2024 Zero Knowledge Summit Notes

The 11th Zero Knowledge Summit was held in Athens on April 10, with approximately 500 attendees participating. The conference covered several hot topics, including zero-knowledge proof hardware, SNARK performance, and decentralized proof networks.

ZK Hardware Progress

A researcher provided an overview of the ZK hardware field, including the use of general-purpose hardware, the manufacture of custom hardware, and companies running decentralized proof networks. He predicted that the "endgame" of zkVM could achieve a 1000-fold increase in computational efficiency and may impact the final version of Ethereum. He also mentioned that a competition for the formal validation of provers and validators would be announced, with a prize of up to $20 million.

The co-founder of a certain company introduced the Binius system, which is designed to integrate both the proof system and hardware. Early tests show that the performance of the Groestl hash function is significantly better than that of Keccak in certain applications.

Decentralized Prover Network

Industry insiders generally believe that the generation of proofs for large statements in the future will be carried out by a highly competitive, decentralized market of professional provers.

The co-founder of a certain company discussed the upcoming proof-of-stake network and introduced various potential mechanism designs. She believes that the design goals should be in the order of: minimal cost, maximum latency, and resistance to censorship. She predicts that the auction model is most likely to prevail, potentially resembling today's block construction.

A doctoral student from a certain university introduced a new paper on the economics of proof networks. He mentioned that bilateral auctions are easily affected by collusion and introduced an alternative mechanism called Proo-phi.

The Chief Technology Officer of a certain company discussed the proof market supporting multi-party computation (MPC), especially how to maintain privacy between small clients and large provers.

ZK Certificate Application

The meeting also discussed various efforts to build zero-knowledge credentials from the existing identity system:

• Email DKIM Signature Based Address Ownership Proof
• A system that uses OpenID Connect to interact with traditional web2 identities
• The method of constructing anonymous credentials from electronic passports

These technologies can be applied in multiple scenarios such as anonymous remittances and identity verification, and are expected to provide reliable identity credentials while protecting privacy.