The Road to STARKs and Miden with Bobbin Threadbare

This week, Anna chats with Bobbin Threadbare about his project Miden, a STARK-based roll-up which was recently purchased by Polygon. We recap the differences between STARKs and SNARKs and the increasingly blurred line between these two proving systems. We then map Bobbin’s journey to Miden VM (now Polygon Miden), how it originated from his earlier project Distaff VM and now incorporates the Winterfell prover from his days at Facebook.

Here are some links for the episode:

• Episode 194: zkEVM with Jordi & David from Hermez
• Blog Post: Polygon Announces Polygon Miden
• Miden repo
• Introducing Distaff: a STARK-based VM written in Rust
• Distaff VM repo
• AirScript - a low-level language for zk-STARKs
• AirScript: Arithmetization for zk-STARKs, with Bobbin
• Blog Post: Open sourcing Winterfell: A STARK prover and verifier
• Winterfell repo
• Vitalik’s write-up on STARKs, Part 1 of 3

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