Original text: " Looking for the new password of the 2023 ZK track "
Transcription: Biteye Core Contributor Xiaoyaoji
Edit: Biteye core contributor Crush
meeting members
- Moderator: Jesse, Biteye Content Team Leader
Guests:
- Cora, Polygon Head of China
- Leo, StarkNet Chinese core contributor
- Todd, A&T Capital Investment Director
- Young, Scroll Researcher
- Zhixiong Pan, ChainFeeds Founder
Question Guide
1. What is ZK Rollup ? What role does it play in the scaling and privacy of our blockchain?
2. What are the characteristics of the three different projects Polygon, StarkNet, and Scroll for the ZKevm solution? And the current progress and future development plan?
3. What role will zero-knowledge proof play in the future Web3? In addition to the expansion and privacy that are often talked about, are there any scenarios that have not been explored? What other early projects are worthy of attention in the zero-knowledge proof track?
4. As ordinary investors, if we want to take the express train of ZK, what can we do?
meeting summary
- Zkevm classification: According to V God zkevem's 4 classifications (Ethereum compatibility and zk proof time trade-off), scroll and polygon are building the second classification (full evm compatibility), and starkware can also compile Solidity into Cairo Implement the fourth category (high-level programming language compatibility).
- Project plan: Scroll's test network will be migrated to Ethereum Goerli in late February, and the main network will be launched at the end of the year; polygon's zkevm will launch the main network beta version on March 27; Starkware's Cairo will be upgraded to Cairo1.0, which requires community voting.
- New trends in the project: Polygon ID based on zk technology; Visa has recently made a payment application in Starkware, focusing on Starkware's chain games and defi; Scroll's open source method and the community jointly build zkevm, and a distributed prover network.
- zk application scenarios: expansion, privacy (including zk-based KYC), zk cross-chain bridge, zk oracle, zk+gamefi, zk tools (such as using semaphore to develop private social unirep.social).
Conference content
Cora:
Hello, everyone, I am Cora, from Polygon, Polygon I think everyone should be familiar with it now, it is now the third largest ecology of the entire blockchain, it was a sidechain of Ethereum in the early days, and then it was a layer2 around A full-site expansion solution of Ethereum, including the main network is also on the chain.
The main network has been launched in 2020, and then we will evolve from a site-wide expansion solution around Ethereum to a solution specializing in zk.
In 2021, we launched a $1 billion fund dedicated to the research and development of zk, and Polygon is now launching zkevm for zk.
March 27th is the day when the zkevm mainnet test version is launched, including the use of zk technology, and we have also made polygonID. In the future, it will involve, for example, cooperation with a mobile phone service provider in the UK and HTC.
In the future, the Socialfi track will also have a relatively large integration with PolygonID, and I hope everyone looks forward to it, thank you.
Leo:
Hello everyone, I am Leo from StarkNet Chinese. I am mainly responsible for the content education of StarkNet in the Chinese community. StarkNet is a Layer 2 expansion solution made by the StarWare team with Stark validity proof.
StarWare first developed the well-known StarkEx, and its applications include DYDX IMX and other well-known projects.
The total transaction volume that has been processed now is more than 850 billion, and the highest transaction volume in a single day is more than 10 billion. StartEx is the earliest expansion scheme that utilizes zk technology stark validity proof.
After StartEx, StarkWare launched StarkNet, which is an open platform for general computing.
At the very beginning, there were many developers and applications on StarkNet. The most famous one is the recent visa initiative to use account abstraction on StarkNet to make some transfer payment applications.
So StarkNet will have a very different performance on Layer2 in the future, I hope everyone can pay more attention, thank you.
Todd:
I'm Todd, from A&T Capital, our Fund has invested in ZK so far, like Scroll, delphinus lab, and recently participated in some hardware investments. ZK is also a direction that I focus on and research, so I will introduce it here first.
Young:
Hello everyone, I am Young. Currently doing some technical research on ZK and Ethereum, and for Scroll, we are at a bytecode level to be compatible with Ethereum’s zk Rollup, which is evm’s ZK Rollup. Scroll expands Ethereum without sacrificing security.
What makes us different from other expansion solutions is that our developers can have the exact same development experience as Ethereum on Scroll.
At present, we are working with the Ethereum Foundation to build zkevm in an open source way. Therefore, Scroll should be said to be the Layer 2 with the best performance.
