunity, you wanna jump into the space, be sure to sign up. We're gonna add the link in the show notes. This is part of the ZK Hack event, which is ongoing right now. It's sort of our wrap up party for the ZK hack as well as a ZK jobs fair. So do check it out. I wanna pass the mic to Tanya. Who's gonna tell us a little bit more about this week's sponsor.

Tanya (00:02:28):
Today's episode is sponsored by Penumbra. Every market is also a market of information. That's why Penumbra believes privacy is the next frontier of DeFi. Penumbra is a cross chain shielded pool and decentralized exchange, allowing users to shield assets from any Cosmos most chain and privately transact, stake, swap and market make without revealing your personal information or trading strategies to the world. Penumbra Labs is also building in public. So visit penumbra.zone to learn more user Testnet and join their discord. Check it out. That's penumbra.zone. So thanks again, Penumbra. Now here's Anna's interviews on ZK funding.

Anna Rose (00:03:07):
So in this episode, I'll be talking to a number of different groups who are working to fund zero knowledge tech, and I wanted to start this show off with two specific projects: that's Gitcoin side rounds and 0xparc. I'm here with Gubsheep from zero X park. Hi,

Gubsheep (00:03:27):
Hey Anna. Thanks for having me.

Anna Rose (00:03:28):
As well as Susannah who I work with at the zero knowledge validator. Hey Susannah.

Susannah (00:03:32):
Hey Anna.

Anna Rose (00:03:33):
So I wanna quickly introduce you both to our audience actually Gubsheep you've already been on the show talking about Dark Forest, but do you wanna tell us a little bit about what you're working on, what you're doing?

Gubsheep (00:03:46):
Sure. so these days I'm thinking a lot about a combination of things, mostly in the applied zero knowledge space. So I'm still tangentially involved with some of 0xparc's, crypto native gaming efforts, including Dark Forest. But apart from that, we are basically working on trying to understand what it's really going to take to productionize the next generation of zero knowledge applications on blockchain or otherwise. And apart from that, we do a lot of grant giving, educational work, community development sort of work. So all of these kinds of nuts and bolts that are involved than putting together what we're seeing as, as hopefully a nascent ecosystem of applied ZK projects.

Anna Rose (00:04:26):
Very cool. And Susannah, why don't you tell the audience a little bit more about what you do?

Susannah (00:04:31):
Yeah. So I've been at zero knowledge validator since may last year.

Anna Rose (00:04:36):
Which by the way is almost a year.

Susannah (00:04:38):
Yeah, it is almost yeah. Now,

Susannah (00:04:41):
But yeah. So at zero knowledge validator, we validate on eight different networks, but the whole purpose behind the validator is to kind of further zero knowledge and privacy in the blockchain space. So through validating, we then want to support all of the networks that we're active on. And we do this through a number of things, such as events, kind of funding like this. So direct investments and also grants. And then we have like a number of other little kind of initiatives that are ongoing as well. And what I do there is I guess I do a lot of kind of operational tasks. It's been a of different roles, I guess. Cuz we, we are quite a small organization we're now growing. We've brought some more people on, which helps a lot.

Anna Rose (00:05:30):
Totally. Susannah, I wanna start us off actually talking a little bit about the Gitcoin side round that we were doing and this, I would say like it falls well within the purview of zero old validator, which is to like support and grow zero knowledge tech across the networks that we validate on. But also generally, and one of the things we'd wanted to do for a long while was find a way to like give out grants, but grant giving's like a lot harder than it seems sometimes like you actually, you have to like get applications and decide which what your criteria is and go through that process. And since we're such a small team, we were like sort of struggling to think of how to do that. But then I had a conversation with Scott from Gitcoin in New York during that mainnet week. And we had this conversation about potentially launching the ZK side round as part of the Gitcoin CLR matching round. And any longstanding listener to the show has heard about this because the podcast has a grant and like ZK hack has a grant. So I've been doing this as a grantee for a long time, but yeah, with Scott, we started talking about it as being a grant giver and Susannah as like, I feel like you are also often in charge of all the special projects I brought you in on this one and yeah, we sort of started to put together the Gitcoin ZK side round one. And that was last time that was running, I think what was it like December 1st through 16th or something 2021?

Susannah (00:06:58):
Yeah, it was the first two weeks of December. And I mean, I think Gitcoin really aligned with the aims of ZK Validator because as I previously mentioned, like we are such a small team, that resource constraint is just such a big thing. And I think, I mean, that's pretty much universal across a lot of businesses, but you know, when you have an idea to do something, then obviously you have to actually execute and given that kind of the whole process of managing grants end to end. I think the collaboration with Gitcoin helps take away some of that pressure on the small team that we are having to do everything ourselves. So that partnership kind of perfectly aligned. Like we wanted to be able to give back to zero knowledge projects, but we couldn't necessarily manage the whole thing end to end on our own. So it just worked perfectly

Anna Rose (00:07:51):
Also. I mean, one of the cool things about Gitcoin is that it's voting by the crowd. Like what we provided with the ZK side round was very much a matching pool, but like the actual votes like voting on who gets what amount of funding is done through and actually Susannah, I think you have the numbers here, but it's like, it's thousands of people making small donations to thousands of projects that then results in like kind of a crowdsourced, what would we call it like distribution? Like you then know what is a very popular project, you know, if they got a lot of small donations from a lot of different people, clearly there's like some ground swell, some sort of public interest that has really like led to that project being successful. And even if the, the final number isn't that high because of quadratic voting they're matching rewards could be very high. But yeah. Susannah, do you wanna share maybe a little bit about the last round and like what the numbers looked like?

Susannah (00:08:45):
Yeah. So for our round it was relatively really popular as well. It got the most contributions out of all the side rounds. So we had 53,000 total contributions and that added up to over $300,000 and our matching pool was a $100.000 Dollars. So like the donations from the general public actually amounted to way more than our matching pool, which is really encouraging. It just shows that the round was really popular and as like a lot of appetite to actually be funding zero knowledge projects. Yeah. I think the whole quadratic funding mechanism really kind of emphasizes what people are interested in outside of just our specific interests. And I mean, with a traditional kind of grant giving setup, at least like from an academic perspective, it's like you have some kind of governing body which would make decisions on what's gonna be given funding or not. And this just completely distributes that to the people who are actually kind of interested in zero knowledge generally, and they don't have to be like an expert to take an interest. And then that also encourages just some element of the grants, the, the project setting up their grants so that they are trying to attract people to donate and to demonstrate why their project is actually useful. Not just to like an expert audience, but to also make it more general. I think.

Anna Rose (00:10:12):
Totally. I wanna bring Gubsheep a little bit into this conversation because as we started this round and 0cParc was one of the matching partners, but as we started it, we realized that Bitcoin grantees there just weren't that many zero knowledge projects. So all of a sudden we had like amassed a great matching pool, but we're kind of like, oh no, who are we funding? And that's where we, you know, Gubsheep, I was send sending you like texts being like, oh man, you work in application, can you help us out? So this was where I feel like sort of a collaboration between the two groups sort of started. Do you wanna just share with us a little bit about how it was on the receiving end of that,

Gubsheep (00:10:53):
For sure. Yeah. I think maybe one of the challenges and I can't speak to other Gitcoin side rounds, but it would make sense to me if this was the case, one of the challenges, whenever you're opening up any new grants program being on Gitcoin or anywhere else is that there's two sides to this interaction. There's you know, the funds themselves, but then there's also the grantees. And I think that a lot of teams in the blockchain space are actually struggling with a similar problem where you end up with these, you know, you raise these like very large sums of money, oftentimes like much larger than what we're seeing on Gitcoin or platforms that are built for general purpose public goods funding. But then you have to go out and figure out like, well, where are we actually gonna put these funds? How do we, how do we put them to good use? So on our end, based on our work with dark forest and a couple of other applied ZK communities and ecosystems we were able to jump in and find a handful of teams and projects to put on the receiving end of these funds. You know, and I, I think like the, the goal here with doing that is to encourage potential grantees as well in the zero knowledge space that this is something that is a legitimate way to receive funds. It's a way to you know, make your project more visible to the community as well. So hopefully these efforts only continue to snowball at we kick off another ZK round and hopefully future ZK rounds as well.

