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Sam Kessler
Sam is a reporter at CoinDesk focused on decentralized technology, DeFi and DAOs. It possesses eth, btc and matic.
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The financing cycle, carried out by the polychain capital, values = zero; foundation, which began in 2018 as a research collective, but made the transition to a more traditional, $220-million startup, according to a press release by the company. (And no, “=nil;” is not a typo, but a company name playfully – if confusingly – borrowed from programmer-speak for zero.)
“Proof Market, a trustless data accessibility protocol, enables layer 1 and 2 blockchains and protocols to generate zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs on demand for seamless data-sharing without reliance on centralized intermediaries,” =nil; explained in a statement obtained by CoinDesk.
ZK cryptography is increasingly common throughout the blockchain industry, with applications ranging from privacy and security to data compression. Read more: cryptography without knowledge in 2023: the year when confidentiality becomes convenient cryptography is more and more common in the blockchain industry, with apps ranging from confidentiality and security to data compression. The technology makes it possible to "prove" that a declaration is true by generating a string of letters and characters, a "proof of zk", for a supposedly verifier.
The auditor executes this evidence through some sort of crypto auditor – a computational algorithm that uses sophisticated mathematics to confirm the statement without requiring details beyond the evidence of the gibberish itself.
Zero-knowledge technology has become a core component for countless crypto protocols, powering everything from Ethereum scaling systems such as zkSyncStarknet to privacy chains like Zcash. Zero-knowledge technology has become a basic component for countless crypto protocols, powering everything from Ethereum scaling systems such as zksyncstarknet to chains of confidentiality like zcash.
But zk protocol developers are regularly confronted with challenges arising from the fact that evidence generation is an expensive, technically complex and time-consuming undertaking. These obstacles make it difficult to develop zk platforms, whose reliability is generally based on the idea of making it possible for anyone – or at least a large pool of volunteers – to generate evidence as a way to decentralize trust.
Today, many zk platforms produce the tests themselves or outsource the task to hand-picked partners, which negates most of the claimed advantages of the technology in the name of seed. With the evidence market, protocols requiring zk evidence can pay trusted third parties to generate it.
For instance, a zk blockchain bridge can use the proof marketplace to pay a third party to generate a proof representing the bridge’s state (without the project needing to recruit and sustain a dedicated prover community itself). =zero; the evidence market is usually agnostic about blockchain, which means that projects in ecosystems will be able to buy and sell evidence.
With Proof Marketplace, ZK proof-based protocols can pay trusted third parties to generate them.
