Thread by @MantaNetwork

🤔 Why do Zero-Knowledge Proofs Matter?

A Zero-Knowledge Proof (#ZKP) has evolved from an idea in GMR’s paper 20 years ago to a technology that empowers many Web3 companies.

Why is it so important and why is @MantaNetwork betting on it? Here’s a thread:

In cryptography, encryption is a process of converting plaintext (readable text) into ciphertext (unreadable text). #ZKP, however, is a higher-level encryption on computation. It’s like proving you know 3+5=8 without revealing how.

Why do we need #ZKP in #Web3? Blockchain builds trust through a distributed-ledger system with nodes/computers around the world repeatedly racing to solve the same computations. That’s why consensus is so expensive.

#ZKP can reduce the cost significantly: one node computes while other nodes verify the computation. This is also how zk-rollups work. Instead of re-executing 10,000 transactions, the validators only need to verify a single ZKP execution that contains those 10,000 transactions.

On-chain privacy is another important utility of #ZKP in #Web3. ZKP is the ⚠️only⚠️ solution for reaching consensus on-chain without exposing users’ information.

At @MantaNetwork, we learned from the success of @zcash. For example, both MantaPay and Zcash are UTXO-based private payment protocols. Follow in their footsteps, we have made many changes to improve the user experience.

Zcash is a single-asset privacy protocol, which supports the privatization of $ZEC, its own public token. @MantaNetwork can privatize all parachain assets, like $MOVR, $ACA etc. in the @Polkadot ecosystem and assets in other ecosystems through decentralized bridges.

We recently introduced #zkAssets, a new private-by-default crypto asset class that includes fungible tokens (e.g., ERC20), non-fungible tokens (e.g., ERC721, ERC1155), and non-transferable non-fungible tokens (e.g., soul bound tokens).

The goal of @MantaNetwork is to bring privacy to #web3.

Thanks to advances in #ZKP technology in recent years, Manta leverages the ZKP-friendly Poseidon hash and a streamlined protocol design, bringing a 10x prover time improvement over ZCash.

We selected #groth16 over #Plonk because benchmarks demonstrate the former has better performance despite the fact that it needs a trusted setup. Trusted setups have been used by various privacy protocols such as Zcash, Aztec, and Aleo to help the networks become fully trustless.

To ensure the setup is secure and trustworthy, @MantaNetwork is inviting some of the most well-known figures in the #web3 space as well as community members to join the ceremony. Stay tuned for more details about the upcoming trusted setup ceremony.

Further Reading & References:

https://twitter.com/manta_china/status/1567789401220202496

mantanetwork.medium.com/trusted-setups…

mirror.xyz/0xeB125d270FC1…

medium.com/manta-network/…