Episode 295: Return to MPC with Nigel Smart

Zero Knowledge

In this week’s episode, Anna Rose is joined by Nigel Smart, Professor at KU Leuven and Chief Academic Officer at Zama to discuss the advancements in MPC over recent years. Nigel unpacks core components of MPC systems, including garbled circuits, secret sharing, and FHE. They discuss both systems-level applications like DKGs and Threshold Signature Schemes and actual real-world deployments. Throughout the episode, they also discuss how MPC and ZK differ, but how they can be used together to enhance each other's capabilities.

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Here’s some additional links for this episode:

• 17 misconceptions about SNARKs (and why they hold us back by Justin Thaler
• Nigel Smart’s GitHub
• Unbound Security GitHub
• Unbound Security Twitter
• MPC Alliance
• What is a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet?

Relevant ZK Podcast eps

Trusted Setups & FHE

• Episode 76: Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups & Elliptic Curve Cryptography
• Episode 124: Exploring FHE with Flavio Bergamaschi from IBM Research
• Episode 133: Trusted Setup Ceremonies Explored
• Episode 137: Trusted Setup Bonus: Tornado Cash
• Episode 248: Revisiting FHE with Rand Hindi from Zama
• Episode 270: FHE and ZKPs with Sunscreen’s Ravital Solomon

MPC

• Episode 90: MPC systems with Nigel Smart
• Episode 203: MPC and DAGs with Aleph Zero’s Adam Gagol & Matthew Niemerg

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