ZK-LDN 0x04: On Marlin and PLONK

Annnd we're back! You’re invited to join us for our fourth Zero Knowledge meetup in London on October 22nd! We will be hosting 2 returning speakers: Mary Maller of University College London (UCL) and Zachary Williamson of Aztec Protocol.

Mary is a Research Associate in cryptography at UCL under Dr Meiklejohn. She will be presenting her work on Marlin. Zac is co-founder and CTO of Aztec Protocol. He will be presenting his work on PLONK, the first universal ZK-SNARK construction that is practical enough for use in smart-contracts.

Schedule:
6:30-7:00 pm: Greetings, food and drinks
7:00-7:20 pm: Presentation from Mary Maller (UCL) & Zac Zilliamson (AZTEC)
7:20-8:00pm: Presentation from Mary Maller (UCL)
8:00-8:40pm: Presentation from Zac Williamson (Aztec Protocol)

Read more about zk-SNARKs: https://blog.decentriq.ch/zk-snarks-primer-part-one/

Thanks to our sponsors for helping us put this event together: Applied Blockchain (https://appliedblockchain.com/), Aztec Protocol (https://www.aztecprotocol.com/) and Cambrial Capital (https://cambrial.com).
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Below are the abstracts and bios of our speakers:

Talk title: Introducing Marlin

Read more about Marlin: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1047.pdf

Bio: Mary is a cryptographer specialising in the area of zero-knowledge proofs. She is currently a Research Associate at University College London with Dr Sarah Meiklejohn. Her thesis was supervised by Dr Meiklejohn and Prof Jens Groth and was submitted in December 2018, supported by Microsoft Research Cambridge. She was co-supervised by Dr Markulf Kohlweiss, whom she also completed an internship with in 2017. Before joining UCL, Mary obtained an MSci degree in Mathematics from the University of Bristol.

Read more about Mary: http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Maller/

Talk title: Privacy by design in a world with universal SNARKs

Asbtract: ZK-SNARKs are an innovative method of verifying that a computation has been performed correctly. They form the backbone of many proposed scaling and privacy solutions for Ethereum.

PLONK is a new ZK-SNARK construction, developed by AZTEC and Protocol Labs, that is 'universal'; only one 'trusted setup' is required, and different ZK-SNARK programs do not require additional trusted setups to be performed. This construction is the first universal ZK-SNARK construction that is practical enough for use in smart-contracts.

In this talk, we will provide an overview of how ZK-SNARKs can be used to solve Ethereum's scaling and privacy challenges, and how PLONK opens up a world of zero-knowledge dapps.

Paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/953.pdf

Bio: Zac was previously a physicist at CERN and T2K Japan. He obtained his PhD in Particle Physics from Oxford University.

Read more about PLONK: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/953.pdf
Read more about AZTEC: https://www.aztecprotocol.com/