Deirdre Connolly is a cryptographic engineer at the Zcash Foundation. She works on secure implementations of cryptographic software with an eye on privacy applications, misuse-resistance, and quantum adversaries. Conrado Gouvêa is a cryptography engineer at the Zcash Foundation. He did research on efficient software implementation of cryptographic algorithms and has worked in the industry developing software for cryptographic devices such as tokens and hardware security modules (HSMs). In this talk, Deirdre and Conrado will review the current status of FROST implementations, including our fully-generic library frost-core. They will talk about upcoming work such as integrating FROST into the Zcash protocol and future features, such as distributed key generation.
Anna Kaplan is a security and cryptography researcher at Least Authority. She graduated from the Technical University of Munich with a B. Sc. and M. Sc. in Mathematics. Liz Steininger is the Managing Director of Least Authority in Berlin. Least Authority is a company supporting people’s right to privacy through security consulting and building privacy tech. Are you fascinated by zk-SNARKs and want to learn more about their inner workings? During this interactive workshop, Anna and Liz will focus on the mathematical and cryptographic foundations of zk-SNARKs by focusing on a pen-and-paper approach.
Zooko Wilcox is an original cypherpunk, long-standing technologist and entrepreneur. His work spans open and decentralized systems, cryptography, and information security. Zooko has contributed to an array of projects — many of which champion privacy implementations — and is best known as CEO and founder of Electric Coin Co., the team of scientists and engineers that launched the Zcash cryptocurrency. The Electric Coin Company has shared its interest in moving Zcash from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake. During his session, Zooko will discuss the Electric Coin Company’s motivations for such a move.
The @ZcashGrants Committee will be live in Vegas to discuss the grants program. Topics include a 2022 grant retrospective, increased outreach efforts to attract high-quality grant applicants, and the Global Ambassador Program. The committee will also explain their new Request for Proposal/Input (RFP/RFI) initiative, which relies heavily on community feedback and seeks to bring in talent and developers to help grow the adoption and usability of Zcash. The panel will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the work the committee does that’s not always evident from forum posts or meeting minutes, and will be followed by a Q&A session.
The Future of Decentralized Applications on Zcash, a Shared Community Roadmap (workshop) w/ QEDIT team. The ZSAs project is opening the door for the Zcash ecosystem to be much more functional and enable all kinds of (privacy) applications on-chain. From DeFi, to private governance for DAOs, there are plenty of specific directions that the community can and should take toward that goal. In this workshop, QEDIT will engage the community in a discussion to try to generate a shared roadmap.