Anna Rose (00:12:16):
Totally. And this was kind of cool as, as the Gitcoin ZK side round had started, we were actually able to bring in a number of grantees. So new grants were created during that period. And by the end, I think we had 19. So we started with just a handful, but by the end we had kind of like onboarded new grantees into the Gitcoin space. And that meant like, just getting them thinking about how to propose a grant, what kind of projects they're building, how to express that to a crowd. And so I felt like, I mean, at the end of this first round, despite it being our first and you know, us learning a lot as we went, it turned out quite nicely. As you just said, Susannah, like it got a lot of the, for, for a side round. It did very well.

Susannah (00:12:59):
Yeah. It, I mean, compared to the other side rounds, we had the highest number of contributions. So that's not like individual donations, but the single contributions given to each project. So it basically means that the projects within the round were really popular. And then some of the projects were so popular that they maxed out the caps on the main round and also were in like the global top 10 of all the projects. I think there were two projects featured in our side round, which received the largest donations in, in terms of amount that the projects received, which is really encouraging that these projects are so popular and using zero knowledge technology.

Anna Rose (00:13:44):
So it's really cool to be doing this interview right now because actually the Gitcoin grant round 13 is starting, I think like any, it could be the day that this is released or just around that time. And this time around, we are once again doing a ZK tech side round, but this time it's actually a full collaboration between the zero knowledge validator and zero X park. And so I thought maybe we could take a moment to share with people what we have planned for this one kind of how well it's doing so far. And, and also, yeah, maybe we can even like help people who have projects better understand how they could potentially get involved. So yeah, I don't know Gubsheep if you wanna share a little bit on that front,

Gubsheep (00:14:28):
For sure. So this upcoming grants round we've put together a matching pool that's, you know, about two or three X, the size of the previous one on we're seeing partners like Ethereum foundation, Scroll Tech, Polygon, a number of rollup teams, a number of ZK companies. I don't have them all off the top of my head here, unfortunately. But you can check them out in some of the blog posts that ZK Validator and 0xparc will be releasing on the round. So it's a really exciting crew of matching partners that are helping to bring together more attention for this kind of funding. And you know, one thing that I really think about with this round is excited to try to use it as again, a springboard to legitimize the idea of public goods funding for teams working on zero knowledge technology.

Gubsheep (00:15:19):
Some of these teams, for example, I think come from perhaps more traditional backgrounds than a lot of crypto donative projects might. So for example, you know, teams of searchers from the academic world who might be a little bit further removed from crypto referring to cryptocurrency, but who are working on crypto as in cryptography. So being able to direct more funding to, to groups like these, I think would be really fantastic and could open up in the longer term more support from the crypto community of this kind of basic research. Another area of focus that I'm really excited about is I think that a lot of the attention and a lot of the funding in the space is going towards companies working on ZK rollups, which, you know, all of us here on the podcast today are super excited about as a scaling solution for blockchains, but there's this whole other area that I think is currently underappreciated, which is the area of ZK applications. So this means things like Tornado Cash or like Dark Forest decentralized applications, which are enabled by zero knowledge technology that would not be possible otherwise. And focusing in on these sorts of use cases, I hope can shift more attention into the space of ZK applications that are not necessarily rollups because I, I think we're gonna be seeing a lot of activity in, in that domain over the next couple of years.

Anna Rose (00:16:48):
I also think, I mean on that front, I think there's also like some fundamental tooling. That it sort of gets it, it might be funded through the sort of focus on some of the rollup tech, but those types of tools that are more privacy focused, for example, or more focused on like games, those kinds of like tools, structures, frameworks, things that won't necessarily be used by the, by the rollup companies and projects. Yeah. I think this is a great way for us to start bootstrapping those and they may become equally profitable down the line. It's just that, like right now, the focus has been very much on scaling. I just wanna sort of pass this to Susannah, cause I know you actually have the numbers and data of this round. We should probably mention the matching partners. Do you wanna just share with us a little bit more about that?

Susannah (00:17:36):
Yeah. So right now our matching pool is $265,000. This could go up, but this is the minimum amount that we are gonna have to distribute so far. And this is coming from 11 matching partners. So 0xparc, zero knowledge validator, Anoma, Polygon, Aztec, Aleo, Penumbra, Scroll, Gnosis, Ethereum foundation, and Geometry.

Anna Rose (00:18:02):
And this is such a good group. This is like such a great group of ZK teams. A okay. I, I think we've shared a lot on the ZK side round. I mean, if anyone wants to find it, they have to head over to the Gitcoin grants page. There should be a big banner of some sort that says ZK tech side round. If anyone wants to donate and wants to sort of see this thing in action, it should be live now while this is airing. So yeah, I definitely wanna encourage people to check it out. And I do wanna use a little bit of time now to talk a little bit more about 0xparc's funding activity, because I know that actually goes past what just Gitcoin and since I have you on Gubsheep, I wanted to yeah. I wanted to hear a little bit more about that. PS like I will be inviting you back for a full episode to talk about like all of the application ideas, but yeah, if you could share a little bit more about the kind of activity you're doing also since this is the ZK funding episode, like maybe there's people out there who are looking for yeah. New ways to get funding for their project.

Gubsheep (00:19:03):
For sure. So maybe first, a little bit on 0xparc itself. We are a new organization that has spun up with in the last six months with the mandate to support application level R & D on Ethereum and other decentralized platforms. So we're fully funded by donations and grants, and we work on a number of different areas, including crypto donated gaming with projects like Dark Forest, other projects that are soon to be announced that you should keep an eye out for as well as a lot of focus on applied ZK tech as well. So a lot of our work is done through grant giving and we think about grant giving as particularly important in the crypto space because we're seeing simultaneously a lot of work on both new technologies, but also new organizational models. So new models for funding projects, new models for building and new models for coordinating different teams. It's not always the case that the right vehicle for something to be built in the crypto space is something that looks like a traditional company or business, or for example, if you live in the US and you're in the startup, seeing the, you know, equity funded VC backed Delaware C Corp, instead, what we're seeing is that a lot of this work is being done open source, which raises questions about how do you ensure that this kind of work, which is very valuable is properly able to be self-sustaining. But another feature that we see of the space is that projects are so much more interdependent, I think, than you'll see in a lot of software. So for example, you'll have people across all different levels of the stack, closely collaborating as standards evolve as tooling evolves, as we learn more about the best application design patterns. And because of that, a lot of teams don't necessarily want to make a commitment to, for example starting a startup or a particular type of org right off the bat. I think that this is also a feature of being in software R&D. Not every experiment is necessarily going to pan out into something that looks like a commercializable product, and you want to make space for projects that aren't necessarily going to look like that as well. So the idea here is that grant giving is something that allows teams to keep options open and be free from maybe a lot of the more typical constraints around, you know, what kinds of software projects might be traditionally considered viable. And instead to be able to work on things like open source software, that doesn't necessarily have a viable business model off the bat, that's immediately apparent. And I think that creating this space might also will allow us to see, you know, innovation on the organizational side, how are teams eventually going to decide to package these projects or coordinate amongst themselves? That is the sort of experimentation that we want to be encouraging as well.

Anna Rose (00:22:00):
Very cool. How can people find out more, like, are you doing sort of application based grant giving or are you like, how do people interact with what you have set up?

Gubsheep (00:22:09):
Right. So a lot of our more public facing activities, you can find on the zero X park blog. So if you just go to 0x parc.org/blog, that's where we're posting about things like we run educational programs. And I think in the next couple of weeks, actually, we're gonna announce our applied ZK learning group number two, and you can take a look, there'll be an interest form, which you can fill out. If you're interested in joining the group. A lot of our outputs, we also post publicly on Twitter and on our blog. So folks can take a look. We've had folks, for example, like one, one of our recent releases you know, it was a community project that was building off of our Circom ECDSA implementation. We posted a Twitter thread about and shared a technical explainer on. And someone actually came back to us with both, you know, a handful of like improvements as well as a disclosure of a vulnerability in the existing prototype. So that was really fun. Being able to just publicly engage with folks by building out in the open, I think is, is really, really valuable. So, you know, check us out on Twitter, check out our blog. That's usually how we keep the community updated on what our projects are up to and you can always reach out as well over email hello [at] 0xparc.org.

Anna Rose (00:23:24):
Cool. All right. Thank you so much, Gubsheep for sharing with us a little bit more about 0xparc. Thank you Susannah for coming on the show and thank you to both of you for, you know, exploring this Gitcoin and funding generally.

Gubsheep (00:23:37):
Awesome. Thanks so much, Anna.

Susannah (00:23:39):
Thanks Anna.

Anna Rose (00:23:45):
So next up, I'm here with Arjun Kalsy. Who's the head of growth and business development at Polygon. Welcome Arjun.

Arjun Kalsy (00:23:51):
Hey, Hey Anna. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Anna Rose (00:23:54):
Arjun, we've spoken with a bunch of Polygon people recently, there was an episode with Mihailo where we talked about sort of the push that Polygon is taking into ZK tech, but I felt like it was important to include you on this episode, since you have put up quite a bit of funding for zero knowledge technologies, and that's what we're gonna talk about here. So maybe you can share with us, like as far as I know, I mean, at least to the public, the first time we heard about this was a blog post last summer, where there was this commitment made to fund ZK tech. Tell us a little bit about like, what was the thinking of around it?

Arjun Kalsy (00:24:25):
Sure, sure. Definitely. So actually, it's, it's interesting now that I talk about it, that, that the Genesis of this idea actually started. I remember way back in October or November of 2020. Oh, that's when we first started discussing this. So I remember I was talking to Sandeep and he was thinking about this, right. So at the time to take a step back, right. When Polygon was first founded when it was called Matic Network, this was in 2017, right? So the prevailing sort of, you could say thinking around Ethereum scalability was around using plasma technology, right. And in 2017 Vitalik had written a paper on plasma and you know, how you could potentially use like another chain and offset, right. You know, some of these and, and then sort of use like this checkpointing mechanism to solve for security. And so, so that is kind of what had prompted us to create our architecture, which was like a hybrid proof of stake / plasma approach, where, you know, you not only have security on, on the chain, on the proof of stake chain, but then you also, like you could say inherit some security from Ethereum. Right. But, but again, it's important to understand that this is the prevailing thinking then, right. So you fast forward to 2020 and the discussion ones all around rollups. Yeah. Right. And, and Vitalik and I talked again a lot about rollups and, and, and of course, you know, the March of technology is constant. Right. So we knew that there would be something new on the horizon. So we were like, okay, rollups. So, you know, this, this prompted us to now think about like a couple of things, right? So number one, that, what does scalability look like in the future? And how should we go about solving it, like, where should we put our investment or rather in which basket should we put our eggs, et cetera. So a couple of like interesting, you know, viewpoints came out of these discussions, right? So number one, we realized that the future of Ethereum scaling is also multichain, right? So this was like the most important thing, which prompted us to go from Matic network to Polygon. When we realized that the approach we need to take towards Ethereum scaling has to be multichain, the other most important discussion was that, where should we hedge our bets? Should we do optimistic rollups or should we do ZK rollups?

Anna Rose (00:26:14):
Right. I was about to say, right then that was the conversation. The, the feeling was optimistic rollup was gonna come out sooner. Yes. And be potentially like EVM compatible faster. Yes. Whereas the ZK rollup was still a little bit of an unknown.

Arjun Kalsy (00:26:28):
No, definitely, definitely. So there were very few teams working on it. There was very little information about sort of out there about, you know what are the different ways you could solve it? There was hardly any, like, even today, you know, how you could literally, maybe the total number of researchers in the world who really are working on sort of the core ZK tech is possibly less than 15, in my opinion,

Anna Rose (00:26:47):
15. Oh, I think it's .

Arjun Kalsy (00:26:49):
I think it's 5-0, fifty.

Anna Rose (00:26:51):
Yeah. I would put it closer to like 300 personally. Yeah. Given the community. But anyway,

Arjun Kalsy (00:26:58):
Maybe I need to do more research. I, you are like more up to date on this than I am. So when I was like looking at all of this, I kind of realized that man there is like not, not much out there. And and then again, you know, optimism you know, sort of started talking about how they were gonna solve it, Arbitrium at was talking about how they were gonna solve it. We had decided to be multichain. So we said, okay, you know, at some level we'll have to look at both the solutions, but we will also need to pick like a clear winner where this is what we feel is going to be the future. And essentially this is kind of where, you know, we started to make this decision when we really started thinking about what would be the future of scalability. Right. And when you have to make these kind of decisions, you need to work backwards rather than trying to project. Right. So what does working backwards mean? So we went back to, why did we create Polygon or like Matic Network? Like, why did we, why are we doing all of this? Like the only reason why we are doing all of this is to solve for mass adoption of blockchain technology. Like that is a problem statement we're trying to solve. So now the next question is what does mass adoption mean? Right. So mass adoption can be defined in, in many ways, but the, like the closest analogy can take that or is that, or like, let's say, you know, mobile phones, so smart phones, right. Which is so adopted in the world. Right. So if you look at Android, if you look at iOS like over a billion people, you know, in, in the world use, use Android, right. This is not counting all the other, like, you know, let's say let's dumb devices, like all of your connected TVs and fridges and all of that, right. A billion people use this. So how do you solve for scalability for a billion users right now you start working back from that, right. From that problem statement. And when you start working backwards from there, you kind of realize that optimistic rollups to an extent are not going to cut it unless, you know, optimistic rollups by itself, you know, again, morphs into something else, et cetera. But, but in its, in the form in which even it is where it is today and possibly even in the next, maybe couple of years, like we, I, I don't see how it could scale to billion users, but ZK rollups could. The problem is there were a lot of things which had to be solved along the way. Yeah. Right. So, so it is like, you have to go from horse car to race car, but you need to solve like internal combustion engine and et cetera. Like you need to solve like a bunch of things. And you're like, man, like I, and, and of course we have to ask ourselves, can this be solved?

Anna Rose (00:29:03):
So this was in 2020 when you were kind, maybe starting to think about it, but at some point 2021, I guess you made the bet. So what changed at that moment? Like, why did you think now let's start funding ZK.

Arjun Kalsy (00:29:15):
I, I think a couple of interesting things were there, right? So there was some optimistic rollup solutions already, which are going live, right. Like Arbitrium is going live, Optimism. You could see. And, and we looked at all of the board to what the community's working at and, you know, working on et cetera. And we kind of started to like really try to see what the actual implementation might look like, what, how scalable it might be. And, and on, based on our research, we realized that this is like, definitely more scalable than Ethereum, and it's not, not altogether bad, but this is not mass scalability. Right. And if you want to solve mass scalability, then this is the way forward. Okay. And the question is that, are we going to do something? Which is, are we going to stick to something which is, you know, safe and which works, et cetera, or are we going to go out there and take a shot in the dark?

