How Things Work #0: ZODA and The Accidental Computer

[patrick-ogrady]

For the pilot episode of "How Things Work", we chat with the Alex Evans and Guillermo Angeris (from Bain Capital Crypto) about their research into blockchain scaling.

We first pull back the curtain on Data Availability Sampling (DAS) and explore how systems today encode data for light client sampling. Then, we discuss how their recent work, ZODA (Zero-Overhead Data Availability), promises to make this process more (or even optimally) efficient by transforming the encoding of some data into a proof of its correctness. After that, we dive into a discussion about The Accidental Computer (Polynomial Commitments from Data Availability), a surprising result that shows that succinct proof systems can reuse work already done during data availability encoding to reduce (or wholly remove) work associated with the proof system's polynomial commitment scheme. Last, we chat about implementation progress (in Julia) and how blockchains could be designed to take advantage of this work.

X: https://x.com/commonwarexyz/status/1887533469213073639
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-things-work/id1794554748
YouTube: https://youtu.be/eOGQOaqvgnI
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4miKEaz7QcnIjLZ40ZKKf4