ep2 On proving systems - What ZKP builders need to know

2023/9/25

Wen Building

Frequently requested episodes will be transcribed first

In the past few months,a rising star called NOVA, kind of got everyone's attention, especially those cryptographers and builders working on zk projects. Nova is an advancement in proving systems. NOVA is actually what we call a folding scheme. Essentially it folds the same computation or operation over and over repeatedly, and it folds it into a proof size of o(1). Assume that we do 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times of the same thing, the outcome is gonna be around the same size. Proving system is core at the entire ZKP field and every builder who wants to implement applications with zkp needs to understand. In this episode, we have Dr.Cathie to explain these complicated things to a more general public, hoping to inspire more builders who have been discouraged by moon math.

host：Franci @FrancixDeng

guest: Dr.Cathie @drCathieSo_eth

Timeline

01:16 Dr.Cathie's background

02:37 A brief intro to NOVA

05:50 How interactive zk proof works

08:35 Non-interactive zk proof in blockchain app

10:03 A high-level overview of how mathematics is being used in the proving and verifying process

12:28 What does it mean to decentralize provers

14:45 Changes to proving systems and the main popular ones

18:57 Comparisons between groth16 and plonkish system

21:42 The trend is to abstract proving schemes away from languages