In this episode, Anna Rose and Guillermo Angeris catch up with Muthu Venkitasubramaniam, Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University and cofounder of Ligero. They discuss how Ligero’s small memory footprint makes it a good choice for client-side proving, as well as the importance of programmable compliance in blockchain. The conversation explores the differences between ‘MPC in the head’ and error-correcting code perspectives, and how well-established primitives influence the design of modern ZK systems. They also debate the challenge of adding ‘ZK’ privacy back into systems without it, why proving EVM traces may be absurd, and what kinds of guarantees might exist around the results of vibe coding. Related links:

Episode 363: Bringing ZK to Google Wallet with Abhi and Matteo
Episode 326: MPC & ZK in Ligero and Ligetron
ZK13: Ligerito: A Small and Concretely Fast Polynomial Commitment Scheme - Kobi Gurkan
ZK13: Vibe coding ZK Apps with Ligetron ZK Platform - Muthu Venkitasubramaniam
ZK10: Analysis of zkVM Designs - Wei Dai & Terry Chung
Ligerito: A Small and Concretely Fast Polynomial Commitment Scheme
Ligero++ - Reducing proof length of Ligero
Adding Zero-Knowledge to STARKs - Talk by Ulrich Haböck
Aurora - comparing prover times of STARKs vs Ligero
WYSTERIA: A Programming Language for Generic, Mixed-Mode Multiparty Computations
Samaritan: Linear-time Prover SNARK from New Multilinear Polynomial Commitments
Brakedown: Linear-time and field-agnostic SNARKs for R1CS

Ligero for Memory-Efficient ZK with Muthu

Zero Knowledge