Arjun Kalsy (00:29:56):
Cool. Right. This is, this is basically what the decision ultimately is. You can argue for hours of hours about your, what is better, what is not. And, you know, all like all the things, but ultimately this was basically the decision. Are we going to go with something which, you know, you know, kind of works and which you can work on, or are you willing to take that big bet, that big gamble, which could solve scalability for a billion users? And we chose option two. We said, you know what? We are not those kind of guys. We will take the gamble and we will do what it takes and whatever money is required. So be it.

Anna Rose (00:30:26):
Let's talk about that money. Let's talk about the funding. What is sort of the offer and where does it come from? Exactly. Is it from the Polygon network, a foundation? Like tell us it's from...

Arjun Kalsy (00:30:34):
Its from the foundation.

Arjun Kalsy (00:30:35):
It's from, it's from the foundation. So essentially, so, so this is also interesting, right? So if you start to like deconstruct what, what I happened, that the word acquisition actually makes no sense in, in the web3 world, right? Because you can't really acquire anything like you can't really acquire Polygon because the code is free. I mean, you can create your own Polygon tomorrow, if you, if you so like, you know, it's, it's open source. So what does acquisition mean? So what we kind of realize that ultimately in this space, what we really need to do is we need to convince teams to work with us, right? We need to convince teams that, listen, you're working on like, you know, top tier ZK technology. But if you work with us, right, and we are part of, let's say the Polygon multichain ecosystem, then we can bring, you know, our resources to bed and then combine, we can, you know, sort of solve this problem.

Arjun Kalsy (00:31:17):
Like this is essentially, it it's a conversation. It's not really some business deal, which is in some boardroom, you know, and people, this is really not how it happened this honestly, a conversation where we try where we first made a list of all the top tier ZK teams in the world. Then we started talking to them one by one. And, and here again, you know, Sandeep who had written basically the first white paper of, of Polygon and Mihailo who now come on board, et cetera, word that, you know, talk to people who are looking at like this along with, you know, JD Kani and Ravi, et cetera, who also are, you know, super technical guys and understand this really well. So we evaluated each and every team. And this was the conversation that guys like, you are doing this right. And once you do this, you have to build a chain. Then you have to build the ecosystem, et cetera. We are already great ecosystem builders, right? And we already have a really large, fast growing ecosystem. And if you work with us, then you can focus on solving like this unsolved problem while we can focus on all, everything else. So combined our power, or rather combined, we sort of mutual are complimenting each other's strengths. You as a research team, us as like, you know, somebody who's great at execution, this was the conversation. And all of the funding, cetera was really just, you could say incentives or rather acquisition of the team itself. These were really acqi hires as one might say. Versus really trying to do an acquisition. Because like I said in web3 you can't do that. You can just, you know, at best make your case and try to, you know, convince people that together, working along with us, like we would achieve the mutual objective.

Arjun Kalsy (00:32:35):
And the advantage was that because we are also substantially grown, we had like a treasury, et cetera. And we realized that, you know, these problems are already getting solved, but if we could throw more resources at them, then they would get solved faster. Right. So anything which might be like a 20, 25 solution, we could do it in 23. And, and that was really the other aspect where, you know, having access to like resources, which we had at Polygon, we could really make this a new reality. And of course there some other factors, which are also extremely important, which is the fact that we are very Ethereum aligned, you know, to the philosophy of Ethereum and rather to Ethereum's philosophy of subtraction, which is that the true way to scale is not by controlling systems, which by really decentralizing them. And we have a very clear path on decentralization. So I think when the other teams saw are like, you know what we've achieved and what are, is at core, they were like, okay, let's work with them because they're not the kind to boss around people. We'll still have a freedom. Right. They, we will do whatever we want and we'll have access to resources now. And we can go about solving that problem, which we already want to solve. So yeah.

Anna Rose (00:33:31):
Tell me a little bit about the pool of funding though. Like how much did you dedicate? What, what is, and, and maybe tell us like how, how much is left and what's that for? So yeah. Give us a bit of a sense for this funding that you set, set forth for ZK.

Arjun Kalsy (00:33:45):
Got it, got it. So, number one, we didn't go with this approach that we will spend this much on acquiring the teams. Like we spoke to the teams first and we kind of got an idea that this is what it would take. So it was like, again, working backwards versus saying that this is our budget. Let's see what we can get. We try and optimize our budget. No, like that's not how you solve unsolved problems. Right. So we went to talk to the teams, we tried to see what is the best we could offer that, you know, what would be the best offer. And from that perspective, and also like, you know, did other calculations on, you know, what kind of teams would've to be built, what would be the projected burn rate, et cetera, all of that. And we kind of decided on a number, and this was that number now in terms of the funding left,

Anna Rose (00:34:19):
What was the number though?

Arjun Kalsy (00:34:20):
No, this was the number, right. We decided you would need at least a billion dollars,

Anna Rose (00:34:23):
A billion dollars. Exactly. And that's

Arjun Kalsy (00:34:25):
At least a billion. Yeah. At least a billion dollars to, you know, get all the teams onboard and it might take more and, and to the point where, how much is left, et cetera, like I told you, there's no budget here. If you have to spend another billion dollars, we'll do it. Like for us, what is required is that we have to have to solve this problem. Right? Like this, because if you solve this problem, then you have solved mass adoption, right? The, the whole reason why we are doing all of this, the, the, the dream will be realized. And, and you know, for that, there is no budget, like what, whatever it takes. So that's the kind of mindset we, we go with

Anna Rose (00:34:57):
There, but you had sort of set out originally, like, at least in the summer, what we saw was like a billion dollars is gonna go towards ZK tech and in, in a lot of ways that is sort of this acquiring, but not exactly because you are also kind of adding more into the research and stuff like that.

Arjun Kalsy (00:35:12):
Yes grow the research, team structure. Yeah.

Anna Rose (00:35:14):
What else are you also looking like? And actually wait, before we go into the future and like, what else you have maybe planned, but I wanted to ask you, are you only looking at ZK solutions for scaling because ZK obviously has more characteristics potentially.

Arjun Kalsy (00:35:29):
So for us, the long term bet, is definitely ZK, but it's not as if we are not looking at optimistic rollups technologies, interestingly, the blockchain, which we're building with Ernst & Young, the Nightfall implementation is an optimistic rollup.

Anna Rose (00:35:41):
Oh yeah.

Arjun Kalsy (00:35:41):
Yeah. It's an optimistic rollup, which uses some ZK sort of technology for privacy. Yeah.

Anna Rose (00:35:46):
Oh yeah. So that, that's actually what I was gonna ask. So it's like, are you also funding privacy tech, not, are you also funding other scaling solutions, but is it more like, are you looking to develop ZK very much narrowly in the scaling sort of dimension? Or do you wanna see like a flourishing of other use cases and stuff?

Arjun Kalsy (00:36:05):
We want to see like flourishing of other use cases, for sure. We've been closely watching like some other really top tier teams doing this, like Aztec has been doing some great work. Yeah. So many other protocols, you know, have been sort of doing this, like for example, even the Hermez team has had been working on iden3, which is a very interesting, you know, sort of identity management solution.

Anna Rose (00:36:23):
Or Circom the very, very popular language.

Arjun Kalsy (00:36:26):
So we want to build this entire ecosystem. It's not just about ZK rollups of course. You know, we also realize that in certain cases, privacy will be required. When you look at mass adoption, right? When you look at enterprise adoption. So when you, again, backwards from there, you realize that you need to have, you need to have solutions of privacy. You need to have proper tooling, you need to have identity management, so many things need to be built. And, and this is kind of, like I said, you know, the answer to what the other question, which you wanted to ask, like, what, what else are we going to be spending money on is basically all of this. Right. So ZK rollup is just the blockchain, right? You need to solve tooling. And, and what we are seeing, for example, today, if you look at blockchain technology in general, like a proof of stake chain, and what we are seeing on Ethereum is that there is a huge amount of focus right now today, which is good for the ecosystem on tooling, right. Which is building sort of testing low code environment. So you have to do all of that, you know, for ZK as well. You need to grow the entire ecosystem, like just like how we've done for our proof of stake chain. So a lot of resources will go into that as well. A lot of teams, we are going to incubate for this. So that is the other part of the story.

Anna Rose (00:37:25):
Cool. So you've mentioned a few of the teams that have actually like been brought in through this funding. I'll just go over them cuz I've, I've had a few of them on the show already, but it's Polygon Miden, Polygon Zero. Polygon Nightfall and then Polygon Hermez. Yes. Is there anything else like, so each one of those so far are kind of like rollup projects in a lot of ways. So this is the scaling, but I, yeah, I think kind of moving to those next stages, like, I don't know if you can already reveal like business deals still in the works, but yeah. Maybe give us like any sort of hint of the kinds of projects that you're looking for also, cuz think of the, the listeners to this episode, like you might actually have some people who are building ZK things. It might be interesting for them to know what your funding next. Or going forward

Arjun Kalsy (00:38:17):
Like I said, so what we are really focusing on right now is definitely getting a lot, like talking to teams who can build great tooling, like to make it easier for developers. Right. Sort of, you know, to sort of start building for ZK rollups to start building for that technology. You know, of course all of this will be within the you know, within the EVM sort of environment. Right? So there'll be minimal, let's say work required, but there will be a fair amount of tooling, which would have to be built to, for example, let's say manage the ecosystem, for example, you know, all the sequencers, et cetera. And, and if you break down for example, ZK technology, right? And if you look at the biggest parts, for example, creating the rollup, creating the proof, like there are different at different stages, there are different problems which need to be solved. So we, you looking for teams who are working on these problems and if, if they figured out some, you know, great, great solutions to these problems, like that's the approach you're taking. So I can't, I will not say that we are already like shopping around or looking for a team. We are really looking for people who are problem solving. This could be anyone, frankly speaking. It could be like a university student. It could be like a top tier funded team, but like that's really what we are looking for. And currently our, of course, a hundred percent focused right now is to get our ZK rollup chains like, you know, production ready as soon as possible. We are hoping to get testnets out in at least the next, maybe four months, three to four months. And then you know, start moving to production environments by the end of this year.

Arjun Kalsy (00:39:31):
Then by next year, we'll be able to, you know, maybe look at other proof generation, plugging in other different kinds of proof generations like Plonky2 and et cetera, and how you could do that with EVM. So, so that is a roadmap which we are working on right now in terms of what lies beyond rollups right. Like what, what happens then? I, I can't really say that. So, so I would say that there is no real concrete plan around that because the ZK dream by itself has still not been realized. Right. So we still don't know what the ZK path is going to look like, what scalability will look like. I think we would, if once we go live with these solutions, we will also begin to understand maybe some of the advantages and some of the limits of this technology and then know like, you know, what, what we need to do next. So that's kind of where we are right now, but right now, like the hundred, instead of trying to think too ahead that, okay now, no, it's really about let's first execute, you know, Polygon has a reputation for shipping and we wanna ship first and, and bring that to the community. And then, you know, once we do that, like I said, you know, we we'll begin to learn more about the ecosystem and what we need to solve next.

Anna Rose (00:40:34):
Nice. One of the other interviews in the, this episode is actually about we're gonna be talking about Gitcoin and this sort of Gitcoin ZK side round, which you participated in. And but you also are working with Gitcoin and here I was just curious about like grants and, and how we can get funding out into the ecosystem in different ways, like less about maybe direct funding of, you know, developers or teams, but rather just like giving out grants. So yeah, what's your philosophy around that?

Arjun Kalsy (00:41:03):
So definitely grants are of course, a great way, you know, to get like more teams to work on a certain problem. Right? So by having a, let's say a, a good Gitcoin grant, you have six or seven or maybe 10 plus teams around the world trying to solve a problem. Right. And the chances of you solving that problem automatically increase. So just by having more people solve that problem grants obviously work really well now we've, we've had a grant program for a long period of time. So if you look at what Polygon has been doing, we've been giving out Gitcoin grants, we've been doing hackathons for almost the last three, four years. Like, so this is something which we do. I think it's so important for, you know for all projects to have great grant programs so that we can grow that blockchain ecosystem. It's still very small compared to, you know, like web 2 and, and some of the other tech out there. So, so this is very important now in terms of like how we want to engage going forward. So of course, you know, one, one part is that we come across teams, you know, who are doing great work. And then, you know, we try and see if we can work with them. The other part is of course, like I said, so within the ZK space, we are trying to identify problems, right. Or within the blockchain space in general, like where are some of the problems? Which, which need to be solved. Right? And, and there are multiple ways to solve it. So one way is grants. We've also created, done something very interesting within Polygon, right? So we've created this program called EIR, which is an entrepreneur in residence program, and this is another way of solving problems.

Arjun Kalsy (00:42:15):
Right. So think of it like problem solving. So we have a very large ecosystem of 10,000 DApps basically live on a platform. So having an ecosystem, this big allows us to zoom out, right. And, and from like a 60,000 feet, really look at what's missing, right? So what's missing on NFT, in gaming, what's missing on the DeFi side and, and what's missing on tooling. What's missing research. And, and by having an EIR program, we can find teams and give them focused problem statements to work on saying that guys work on solving this. We know it's a problem for the ecosystem. Maybe, you know, it's not been noticed yet, but we know because we are able to see the, and visualize this and, and, and we will provide the funding and, and whatever's required to do this. So it's also grants, but it's also programs like, you know, working with lots of incubators and accelerators, but also having these EIR type programs, which, you know, allow us to attack like multiple problem statements in different ways. So this is kind of how we want to go about doing ecosystem building, which is enabling freelance developers, but also in, you know, like highly motivated teams who want to maybe switch over from web 2 and work on focus, problem statements.

Anna Rose (00:43:12):
Very cool. I love that idea of bringing over some web2 folks into web3 as well.

Arjun Kalsy (00:43:17):
So, well, this is the DeFi team actually Hamza, and I think Sanket from the DeFi team came up with this concept, a brilliant concept. So, yeah.

Anna Rose (00:43:24):
Cool. Arjun thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us a little bit about Polygon's ZK funding goals and yeah. Good luck with the next period where I hope to see lots of funds going into your ecosystem to fund this kind of tooling.

Arjun Kalsy (00:43:39):
Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Anna Rose (00:43:45):
So I wanna welcome back Alex to the show. Hey Alex, what's up?

Alex (00:43:49):
Hey, Anna. Good to see you again.

Anna Rose (00:43:51):
Last time you were on, you were actually on for the ZK Hack event back, I guess just a few months ago, we did this wrap up episode, but this time around, you're here to talk about ZK funding. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're working on?

Alex (00:44:07):
Yeah. Thank you. So I'm the COO of Aleo and I'm here because we're organizing this initiative across the industry called Zprize, which I'm really excited to hopefully tell you about

Anna Rose (00:44:19):
Very cool. So maybe let's start with the seed of this idea. Where does Zprize, where does the, the idea of Zprize come from?

