Thread by @apruden08

Zero-knowledge proofs are the future for secure, trust-less, and scalable computing for Web3. How @z_prize is going to help accelerate that future 👇🧵

#zeroknowledge cryptography has countless applications in Web3. At a high-level though, their main utility is to 🔒secure🔒 and 📈scale 📈decentralized networks.

A zero-knowledge protocol consists of two parties👫: a *prover*👩 who makes a claim and a *verifier*👨‍🦱 who validates it. Typically these protocols are designed so that the vast majority of the "work" happens in the proving part vs. in the verification part.

This is a cryptographic protocol that provides the following guarantees:

🌐All possible statements can be proven
🤫Provers can't forge proofs that claim something is true when it is false or vice versa
☑️Verifiers learn only whether or not claim is true or false and nothing more

How does this🔒secure Web3 transactions? By providing a proof of a given tx or computation, rather than publishing the tx itself, it conceals private information and enables interesting new use cases like on-chain ID's such as @SpruceID, or private smart contracts.

How does it📈scale Web3? By compressing multiple transactions/transitions into a single proof, zk-proofs can save precious blockspace on Layer-1, while also enabling trustless light-clients and lightweight mobile wallets like @CeloOrg's Plumo.

@AleoHQ we also use zero-knowledge proofs to build an entirely new virtual machine architecture, which has the advantages of both a zk-rollup but enables better privacy and interoperability compared to building on top of existing Layer-1's

So what's the catch🤔? As mentioned before, the majority of the computation and work happens on the prover side, and depending on the application, can be much slower than running the computation natively w/o zero-knowledge.

But the space is innovating at an astonishing rate . Only a few years ago the state-of-the art was producing a single proof per minute. Now in deployed systems like @Filecoin and @AleoHQ provers generate 1000s of proofs per second.

#zeroknowledge cryptography is the future for Web3. That's why we came up w/ @z_prize to advance these protocols through competition w/ $7M in prizes. This is a collaboration between 32 companies in the industry including @Polkadot, @AleoHQ, @anomanetwork, @MantaNetwork

Working together, we can help shape the direction of this technology for the benefit of all, and help accelerate the advancement of this new technology to make ensure privacy, scalability, and compliance for the next-generation web.

Learn more at zprize.io