Show Notes
In this end-of-year episode, Anna recaps the major ZK themes of 2025 and gives a preview of what’s coming in 2026 — new episodes, a mini-series, zkSummit14, and the rollout of ZK Mesh Plus, a unified space for newsletters, educational content, and events.
She highlights this year’s core research threads, from lattices and Ligero to quantum security, ZK-ID systems, emerging applications, and the ongoing push toward better proving benchmarks. Anna wraps with reflections on why privacy tech is becoming more urgent in the age of AI and what the community will be exploring next year. Related Links
Ecosystem ZK Whiteboard Sessions ZK Mesh Subscribe to ZK Mesh ZK Podcast substack State of ZK Report
ZK Systems Story Back to the Future with Zero Knowledge Zero Knowledge Systems, Privacy and Security with Jonathan Wilkins The Founding of Zero Knowledge Systems with Austin Hill
Lattices Implementing LatticeFold with Matthew and Albert from Nethermind Lattices, Folding, & Symphony with Binyi Chen ZK Whiteboard:Lattice-based SNARKs, w/ Vadim Lyubashevsky ZK Whiteboard:LatticeFold, w/ Binyi Chen
Ligero Ligero for Memory-Efficient ZK with Muthu ZK Whiteboard:The Ligero Proof System, w/ Muthu Venkitasubramaniam
Quantum Quantum Engineering with Jelena Vučković Quantum Punks with Alex and Nicola Countdown to Q-Day with Project 11
ZK-ID Bringing ID Onchain with Self zkPDF and zkID with Vikas Rushi and Ying Tong Evolving ZK Identity from Iden3 to Privado & Billions ZKPassport, Obsidion & the Emerging Noir Ecosystem Building ZK Registries Onchain with Rarimo
More How ZK inspired AI Watermarking with Miranda Christ Lighter, Perp DEXs and Custom ZK Circuits zkTLS with Maddy from Reclaim ZKTorch & the Evolution of ZKML with Daniel Kang Zerocoin to zk-creds: Modern ZK History with Ian Miers Ethproofs, zkVM Benchmarks & the Unstoppable Rise of ZK with Justin Drake ZK Benchmarks with Conner Swann Verifiable Key Management and TEEs with Turnkey TLSNotary with Dan and Sinu Local-First with grjte and Goblin Oats AI and ZK Auditing with David Wong The Quest for Practical iO with Machina iO Indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO) with Huijia (Rachel) Lin Pratyush Mishra on Tiny Proofs, Folding, Low-Memory SNARKs and More
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Read transcript
More from Zero Knowledge
This week, Anna and Nico catch up with Srinath Setty, researcher at Microsoft. They look back at his research since his work on Nova, spanning lattice-based folding, zero-knowledge identity proofs, and lookups and memory checking, much of which traces back to his 2019 work, Spartan.
This week, Anna is joined by Nico and Kobi to speak with Mathias Hall-Andersen and Giorgio Dell'Immagine from zkSecurity about zkGolf, a competition challenging humans and AI agents to build the most efficient, formally verified ZK circuits.
This week, Anna and Guillermo chat with Josh Yang, CEO and co-founder of Brightlight Photonics, about the lasers that power quantum computers. Josh explains how lasers are used in neutral atom and other atom-based quantum systems to cool and move atoms, manipulate qubit states and read out results. They explore why these systems require so many different lasers and how today’s bulky, expensive optical setups can become a bottleneck as quantum computers scale.
This week, Anna, Tarun and Nico are joined by JP Aumasson, co-designer of BLAKE3, author of Serious Cryptography and cryptography engineer at Cloudflare. They revisit the quantum threat to cryptography, looking at recent advances in quantum attacks on RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography, and discuss why JP remains cautious about predictions of an imminent “Q-day.” They then explore how AI is changing cryptanalysis, from recent RSA factoring records to the growing divide between symmetric and asymmetric cryptography.
This week, Anna is joined by Soubhik Deb, Head of Research at EigenLabs, to explore Yukon, a platform for collaborative AI-powered research. Soubhik traces the project’s origins to ECDSA.fail, a competition launched in response to Google’s work on more resource-efficient quantum circuits for breaking secp256k1. They discuss how researchers and their AI agents build on one another’s submissions, turning traditional research into a multiplayer process that can iterate at machine speed.