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ZK Insights | 11 Jan 2026
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ZK Insights | 11 Jan 2026
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In this episode, Anna Rose (https://x.com/annarrose) and Nico Mohnblatt (https://x.com/nico_mnbl) catch up with Ian Miers (https://x.com/secparam) from the University of Maryland (https://www.cs.umd.edu/), starting with his work on seminal ZK blockchain research, Zerocoin and Zerocash and the creation of the first zk-focused blockchain project Zcash. They then explore the history of trusted setups, including the trusted setup bug discovery in Zcash, and subsequent improvements like Powers of Tau. Ian also discussed his work on ZEXE, a system that has inspired the formation of Aleo, and his more recent works: zk-creds for building flexible anonymous credentials from existing identity signals like passports, and zk-promises for supporting anonymous reputation, moderation, and callbacks in decentralized systems. They also touch on broader topics like post-quantum security considerations, sybil resistance, and the need for programmable privacy tools.
In this module, Guillermo Angeris and Muthu Venkitasubramaniam, Co-founder at Ligero Inc, professor at Georgetown University and co-author of the original Ligero paper, deliver a comprehensive technical walkthrough of the Ligero proof system. After situating Ligero within the broader landscape of zero-knowledge proof constructions, Muthu introduces the MPC-in-the-head approach. Using this framework, he explains the Ligero proof system in detail, walking through its use of packed secret sharing, its constraint system, and the three core tests—proximity, multiplication, and linear—that ensure its correctness. Finally, he discusses practical considerations, including how Ligero achieves zero-knowledge, succinct verification, and memory efficiency, making it suitable for client-side proving on resource-constrained devices.
How Nodle's Digital Trust Network can support compliance without compromising privacy
Privacy will be the most important moat in crypto this year
The question for messaging apps this year isn’t just how to be quantum-resistant, but how to be decentralized
We’ll have ‘secrets-as-a-service’ to make privacy core infrastructure
In this paper, the authors present a subsequence scheme that separates proving either a subsequence or a non-subsequence argument into two phases: (i) proof of preprocessing and (ii) proof of (non-)subsequence argument, and achieve a text-sublinear proving time.
In this work, the authors present and implement a threshold signature scheme that is fully compatible with ML-DSA, supporting secure and efficient signing for a small number of parties, with an average communication per party upper bounded by 1 MB up to 6 parties. It is well-suited for real-world applications, including multi-device cryptocurrency wallets, threshold-based TLS authentication, and Tor's directory authorities.
Qurrency is an efficient UTXO-based privacy-preserving token system that includes an auditing mechanism and is secure against "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks. It has been demonstrated to be efficient through implementation and can be easily used on any EVM-based blockchain system.
The work provides new pairing-based NIZK arguments for the Ring-LWE-based public-key scheme proposed by Joye (CT-RSA'24). Compared to previous work, the new NIZK argument features a longer proof size and a faster prover.
If you're interested in our ZK Insights or have ideas for similar content to share, we highly encourage everyone to head over to our Github repo and submit a Pull Request. Join forces with like-minded ZKPunks to co-create!
✨ Github repo link: https://github.com/ZKPunk-Org/zk-insights
✨ Web collection version: https://insights.zkpunk.pro/
Special thanks to: Yingfei
In this episode, Anna Rose (https://x.com/annarrose) and Nico Mohnblatt (https://x.com/nico_mnbl) catch up with Ian Miers (https://x.com/secparam) from the University of Maryland (https://www.cs.umd.edu/), starting with his work on seminal ZK blockchain research, Zerocoin and Zerocash and the creation of the first zk-focused blockchain project Zcash. They then explore the history of trusted setups, including the trusted setup bug discovery in Zcash, and subsequent improvements like Powers of Tau. Ian also discussed his work on ZEXE, a system that has inspired the formation of Aleo, and his more recent works: zk-creds for building flexible anonymous credentials from existing identity signals like passports, and zk-promises for supporting anonymous reputation, moderation, and callbacks in decentralized systems. They also touch on broader topics like post-quantum security considerations, sybil resistance, and the need for programmable privacy tools.
In this module, Guillermo Angeris and Muthu Venkitasubramaniam, Co-founder at Ligero Inc, professor at Georgetown University and co-author of the original Ligero paper, deliver a comprehensive technical walkthrough of the Ligero proof system. After situating Ligero within the broader landscape of zero-knowledge proof constructions, Muthu introduces the MPC-in-the-head approach. Using this framework, he explains the Ligero proof system in detail, walking through its use of packed secret sharing, its constraint system, and the three core tests—proximity, multiplication, and linear—that ensure its correctness. Finally, he discusses practical considerations, including how Ligero achieves zero-knowledge, succinct verification, and memory efficiency, making it suitable for client-side proving on resource-constrained devices.
How Nodle's Digital Trust Network can support compliance without compromising privacy
Privacy will be the most important moat in crypto this year
The question for messaging apps this year isn’t just how to be quantum-resistant, but how to be decentralized
We’ll have ‘secrets-as-a-service’ to make privacy core infrastructure
In this paper, the authors present a subsequence scheme that separates proving either a subsequence or a non-subsequence argument into two phases: (i) proof of preprocessing and (ii) proof of (non-)subsequence argument, and achieve a text-sublinear proving time.
In this work, the authors present and implement a threshold signature scheme that is fully compatible with ML-DSA, supporting secure and efficient signing for a small number of parties, with an average communication per party upper bounded by 1 MB up to 6 parties. It is well-suited for real-world applications, including multi-device cryptocurrency wallets, threshold-based TLS authentication, and Tor's directory authorities.
Qurrency is an efficient UTXO-based privacy-preserving token system that includes an auditing mechanism and is secure against "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks. It has been demonstrated to be efficient through implementation and can be easily used on any EVM-based blockchain system.
The work provides new pairing-based NIZK arguments for the Ring-LWE-based public-key scheme proposed by Joye (CT-RSA'24). Compared to previous work, the new NIZK argument features a longer proof size and a faster prover.
If you're interested in our ZK Insights or have ideas for similar content to share, we highly encourage everyone to head over to our Github repo and submit a Pull Request. Join forces with like-minded ZKPunks to co-create!
✨ Github repo link: https://github.com/ZKPunk-Org/zk-insights
✨ Web collection version: https://insights.zkpunk.pro/
Special thanks to: Yingfei
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