Zero-Knowledge Summit 2024: On-Site Report

On April 10, 2024, the 11th Zero Knowledge Summit was held in Athens. This summit was hosted by the Zero Knowledge podcast and had approximately 500 attendees, with four presentations taking place simultaneously throughout the day. Below is a summary of the key topics discussed at the summit, covering advancements in zero-knowledge hardware, SNARK performance, and proof network design.

ZK Hardware Development

For a long time, hardware support for proof generation has been a focal point of industry attention. On the main stage of this summit, two speeches outlined the latest developments in this field.

A researcher from a certain foundation provided a comprehensive overview of ZK hardware, including a classification of companies in this field. These companies include those using general-purpose hardware, those manufacturing custom hardware, and those operating decentralized proof networks. He predicted that the "endgame" of zkVM could achieve a 1000-fold increase in computational efficiency, which would have a profound impact on the future of blockchain technology. He also mentioned that the certain foundation would announce a competition for the formal validation of provers and verifiers, with a prize of up to $20 million.

The co-founders of a certain company discussed the concept of simultaneously designing proof systems and hardware. Their system uses binary tower fields and the sumcheck protocol. An interesting conclusion drawn from early tests is that the performance of the hash function Groestl significantly outperforms Keccak, which means that using Groestl may be more advantageous in certain applications.

Decentralized Proof-of-Stake Network

Many in the industry envision a future scenario where the generation of proofs for large statements (such as the correctness of a batch of transactions in a Rollup) will be accomplished by a competitive, decentralized market of specialized provers.

The co-founder of a certain company introduced their upcoming proof-of-stake network. She discussed various potential mechanism designs for decentralized proof-of-stake networks and predicted that competition-based or mining-based designs may not yield ideal results. She believes that the design goals should be, in order: minimizing costs, maximizing latency, and resisting censorship. She predicts that issuance/staking models may be effective, but auction models are most likely to prevail, ultimately resembling the current block-building model.

A doctoral student from a certain university introduced a new paper on the economics of proof networks. He mentioned that bilateral auctions are susceptible to collusion between the prover and the bidders, and they proposed an alternative mechanism called Proo-phi, which introduces new matching transactions and proof mechanisms.

The Chief Technology Officer of a company discussed the proof market supporting Multi-Party Computation (MPC), particularly how to leverage MPC to protect the privacy between small clients and large provers. He explored how to choose a combination of proof systems to perform linear operations in order to minimize costs in MPC.

ZK Certificate

Three discussions on building zero-knowledge credentials from existing identity systems were also held at the summit, each relying on a different existing identity system.

A co-founder of a project discussed ZK email address ownership proofs. These proofs rely on the verification of DKIM signatures for emails sent to specific addresses, which have been widely deployed by major email providers. This technology can be applied to various scenarios, such as anonymous remittances to email addresses or anonymous reporting.

A scientist from a certain laboratory introduced a project that uses OpenID Connect to interact with traditional web2 identities. This project is capable of interacting with existing OpenID providers and proving that users control a given address, thereby enabling applications similar to sending remittances to social media accounts.

Members of a certain project team discussed how to build anonymous credentials from existing electronic passports. For example, users can prove that they hold a passport from a certain country and have reached a specific age without disclosing the exact passport number or precise age.

These discussions demonstrate the broad application prospects of zero-knowledge proof technology in authentication and privacy protection, providing new possibilities for future digital identity management.