In this week’s episode, Guillermo and I had a chance to catch up with Bobbin and Gaylord about Miden, exploring this private zkVM and their proposed edge blockchain architecture.
Bobbin kicked off with an update on the Miden project, picking up from our previous episode recorded back in 2021, and following the path of the project from its incubation in Polygon to its spin-out as a standalone project. It was also great to have Gaylord on the show; he and I worked together on ZK Hack from 2023 until earlier this year, and he even showed up for the interview in full ZK Hack attire (sadly this was wasted on our audio-only format, though he did tweet a pic 👀).
At one point in the conversation, we noted that everyone on the call had contributed to the ZK Whiteboard Sessions in some form over the past three years. Bobbin was part of the Season 1 programming team and a host, Gaylord worked with me on production and rolled out Season 2, and Guillermo (along with the BCC crew) helped program Season 3, where he’s also a host. You’ll see him in upcoming modules soon!
Key takeaways from Episode 376:
Miden was originally started as a zkVM project within Polygon (built on top of Bobbin’s earlier Winterfell STARK tools), Miden has since spun out into its own independent blockchain project.
The Edge Blockchain concept is where execution and state are pushed to the edges aka. user devices. This allows for client-side proving and ideally more user control over data and assets.
Instead of relying on RISC-V or EVM, Miden uses its own ISA. Developers can still write in Rust, which compiles down to Miden Assembly.
Despite broader industry hesitation about privacy post–Tornado Cash, Miden has kept it’s focus firmly on the topic. However they are taking a nuanced approach to the rollout of this, maintaining a centralised portion until security and privacy can be guaranteed for users.
The design of Miden takes inspiration from Zcash, actor-based systems, and some of the Libra-era work that was done at Meta (circa 2019-2020), work that also influenced projects like Sui.
As mentioned above, the whole crew had worked on ZK Whiteboard Sessions, so this episode doubled as a little reunion
Be sure to check out episode 376: the full episode page is here, or you can follow this thread for commentary.
Talk soon,
Anna
ECOSYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT
As we mentioned in the intro - ZK Hack recently kicked off season 3 of the ZK Whiteboard Sessions. ZK Whiteboard Sessions is an educational video series focused on the building blocks of ZK.
Subscribe to the ZK Podcast Youtube Channel for more videos as they are released!
Expect a new video every two weeks. Modules will be released here https://zkhack.dev/whiteboard/#season3