Alex (00:44:26):
Yeah. So first off on the name, I guess the, the name is sort of riff on Xprize, which, you know, is an initiative that's been around for a little while to it's a competition to encourage, you know, people to kind of solve these, these generational problems with breakthrough solutions. So that's where the name came from, but the idea really started with this problem that we faced at Aleo, where we have a system or, or platform for private applications and a blockchain is part of it. There's a proof of work algorithm that we use, which relies upon generating zero knowledge proofs or, or miners have to generate those zero knowledge proofs to participate in in, in the consensus. And, you know, we just struggled to find a good baseline prover to you know, to have people take off the shelf and use. And, you know, and, and as I talked to more and more folks across the industry, I realized that, you know, there really isn't a great baseline of hardware except for you know, for a hardware accelerated prover or even verifier. And so the idea was like, Hey, you know, this technology, these ideas, these algorithms, these proof systems are, are, you know, there's a lot of thought and work that's gone into them, but there's been less work on the implementation and hardware. And so the idea of the Zprize was really born out of this. Hey, we all have the same problem. If these provers or verifiers were more performant, it would be able to, it would enable these applications that we're all talking about. And so why don't we band together and create a competition and trying to incentivize teams to build that.

Anna Rose (00:45:51):
And in this case, it it's very much focused on like hardware acceleration. When you say that you're thinking, you're kind of talking about like building something towards an ASIG, I guess, like a Z a SNARK type ASIG.

Alex (00:46:04):
Yeah. So, so that's one goal, but there's potential utility in having, you know, an optimized verifier for just a commodity, a commodity CPU. And you know, if someone takes, you know, can build a faster verifier or an optimized verifier for even say like a phone, you know, that that could be really important and interesting. And there's teams that in fact are really focused on that more so than they're than they're focused on, you know, on building an ASIG for any specific problem. So that's why the structure of this competition is gonna be one where you, we sort of define a number of categories and different teams will be able to sponsor prizes and whatever category that they, they kind of think of. And, you know, one of the things that I'm focused on is trying to find the categories where there's as much overlap as possible so that the industry in general will benefit. And one thing I didn't mention before that I really do wanna highlight here is that the output of all of this, all of the work that the competitors are gonna do is gonna be open sourced. So this is gonna be a public good for the industry, moving forward.

Anna Rose (00:47:02):
And maybe you can share a little bit, like who do you actually expect to be participating in this competition? So, so far you've kind of talked a little bit about the categories and like, so there's a few things, and maybe we can dive into like each of those a little bit more in depth, but like, yeah. Who who's this for? Is this for the little, like the dev working in their basement, the dev tinkering around? Yeah. Or is it for a company?

Alex (00:47:25):
Kind of all the above. So I, I think the, the initial idea is to find teams that are already working in the space on like the problem of accelerating cryptography in hardware. And I think you've actually interviewed, you've interviewed a few of them. So, you know, teams like, you know, for example, like the supernational and chain reactions of the world, by the way, I don't know if, you know, these folks will actually end up competing, but that's like an archetype of potentially teams that might be interested to compete. But also, I, you know, I think there's gonna be a lot of people, maybe in academia who are researching kind of a specific aspect of, or, researching hardware acceleration for cryptography that, you know, they might look at this and say, that's a pretty decent pot of prize money. Maybe I'll just work on this over the summer.

Alex (00:48:06):
And so I think we could see some of those people and you know, and then I think there's a lot of people who work on these problems say big hardware companies or big chip companies like Intel maybe. And maybe they work on an adjacent problem, but, but hopefully like one of the goals of this is not just to get acceleration for these proof systems or acceleration for these algorithms. It's also to raise the profile of the industry, you at large. So people who maybe hadn't been paying attention before, maybe look and say, Hey, wow, this is kind of a cool and interesting problem. I'd never really thought about it before, but you know, I have some of these skills that, that you would need to, you know, be successful. So let me throw my hat in the ring. So, yeah, it's, it's kind of a big tent.

Anna Rose (00:48:45):
Okay. So let's, let's kind of dive into the categories actually. Maybe before we do that, are they fully defined? Cause I know this is a project, like this is a train that's running, but I don't know if it's fully formed yet or is it, what is it an airplane in the sky anyway, building the airplane as it's flying or something.

Alex (00:49:03):
You got it. That's right. That's definitely the name of the game right now.

Anna Rose (00:49:06):
Okay. So what, what are the categories look like today? What are you, what are you planning?

Alex (00:49:10):
So first off, I, I have to say, you know, again, this is, you know, I'm, I'm at Aleo, but I'm very proud that this is not an Aleo owned initiative. This is a, this is an industry initiative. And actually just at ETH Denver here, recently we had on about 30 people representing seven or eight different teams, you know, all kind of jamming on what this could look like. And so so first of all, I mean, what, what I'm about to say represents, not just my thinking, but you know, contributions for many and I want to, and I'll acknowledge many of them, but also, you know, I, I think there's many more contributions that people will make and we wanna make sure that we, that we define this competition in a way that's specific enough to ensure that we get something that will benefit everybody, but general enough to allow for creative solutions that maybe no one has seen before. That's really gonna be the art here. And, and that's, most of what's going to be the work over the next couple months before we announce the official start of the competition. So as it stands the idea which again, represents the contributions of many folks is to separate prizes out in three dimensions. So one is first and most importantly, like what's the objective cause we talk about accelerating SNARKs and what does that actually mean? You have to think about, are we going for latency? So like the fastest proof generation time, for example, like the fastest, this, the slow or the, the quickest time to generate a single proof, are we talking about throughput the most proofs in a single time span where we talk about efficiency, the cheapest proof generation, right? So there's like, you know, when you say accelerating, it's kind of vague.

Alex (00:50:43):
You have to define more specifically, what's the goal that you want and for different applications, you know, there'll be different things you care about. So that's kind of one dimension. The sec, my initial idea was thinking about hardware platforms like, okay, you have a CPU, you have a GPU, you have an FPGA. And you know, there's probably not time to build an ASIG for this competition, but like you could separate it by that. But over the course of some conversations, I've kind of evolved from just being that specific to hardware platform and being, and maybe focusing more on like class of prover or verifier and by class. I mean, it's just, it's just a little bit of a higher level abstraction. And let me just define what we think those classes are. So one is a mobile user or a low power, a user of a low power device.

Alex (00:51:25):
So maybe there's a reason you would wanna verify things. For example, pull in that context. The other is a, what we consider the browser class. So this is someone who maybe has a commodity laptop or a commodity desktop, and maybe you would use either the onboard GPU built into like a, say a Mac M one or some other device that's built into, you know, for a computer that you built. And, and the idea would be that you would run this inside of a web browser. So you could, you know, interact with an application, click a button, and it creates a proof right there for you. So that's like that's. So the second class is kind of as, as if you were a user. And then the third class is a server class where this is sort of more of the prover as a service model, where someone sends some instructions out to you, you generate a proof for them, and then you return that. And in that class, you, you could think of, you know, maybe higher end specialized GPU or even an FPGA could compete in the server class. That's, that's kind of how we think about the we've evolved a little bit from like specific to hardware to like just more of a class. And that way, the kind of nice thing about that is you can say like for, for the, for the purposes of efficiency, say, you can compare, Hey, what's an FPGA as a GPU and, and kind of really do an apples to apples comparison, find what hopefully is the best solution for a given application. And that's the third category or dimension that we're kind of exploring, like what's the application and the application. I mean, this is like, this dimension is really probably the largest, right? Cause like, are we talking about initially the idea was to focus on the lower level mathematical primitives, that kind of underly of these operations, like Multiscale multiplication NTT also known as FFT fast furier transforms.

