The dive into ZK with Iron Fish’s Elena Nadolinski

This week Anna and James chat with Elena Nadolinski, founder of Iron Fish, about the new privacy network and what led her to this point.

Elena recounts her journey into crypto, starting from AirBnB and falling into the rabbit hole of Ethereum hackathons, Solidity, and NFTs, eventually leading her to exploration of zero knowledge proofs for honest computation. This deep dive into SNARKs and Sapling led to the creation of Beanstalk, later Iron Fish, which aims to be the shielded pool for all other blockchain assets.

Note: James is an investor in Iron Fish

Here are some links:

Elena’s slides about Sapling from Zcon
Iron Fish whitepaper
Halo with Sean Bowe and Daira Hopwood, Zero Knowledge Episode 123
Zexe: Zero Knowledge Computation with Pratyush Mishra, Zero Knowledge Episode 85
Ariel Gabizon on his work with zkSNARKs, Zero Knowledge Episode 86

Don’t forget to subscribe to the ZkMesh newsletter, aggregating all of the latest developments in ZK each month. The next release is due this week!

We also launched a newsletter for announcements related to what we do at ZK podcast. Subscribe to make sure you never miss a zkSessions or studyClub event!

Thanks to this episode’s sponsor, Aave

Aave is an open source, decentralised non-custodial liquidity protocol on Ethereum.

With Aave, users can participate as depositors meaning they provide liquidity to earn a passive income. or they can also act as borrowers to borrow in an overcollateralized way or undercollateralized way (think: one-block liquidity Flash Loan).

Aave has also deployed a new market on Polygon’s sidechain to let users pay much lower gas fees. Assets can be transferred from Ethereum with the Polygon Bridge and put to use on Aave’s Polygon markets.

Learn more about it in the link to the blog here:

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram

Catch us on Youtube

Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit

Give us feedback! -https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A

Support our Gitcoin Grant

Support us on the ZKPatreon

Donate through coinbase.commerce

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz