Zero Knowledge Summit 2024: Live Recording

Joseph Bonneau, research partner and assistant professor at New York University, attended the 11th Zero-Knowledge Summit held in Athens on April 10. The event attracted approximately 500 participants and featured four talks simultaneously throughout the day. Below is a summary of Bonneau's presentation, covering the latest advances in zero-knowledge hardware, SNARK performance, and proof network design.

ZK Hardware

The hardware support for proof generation has always been a long-term goal of the community. The first two speeches on the main stage outlined the latest developments in this field.

A researcher provided a comprehensive overview of ZK hardware, including the classification of companies in this field. He listed companies that use general-purpose hardware, those that manufacture custom hardware, and those that operate decentralized proof networks. He predicted that hardware-optimized SNARK verification systems and other upcoming optimizations, combined with dedicated hardware, could achieve a 1000-fold increase in computational efficiency, which could impact the final version of Ethereum. He also mentioned that a competition would be announced for formal verification of provers and verifiers, with a prize pool of up to $20 million.

The co-founders of a certain company discussed the concept of designing proof systems and hardware simultaneously. Their system utilizes binary tower fields and the sumcheck protocol. Early tests show that the performance of the Groestl hash function significantly outperforms Keccak in certain applications.

Decentralized Prover Network

Many industry insiders envision that in the future, the generation of proofs for large statements (such as the correctness of a batch of transactions in Rollups) will be completed 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, suggesting that competition-based or mining-based designs may not perform well. She proposed that the design goals should be, in order: minimum cost, maximum delay, and resistance to censorship. She predicted that issuance/staking models might be effective, but auction models are most likely to succeed, ultimately resembling today's block building.

A PhD student from Yale University introduced a new paper on the economics of proof-of-stake networks. He pointed out that bilateral auctions are susceptible to collusion between proof providers and bidders, and proposed an alternative mechanism called Proo-phi, which introduces new matching trades and proof mechanisms.

The Chief Technology Officer of a certain company discussed the proof market supporting multiparty computation (MPC), particularly the use of MPC to maintain privacy between small clients and large provers. He explored how to choose a combination of proof systems for linear operations to minimize costs.

ZK Certificate

Three different talks discussed the efforts to build zero-knowledge proofs from existing identity systems.

A co-founder of a certain company introduced ZK proof of ownership for email addresses. These rely on knowledge of the DKIM signatures of emails sent to a specific address. Many applications can use ZK to prove whether a user controls an email address, including remitting funds to an email address and anonymous reporting, among others.

Researchers at a certain laboratory discussed the technology of using OpenID Connect for interaction with traditional web2 identities. This technology interacts with existing OpenID providers to prove that users control a given address, enabling applications like remittances to Google or Facebook accounts.

A representative from a certain company discussed how to construct anonymous credentials from existing electronic passports. For example, users can prove that they hold a passport from a specific country and meet a certain age requirement without revealing their passport number or exact age.