Thread by @AleoHQ

🌘 Zero-knowledge proofs are often thought of as a way to conceal information. That's true. But they also have another property that turns out to be very useful for scaling decentralized networks: *succinctness*. 🧵

2/ First, let's review some of the different classes of zero-knowledge proofs 📜:

- Sigma Protocols
- Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge arguments (NIZKs)
- Succinct Non-interactive ARGuments (SNARGs)
- Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (SNARKs)

3/ A SNARK is also called a zkSNARK if it has the property of "zero-knowledge," which states that the proof shouldn't reveal anything other than whether or not the statement is true. 🙈

4/ We @AleoHQ use a type of zkSNARK proof system called Marlin, co-authored by @zkproofs who also helped write the Zexe paper upon which Aleo is based.

Marlin has all the benefits of a SNARK (succinct proofs & a non-interactive protocol), but it is also *universal* 🪐

5/ So a single setup ceremony suffices to prove *any* arbitrary statement up to a certain size. This is how @AleoHQ achieves greater programmability, akin to smart contracts on Ethereum. 🖥️

Learn more about Marlin: eprint.iacr.org/2019/1047.pdf

6/ Again, one of the properties that make zkSNARKs like Marlin very nice for blockchains is that property of succinctness (the "S" in SNARK). Basically, this means that the proof of a statement is much, much smaller than the statement itself. 💫

7/ It's this property that's used in scalability solutions like rollups. In a #ZKRollup, the "statement" being proven is a collection of transactions/state transitions. These can be "batched" into a zkSNARK that cryptographically guarantees all of those transactions at once. ✉️

8/ In @AleoHQ, each transaction can itself consist of 64 state transitions. So every transaction on snarkOS (our decentralized network) is basically a rollup transaction, increasing the throughput potential and achieving scale needed for real-world applications. 🚀

9/ Instead of batching a series of independent user transactions, zkSNARKs can also recursively prove the validity of an entire blockchain w/ a single proof. @MinaProtocol, @CeloOrg use this for super-light clients, and @AleoHQ plans to integrate this too in the future in WASM✨

In conclusion, zkSNARKs do more than secure sensitive information. They can help #Web3 scale by compressing multiple state changes (like transactions) into single succinct proofs, enabling more information to be packed into the same space w/o sacrificing security.

🏁 End/