From the perspective of the whole ZKevm, from the first day of Build, we use an open source method. In fact, there is such an open source code, which has many unique attributes for the entire project. All PRs and codes have passed through some contributors and the community. Peer review is such an open source atmosphere that attracts a lot of zk development talents, as well as some academic institutions in industries that pay attention to ZK.
For the current developer experience, if you deploy on us, you don’t need to recompile or audit, and you can seamlessly migrate from the original EVM to the Scroll network, which will be very good for the developer experience.
In addition, in terms of Proof, we will have a Proof network, which can efficiently support us to do some parallel accelerated calculations to help prove the fast generation.
We will build a decentralized Prover network, and then we will have an extremely fast GPU solution to support it.
The current situation of the entire network is that in October last year, developers and some DeFi were allowed to deploy contracts on it, including some cross-chains of some ERC20 tokens.
For now, we will launch the ETH Goerli test network around the end of February. The function of this version will be a more complete proof, and then we will convert all codes to zk.
Our current ecological cooperation includes Lens, The graph, Ledger, and Orbiter. At present, dozens of projects have entered our testnet, and more than 100 projects are doing some tests on our testnet.
At present, the digitization of the entire test network is about 300 times the total transaction volume of our peers doing zkevm, and it should be about 20,000 times the current total transaction volume of zkSync.
Pan Zhixiong:
My name is Pan Zhixiong, and we are currently working on a content aggregation platform called ChainFeeds. Usually, I pay more attention to some developments related to cryptography and zk, and I will do some learning. Today I am mainly learning from the project parties.
Jesse:
Before we start, let me briefly introduce what zero-knowledge proof is and how it works. Zero-knowledge proof Its English is Zero-knowledge Proof, also known as zk, which is a mathematical protocol proposed as early as 1985.
There are two important roles in zero-knowledge proof, one is the prover, who wants to prove that he knows a certain information, and the other is the verifier, which is used to verify whether the prover knows the information. Zero-knowledge proof allows the prover to come to the verifier To prove the truth of a certain thing, but apart from this fact, will not reveal any other information.
Therefore, zero-knowledge proof provides an effective and almost risk-free way of data sharing. Using zero-knowledge proof, we can retain the ownership of the data, which can greatly improve privacy protection, and may make our data leakage become a Past tense.
Zero-knowledge proofs have three characteristics, namely completeness, rationality, and zero-knowledge. Integrity means that if a statement is true, honest verifiers will be convinced by honest provers, that is, if a fact is true, then it cannot be wrong.
Rationality means that if a statement is false, in the vast majority of cases, the deceitful prover cannot convince the honest verifier of this false proof, that is, if an event is false, then it must be true no.
The last bit of zero knowledge, if a claim is true, the verifier cannot obtain any extra information except that the claim is true. So how does zero-knowledge proof work? It is mainly divided into interactive, zero-knowledge proofs and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. The interactive is composed of three parts, which are evidence, challenge and response.
Evidence refers to secret information, information that you don’t want others to know. Evidence is used to create a series of questions, and only those who know the information can answer these questions correctly. The verifier will first initiate a challenge, and he will randomly A question is extracted to ask the prover to answer. After the prover accepts the question, the result of the calculation will be returned to the verifier. The response of the prover can enable the verifier to check whether the prover knows the proof.
If this process is repeated many times, the probability that the prover guesses the correct answer will become very low without knowing the secret information, which is why zero-knowledge proof is effective, but interactive Zero-knowledge proof has certain limitations. On the one hand, it requires us to perform repeated verifications many times, and the efficiency will be relatively low.
On the other hand, each proof cannot be reused in independent verification, so in fact, interactive proofs are relatively inefficient.
Therefore, someone proposed a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof, which shares a key with the prover and verifier, and makes the zero-knowledge proof more effective by performing only one authentication.
And once the proof is generated, anyone with a shared key and verification algorithm can verify it. Therefore, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof is a major breakthrough in zk technology, and it also promotes the vigorous development of the current zk track. The main methods are the well-known ZK-SNARK and ZK-STARK.
Jesse: After understanding the zero-knowledge proof, let's move on to the questioning session. First of all, the first question is, what is ZK Rollup ? What role does it play in the scaling and privacy of our blockchain?
Young:
Regarding zero-knowledge proof, its concept is relatively broad, so I suggest you read related articles.
Then I will add a case to the zero-knowledge proof. For example, in a scene, you know the phone number of the live host, but you cannot expose his number. If you know the information, you can call him directly. If his phone rings at the scene, it means you know his information.