Alex (00:52:57):
So a lot of the proof systems kind of rely on these underlying operations. And that's honestly what a lot of the focus on hardware acceleration has been up to this point, but you could also define the application area in a little bit of a higher level, say like computing, a Merkle path, right? Within a Merkle tree and make that like that specifically what you, what you define and the advantage of doing a higher level definition for the problem is that you enable people to innovate at both the hardware level. And honestly, at the algorithm level where you could say, Hey, you know, this is sort of how people have done this before, but if I maybe think of this new trick, you know, maybe we can get some faster performance out of it. So those are the three treatment dimensions that we're thinking of currently,

Anna Rose (00:53:31):
How does this actually run? Like, what's the timeframe that you have in mind. Maybe you don't wanna say a date yet. Cause I know it's potentially still in flux, but like yeah, no, it's okay. Give us a sense for like how long do you expect people to actually compete on the, these challenges?

Alex (00:53:45):
Yeah. So we wanna give people enough time to build a submission that will beat the benchmarks that we're gonna lay out for them and to hopefully move again the baseline of the industry up by what, you know, we, we hope is a significant margin. So 10 to 14 weeks is honestly the timeframe we're thinking of here. Now that for some applications may be too long for others. It may be too short. But I think for the majority of the stuff that we're talking about with the kind of expertise and time and effort that will require we, you know, from talking to many people, that's sort of what we've converged upon, but hopefully, possibly, I guess in, you know, my wildest dreams, potentially this is something that maybe will live on beyond a single competition. And, you know, you can have maybe a yearly event or maybe a, you know, as this evolves, maybe there'll be a competition that, you know, is longer in timeframe or is consists of multiple phases. So but this initial competition we're thinking of lasting between 10 to 14 weeks

Anna Rose (00:54:39):
And you kind of mentioned the three types of challenges, but are there going to be three competitions or are there multiple within each type kind of?

Alex (00:54:48):
So back to the building, the plane as it's flying kind of thing. Yeah. So I think this is actually, maybe, maybe this is important to say what's gonna happen right from this point from when we're recording this interview to when we start the competition as currently contemplated, sometime in the middle of April, what's gonna happen now is getting together a committee of people from industry, you know, organizations that have already committed to supporting this effort at which point, you know, at right now we're around I think, 30 different organizations. Who've, who've committed in some way and we're gonna from them choose a committee balance between academics and industry practitioners from different perspectives, hardware algorithms zero knowledge. And we're gonna try and basically rigorously answer all of these questions and define in very, very specifically what the competition looks like, what the benchmarks are, the competitors need to beat and then figure out, okay, what prizes to allocate, how to allocate the prizes. Is there our first, second, third, is there a winner take all? So these are all questions that I get to help lead people in answering, you know, and, and we collectively, as a group are going to, to kind of structure and figure out in a way that maximizes, hopefully the success of the effort.

Anna Rose (00:55:55):
I think a question here is like, why would people participate? So you'd sort of mentioned the types of people who would participate, but like, wouldn't, they keep a lot of this info to themselves. Like, I mean, obviously there's a cash prize, but what are you thinking? Could we really encourage people to, to share this stuff?

Alex (00:56:10):
Yeah. I think I just wanna re emphasize that I don't think the objective of this is to get the best prover for X, because again, all of us, you know, in Aleo maybe most specifically has a protocol that if you apply this knowledge, you could profit as a miner potentially. Right. And I think it's unrealistic to expect the people who have this knowledge and would be that successful to want to share it all with their potential competitors. But I do think, and I believe that the prizes that, you know, the industry will be sponsoring will be enough to, I think, get a better baseline than what currently exists. And I think so much has been built upon opensource foundations take Libsnark for example, like Libsnark is a opensource, public good software library that, that people use artworks very much the same thing. Like these are foundations that people can use and then build upon.

Alex (00:56:58):
And I'm hopeful that this is the same thing, but for kind of the, of like in a more applied way for like a category of, you know, hardware devices or for, you know, user classes that people can then take and, and put together as building blocks and then build their own things. And the reality is I don't even think it makes sense to try and optimize super far down a path for any one proof system today. I mean, remember like a lot of these proof systems, you know, the author of which you've interviewed on this show didn't exist five years ago and five years from now, we could very well have all moved on from all of this stuff we're talking about. So, you know, I think that's sort of why I view this as an incremental iterative effort. And I view this as like let's, let's establish and then try and move the baseline up. There's always gonna be, be competitors who are gonna be 10 X better than the open source baseline. But as long as that open source baseline keeps moving up, I think we, as an industry stand the best chance of, of being able to evolve faster and faster and make these applications practical that people, you know, that people talk about

Anna Rose (00:57:55):
And possibly more decentralized because then more people can actually find it and use it.

Alex (00:58:00):
Exactly. We're all about, you know, this principle decentralization, you know, is what I think really defines this industry. And so hopefully we can, we can maintain that as well.

Anna Rose (00:58:08):
Cool. Where should people find out about it actually?

Alex (00:58:11):
Yeah, so we have a landing page with all the information you need. Awesome. So I'll, I'll share that with you in the show notes zprize.org. So people can go there, check it out, sign up for a mailer to kind of get updates. And we're gonna be, you know, as more details about this competition get solidified. You can kind of go there. I encourage you to go there and check back in and you know, and see, see what new stuff there is. Again, we'll, we'll also put out an announcement about when the competition will officially start. And again, we're like, I think for now, the main thing that I'm really excited about is just, you know, you go to the landing page and you'll see the number of teams that have already signed up to support this in some way. And it's great. I mean, it's, it really does. I think we're represent the vast majority of this industry, and it's great to be collaborating as a community for something that like this, that affects all of us. You know, I think it it's too easy for any one of us to get focused on the specific problem that we're working on. And it's, it's easy to forget that we are a part of this broader community working on this technology. That's truly groundbreaking.

Anna Rose (00:59:05):
Totally. And I should say a little caveat. We like zero knowledge validator is part of that initial group.

Alex (00:59:11):
Yeah. I, I guess I can name, I can name a couple if, if people are interested. So if the Ethereum foundation, Protocol Labs, Mina foundation, Aztec, Zero Knowledge validator, as you mentioned. Uso that's several of the teams. There's a, I'm not gonna be exhaustive cuz there are many, but I'll just mention those, those few of course Aleo is gonna, is part of this effort. We've got some of the other, other folks from the kind of the venture side, Galaxy Digital, Bain Capital, Varian Capital and some others. And again, the full list is on the, the landing page, but, h feel pretty good that it represents, mind of the full spectrum of stakeholders within the industry. And of course, Anna, very excited to be working with you on this, s well as zero knowledge validator.

Anna Rose (00:59:50):
Very cool, Alex, thanks for coming on the show.

Alex (00:59:53):
Hey, thank you very much for having me. This was great.

Anna Rose (00:59:59):
So now I'm here with Alistair, who is the lead scientist and research team lead at the Web3 Foundation. Welcome Alistair.

Alistair (01:00:07):
Hi Anna.

Anna Rose (01:00:08):
So Al you've been on the show before, but in the past it was mostly about the research you were doing this time around. We're gonna be talking about an initiative happening focused more on funding. So there's a ZK component to the Polkadot pioneers prize that I just recently heard about and thought it would be great to include in this episode all about ZK funding. Why don't we kind of start from the top of that? What is the Polkadot pioneers prize? What's the point of this? What is it?

Alistair (01:00:35):
So it is a sort of Xprize, like initiative in theory. We we've been given a million Dots by the treasury to give out to teams that are, are doing cool stuff for Polkadot. And the plan is to put a large part of it, like the, the vast majority towards zero knowledge stuff.

Anna Rose (01:00:55):
Cool. So tell me how, like, how does the treasury funding in all of this work? So there's a Polkadot treasury, a place which is kind of accumulating funds, but yeah, kind of who decides how this is distributed and like kind of where did the Polkadot Pioneer's prize initiative even come from?

