From Auctions to ZK: An Educational Tour of MPC Tools by Aisling Connolly | Devcon SEA
Thu, Oct 2, 2025, 12:00 AM
Ethereum made a significant contribution to the Cypherpunk agenda by removing central points of trust, allowing us to gain accountability, yet losing us any semblance of privacy that we had. There is hope at hand for privacy, but hope, in this case, is rather technical. This talk aims to bring you up to scratch on privacy preserving tools while discussing S{N,T}ARKS, TEEs, FHE, how MPC elevates them in a decentralized setting, and highlighting their use from Auctions to ZK, from the 90s til now. Speaker(s): Aisling Connolly Skill level: Intermediate Track: Cypherpunk & Privacy Keywords: Zero-Knowledge, MPC, Homomorphic Encryption, confidentiality, computation Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum, https://warpcast.com/devcon Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/ Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on Swarm, IPFS and more. Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024. Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/
Speakers
Aisling holds degrees in math, economics, and computer science, and obtained her PhD from the ENS in Paris in 2019. She has spent the past years working extensively on threshold cryptography and confidential computing, in both trad-fi and web3. Beyond this, she also worked on scientific and technical direction, strategy, and the legal aspects of building and using privacy enhancing technologies.