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Hi! I am Nico, a researcher taking interest in applied cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies. My work focuses on zero-knowledge proofs, their security and applications. I also dabble in related topics such as threshold cryptography and MPC.

Aside from my own research, I enjoy writing educational content, explainers and technical summaries for all levels of understanding. You can find some of these articles in the Technical Writing section below.

Currently, I am a Researcher at Geometry Research. I am also a recurring co-host on the ZeroKnowledge Podcast.

Projects

papers

• Arke: Scalable and Byzantine Fault Tolerant Privacy-Preserving Contact Discovery Scheme. (ePrint, code)

  Nicolas Mohnblatt, Alberto Sonnino, Kobi Gurkan, Philipp Jovanovic. Aug 2023.

• Sangria: a Folding Scheme for PLONK. (technical note)

  Nicolas Mohnblatt. Apr 2023.

talks and panels

• Panel on Advances and Narrative of ZK in 2024, with Jim Posen and Anna Rose. (recorded talk)

  Web3 Summit (Berlin). Aug 2024.

• Under the Hood of ZK x ID (recorded talk, slides).

  Web3 Summit (Berlin). Aug 2024.

• Arke: Privacy-Preserving and Decentralised Contact Discovery, joint work with Alberto Sonnino, Kobi Gurkan and Philipp Jovanovic. (recorded talk, slides)

  ZKSummit 11 (Athens). Apr 2024.

• Modular ZK Systems Panel, with Benedikt Bünz, Christopher Goes, and Zac Williamson, moderated by Anna Rose. (recorded talk)

  Modular Summit (Paris). Jul 2023.

• Panel on Folding Scheme, with Benedikt Bünz and Justin Drake. (recorded talk)

  ZK Paris. Jul 2023.

• Sangria is Relaxed PLONK: a Nova-like Folding Scheme for PLONK. (recorded talk, slides)

  ZKSummit 9 (Lisbon). Apr 2023.

• Enabling Decentralised Card Games with Zero-knowledge Proofs. (slides)

  ZKProof 5, Ingonyama side event. Nov 2022.

technical writing

ZK Jargon Decoder: I write (and try to maintain) informal definitions for jargon commonly found in technical writing.

Mental Poker in the Age of SNARKs, Part 1 and Part 2. We revisit the famous mental poker problem with the efficient proving techniques that emerged between 2010-2022.

Paper Speedrun series. A series of short and accessible paper summaries for the Geometry blog.

development

Most of the cryptographic code I write are proof-of-concept implementations using Rust.

• Arke cryptographic library. This library contains the cryptographic primitives needed for our implementation of Arke (see papers above). These include Shamir secret sharing, an identity-based key exchange, a SNARK-based protocol for blind signature verification and a secret handshake. Built with arkworks. (code)

• An experimental implementation of function-hiding functional commitments from the Marlin pre-processed SNARK, with Andrija Novakovic. Based on the paper by Boneh, Nguyen and Ozdemir. (code, blog post)

• A field-agnostic library for Mental Poker using threshold encryption and NARKs, with Andrija Novakovic and Kobi Gurkan. Built with arkworks. (code, intro documentation)

• Proof-toolbox. A collection of common tools used in ZK applications, with Andrija Novakovic, Kobi Gurkan and Koh Wei Jie. Built with arkworks. (code)

About me

I am also a musician, my main instrument is the bass. Since 2015, I have been writing, recording and touring as part of HMLTD.

When I am not proving things or making music, I like to play chess. Happy to play some games online or in person when we cross paths.

Contact

Email: nico [at] geometry [dot] dev

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Actual Progress, comic by xkcd