Alistair (01:01:14):
Right. So the treasury sort of it's spending is controlled by on-chain governance in particular here that the Polkadot council so need from the treasury comes from inflation, from transaction fees and things. And we, we have this sort of mechanism called the bounty where, why the treasury can decide it's gonna spend the money on something. So, so we have a vote and people put a proposal, we put a vote saying we put this much money in, in the bounty. And then we assign a ready to decide how the money's going to be spent

Anna Rose (01:01:46):
Is the Polkadot Pioneer's prize one large bounty, or are there sub bounties within that kind of initiative?

Alistair (01:01:54):
So it, its structured as one large bounty, but we won't give it out to all at once. Not least because we're giving it out for two specific reasons. One, one of the, which is the this ZK part and the other is for Polkadot infrastructure people, for instance if a team were to, were to implement the Polkadot, node in another language, which is a tough project, we'd be paying them.

Anna Rose (01:02:17):
Got it. So let's talk a little bit about the ZK part of the Polkadot pioneer prize. You sort of mentioned that it's going to be a large part of it. So you said 1 million dots. So I'm assuming like, you know, a large, you know, maybe more than 500,000 dots would be allocated towards the ZK funding. What is your for like how this would actually happen? Like how are you actually gonna give this out? Like what, and what are you looking for?

Alistair (01:02:46):
Right. And, and both of these are pretty tough because it's, it's a question is to answer because it's kind of early on, okay. We've had, we've had quite lots of discussion, but it, it's still not so clear to even to ask who are responsible for creators who are responsible for handing out the money how this thing is going to is going to play out. But we, we have a list of things we're looking for that the things, we like to, to see the usual sort of zero knowledge transactions for money, general purpose, zero knowledge, the stuff you fit doing with smart contracts or sort of more interesting things in the identity direction, in the, in the games direction that this, yeah. Anything that's interesting and substantial enough could be eligible.

Anna Rose (01:03:31):
And so far, I mean, what you just described sounded very much like applications, you've seen zero knowledge, but are you also looking for any specific tooling, are there any kind of any libraries or anything that you wanna potentially support or yeah, expand on with this?

Alistair (01:03:48):
Yeah, it's indeed. We're kind of looking for a complete thing. So an application, although if that's just showing off something more fundamental, then it probably also has a good chance.

Anna Rose (01:03:59):
Okay.

Alistair (01:04:01):
But there are libraries and you can probably already use them right now. So for instance, arkworks, you could compile to rust and just, you can put that in a substrate chain and sort of like Jeff was talking about yesterday. I dunno if that performs so well, but it's good enough. You can go and deploy something.

Anna Rose (01:04:16):
Yeah. So by the way, by yesterday, so we're recording this a day after the zero knowledge validator did an event on like with focused on Polkadot and there we learned that Arkworks. It there's basically a project to bring Arkworks to substrate in a way, or like to connect those two things.

Alistair (01:04:32):
Yeah. You can use it right now. And in fact a team - p-tract did some tests for, for, for using it that they wanted to, to use Arkworks, to do the calls you can do with - the EVM like this EVM pre-compiles for, for BLS. Well, in particular sort of for BN 254 right now and they wanted to another sort of curve thing. So they wanted to, to get that into ink, the smart contract language, which sort of rust-like smart contact language on the substrate that composed to, and they successfully got that working and found that it actually wasn't terribly slow

Anna Rose (01:05:11):
Cool, but I would, would a project like that be a good candidate for this bounty, like actually doing the work that p-tract had done?

Alistair (01:05:21):
No, because they, they, you know, their thing didn't really take that long. That was the point.

Anna Rose (01:05:27):
Okay. So you need what you're looking for. Like something much, much more complete, you want an application using ZK, but I have a question here. Does it have to be on Polkadot or is this like, would you be up for funding, fundamental ZK research? Like if, if it was like building an like instead of porting artworks, but if you were building like a new DSL for something new, would you be up for funding that you think?

Alistair (01:05:52):
Not really, unless they were targeting Polkadot yeah. And some,

Anna Rose (01:05:55):
Okay. It is still Polkadot focused, but I,

Alistair (01:05:57):
I mean, if, if you did have a DSL and then, then have that on substrate, then you know, that that's definitely a good candidate.

Anna Rose (01:06:05):
Okay.

Alistair (01:06:06):
And, and we would be very interested in new projects. Right. I, I mean, I'm sure some team could comport one of the guys who are doing stuff with Ethereum to Polkadot with no problem, but they're not going to maintain its a really bad choice for a prize.

Anna Rose (01:06:20):
So you would be looking for like a team that's building itself around the concept of zero knowledge that would potentially be able to build within the Polkadot ecosystem I guess, but like it should have ZK at its core.

Alistair (01:06:33):
Exactly. Yes.

Anna Rose (01:06:35):
Okay. What, so you sort of mentioned a few of these idea is that you were like that identity games. How do you actually think about that? Like what are, maybe we can flesh that out a little and I realize Al this is very early on in the development of this funding project, but I think it is still cool to include here.

Alistair (01:06:53):
So I mean, yeah, we, we thought about each of these possible applications and the things we really like to see done that maybe people haven't done on, on other ecosystems yet or have done. But not ideally. I mean, so for instance with games, there's, there's several games on Ethereum, but we should already be a lot more scalable, a lot cheaper in terms of transactive fees than Ethereum. So there's things you can, and not to mention we could use different technology. You're very restricted in what you can do efficiently on Ethereum. And so we just think we can do more.

Anna Rose (01:07:28):
Mm, can you tell me a little bit more about the curation part? So you mentioned that there's a portion of this that is curated, but yeah. How does that work? Who are the curators? What are you deciding on?

Alistair (01:07:39):
So on, on chain there there's a curator account now that is controlled by a multisig in which five people control. I'm one of them, there's Alex from the web3 foundation grants, that there's Raul who's council member and, and doing governance things for Parity there's Sotu who works for ASTA and Brian who from Acala. Cool. And we will collectively in the end have to do something on chain to spend this money.

Anna Rose (01:08:12):
So how does it work? Like what is the criteria like, what would happen? Someone goes through an application process, they send you, and then you decide kind of how it gets allocated?

Alistair (01:08:21):
Pioneers prize dot Polkadot dot network. There is an email, maybe Polkadot pioneers, prize.parity.io at Parity.io. Definitely something at parity.io.

Anna Rose (01:08:32):
Okay. I guess you can find it on the website.

Alistair (01:08:34):
Yes. And, and I know the email forwards to all us curators.

Anna Rose (01:08:39):
Okay.

Alistair (01:08:40):
The, the, the process it's still a bit unclear. Maybe people from Parity will be involved, but the ultimate decision on chain definitely rests with the curators.

Anna Rose (01:08:51):
Okay. Is this only for technical projects or would like community projects also be kind of eligible?

Alistair (01:08:58):
So at its core, I think this is a, a technical prize. We want to see like actual code on substrate. That does cool stuff. Obviously, if projects have community have a well designed idea, then this is a bonus.

Anna Rose (01:09:12):
Okay. Got it. Cool Al, so let's thanks for coming on the show and sharing with us a little bit about the Polkadot pioneers prize and the ZK portion of it focused on funding ZK tech.

Alistair (01:09:25):
Okay. Thank you.

Anna Rose (01:09:26):
So this concludes the episode on ZK funding. I know that there are actually a number of other funding bodies out there. Grants programs. A lot of the ZK projects are their own grants programs, but this is just a small selection that I chose for this particular episode. So I hope you got something out of it. And I do wanna say thank you to the podcast producer, Tanya, the podcast editor Henrik, and to our listeners. Thanks for listening.