2019 - The Year In Snarks [Part 2 - People]
By Pranay Mohan
In the last issue, we covered several important developments in SNARKs that happened in 2019. Today, we’re wrapping up the 2019 reflections portion of this newsletter by shouting out some of the key people helping drive SNARKs forward. As you’ll see, some are the well-known names you might expect while others are all too unheralded for their contributions. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but just a sample of the brilliant minds in this space. Without further ado, here are some of the folks we think you should be following:
Mary Maller
Mary Maller is a cryptography researcher at University College London who focuses on Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). She is not associated with any blockchain projects, which might explain her relatively low profile, but she is a leader in the space, with her research focusing on mitigating trusted setup in zk-SNARKs. In 2019, she co-authored the Sonic paper which was the first universal SNARK (ie SNARKs that support arbitrary computations bounded by the size of the circuit), and has since been a foundation for other constructions.
More about Mary Maller
Sean Bowe
Sean Bowe is an engineer at Electric Coin Company, the private entity that works on Zcash. Sean is a veteran in the ZKP space, and has been on the rollercoaster ride of the first production zk-SNARK system since inception. Largely an autodidact, Sean shows how meritocratic this space is, as he has made significant contributions in this field without a degree in the subject. Most recently, he developed Halo, a SNARK construction that allows recursive composition using ordinary elliptic curve cycles.
Listen to Sean Bowe on the Zero Knowledge Podcast
Eli Ben-Sasson
Eli Ben-Sasson is a leader in the cryptography space, having been a professor at Technion for about 10 years. He is one of the co-authors of the original Zerocash paper which led to the development of Zcash. Most recently he has focused his efforts on STARKs, which are a type of ZKP that needs no trusted setup, but makes some significant performance tradeoffs. His company Starkware is focusing on improving this cutting edge technology. In June 2019, for example, the company launched StarkDEX, an engine for improving the scalability of decentralized exchanges (DEXes).
More about Eli Ben-Sasson
Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik needs no introduction -- he is the father of Ethereum, and his voice carries tremendous influence in the cryptocurrency world. Over the course of 2019, he has focused a growing amount of his attention on SNARKs, as they represent a promising scaling solution for Ethereum. Vitalik has also helped make this space more accessible for engineers and non-cryptographers by writing articles and giving workshops on the SNARKs.
Vitalik’s SNARK series
Anna Rose
Anna Rose brings an essential community organizing and education role to the zero knowledge space. Anna runs the Zero Knowledge Podcast, and more recently the ZK Summits which have emerged as a point of coalescence for the community. Her ability to bring on guests of varying technical fields and parse out the important and relevant bits for the ZKP world has made this space more approachable and inclusive for all.
Check out the Zero Knowledge Podcast
Izaak Meckler
Last but not least, we have Izaak Meckler, the CTO of O(1) Labs. Izaak pursued a PhD in Cryptography at Berkeley, until he left to create the Coda protocol, the first project to use recursive SNARKs to create a constant-sized blockchain. Izaak has helped the field advance by enabling academic research and applying it to real world problems, allowing theory to become battle-tested. He and several others are currently working on a new SNARK, codenamed Pickles, that leverages the improvements in recent constructions to keep Snarktober going.
Next week, we’ll turn our attention to 2020 and discuss what’s on the horizon for the zero knowledge world. This year and new decade looks just as, if not more promising, than the last year, and we’re only in the very early days of SNARKifying the world. If you haven’t yet, subscribe here to the SNARK Age, and stay tuned for next week’s issue!