The Next Wave of Innovation in Zero-Knowledge Technology Will Be Driven by Zero Trust Protocols
Few crypto abbreviations distill more weight than the letters ZKP. Zero-knowledge proofs are a powerful technology with a multitude of use cases, from financial privacy to identity verification. As understanding of this blockchain-adjacent tech has grown, so has the number of proposed applications for ZKPs. But despite its vast potential, adoption of zero-knowledge-based protocols has remained limited to a handful of Layer 2 networks so far.
The reason for lagging adoption concerns some of the challenges that come with ZKPs, including the increased computational burden placed on blockchain networks. But web3 developers don’t give up easily and a number of zero-knowledge projects have devised solutions that will enable ZKPs to achieve the industry-wide adoption they deserve.
What You Should Know About Zero-Knowledge
Don’t let its name fool you: there’s a lot to learn about zero-knowledge technology, which adds an additional layer of complexity onto blockchain design. For engineers who are au fait with ZKPs, however, the trade-off is worth it on account of the use cases that zero-knowledge tech supports, particularly in the context of privacy.
ZKPs enable one party to prove to another party that a statement is true without revealing the underlying information used to prove it. It sounds like a niche technology with marginal applications, but in fact this ability has massive implications for building decentralized applications. Not only can sensitive financial data be concealed on public networks, but so can personal data, enabling protocol-level KYC/AML for accessing RWAs, for instance, without creating a trove of data for hackers to target.
Promising as ZK technology is, there are a number of challenges that developers are forced to contend with. In short, because it’s computationally intensive, ZKPs make scaling hard, and the tech’s complexity can impair wider adoption both from a developer and user perspective. Moreover, the need for a random number generator to create a trusted setup when creating a ZK protocol forms a theoretical attack vector that demands robust access controls to prevent compromisation.
Making ZKPs a Genuine Game-Changer
Zero-knowledge tech has the potential to be a genuine game-changer in the fields of privacy, healthcare, trading, real-world assets, and much more. But for this to happen, the advantages to implementing it need to outweigh the downsides such as increased developmental burden. Thankfully, recent innovations within the field of ZK technology are making it easier to work with and solving some of its well-documented downsides.
From a security perspective, a recent research paper has demonstrated that zero-knowledge proofs can be engineered to prevent information leakage – even when the RNG involved with proof generation is reused. This is a significant breakthrough that will give businesses greater confidence in the inviolability of ZKPs and lead to greater adoption in information-critical areas.
From a blockchain developer perspective, meanwhile, advancements in modular design have enabled builders to support ZK-based solutions without adding complexity to their existing tech stack. Modular design is a cornerstone of blockchain architecture, but has proven tougher to pioneer in the field of ZKPs. Thanks to protocols such as Pera (formerly dWallet), however, web3 projects can now enjoy the benefits of zero-knowledge tech without the downsides.
It’s part of a new breed of cryptography projects seeking to iterate on the capabilities of zero-knowledge technology. Pera’s use of ZTPs, which can be thought of as the evolution of ZK tech, is based on multi-party computation (MPC) which allows computation to be performed by multiple parties without secret information being disclosed. Pera’s version of MPC, known as 2PC-MPC, is highly scalable and massively decentralized, potentially supporting thousands of nodes.
Pera’s ZK implementation is focused on maintaining user privacy through the use of Zero Trust Protocols (ZTPs) that can operate across multiple chains without requiring third party dependencies. As a result, it’s much easier to implement cryptographic verification for things such as user identities on any network.
The Best Is Yet to Come
The technology is now in place for ZKPs to fulfill the sort of use cases for which the technology was long envisioned, starting with onchain privacy and data handling. Security, accessibility, and scalability challenges have all been solved, leaving the biggest hurdle as adoption. The tech is here, in other words, but it needs to be widely adopted, and not just on ZK L2s, but across the entire multichain landscape. If that can be achieved, zero-knowledge technology will no longer be talked of in terms of what it can ultimately achieve but in terms of how it’s solving real-world problems in the here and now.