So you have to prove the authenticity of a statement without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself.
Regarding ZK Rollup , we can first understand what Roll up is. It is actually a way to move calculations off-chain while putting some recorded messages or transactions on Layer 1.
Roll up essentially realizes two major directions. It releases some resources of the original technical layer, and at the same time inherits the security of the current Layer 1.
Then Roll up is mainly divided into two types, one is Optimism Roll-up, and the other is ZK Rollup that I will talk about today. One of the starting points of ZK Rollup is that there is a problem on Layer1 at the beginning. Every transaction needs to be broadcast to a P2P network. Each node will receive a block full of transactions, and everyone needs to re-execute all the transactions in it. Transactions, this method is actually very inefficient at Layer 1, and there will be a lot of redundancy.
So the idea behind ZK Rollup is that you don’t need to broadcast each transaction to a P2P network, on the contrary, send all transactions to an offline Layer 2 node, assuming you have received 1000 For transactions, he can generate a proof of mathematical proof, which is a proof generated by some transactions that depend on input. He does not need to rebroadcast to all transactions, he only needs to submit a part of this transaction.
For example, some important information such as the account value can be recovered. It can be used as a public input and added with a proof. It is much smaller than the original transaction, and the effect of verifying these proofs and you have to re-execute and calculate these transactions are completely equivalent.
Therefore, we can attribute ZK Rollup to three points. It uses ZK-SNARK to verify transactions.
Secondly, it can verify the correctness of the transaction without trusting the prover among all nodes. At the same time, it inherits the security of Ethereum while lowering the transaction cost.
Regarding the expansion and privacy of ZK Rollup , the mainstream zkevm does not consider privacy.
In fact, one of the features in ZK-SNARK is mainly used to compress the calculation amount. At present, in this area, there is no way to compare the ZKevm project with some privacy protection projects, but privacy is a very important direction.
Cora:
ZKevm generally understands that ZK Rollup is used to solve the problem of evm compatibility. Simply put, it is to make the zero-knowledge proof ZK technology better compatible with Ethereum's existing infrastructure, and then improve the efficiency of zk proof generation and verification.
The reason why the evm compatibility of ZK Rollup has become a problem that needs to be solved is that Ethereum did not consider compatibility with ZK technology at the beginning of its establishment. Now it is very slow to use evm to directly generate proofs for verifying zk. According to the current situation of Ethereum , it may take several hours, so ZK Rollup needs to strike a balance between evm compatibility and ZK efficiency.
Previously, the entire industry believed that zkevm equivalent to evm would not exist. The Ethereum community had to make certain compromises, such as withdrawal delays and fraud proofs, designing a new language for ZK Rollup , or using a special compiler to be compatible with zkevm Relatively speaking, there is a lack of support for existing Ethereum development tools.
To achieve true evm equivalence means that Ethereum can be expanded without taking compromise measures, and the best way to expand Ethereum is to retain the existing Ethereum ecology, such as code tools and The infrastructure is all that needs to work.
In a previous blog of V God, he made a detailed division of zkevm. For example, type 1 is the most compatible, but ZK has the lowest efficiency. This is the most ideal form he personally wants.
Type 2 is a goal that Polygon currently wants to achieve. Although it is not completely equivalent to Ethereum, it is completely equivalent to evm. Type 2 will have some differences with Ethereum in terms of data structure, and some unfriendly stacks to ZK will be deleted, but it will be fully compatible with existing Ethereum APP debugging tools and some infrastructure for developers.
Type 3 is actually the current stage of polygon, which is almost equivalent to evm.
The test network launched by Polygon 6 months ago and the test version of the main network to be launched on March 27 all hope that through some tests, the whole solution can be better optimized, and try to rely on Type 2 as much as possible.
One of the problems we are currently facing is that there may be enough multi-test projects on the chain to find a more optimized way.
Todd:
From my point of view, the core difference between ZK evm and other evm is that the section they finally send to Ethereum, or a data packet, contains different things.
What Zk sends back to Ethereum is a zk proof. On the Ethereum layer 1 network, there needs to be a verifier, and then to verify the package that zkevm sends back to Ethereum layer 1, to confirm Layer 2 with evm as its own virtual machine. The authenticity of all transactions they performed in the past block.
Other evms actually compress the entire transaction and send it back instead of sending it back in the form of a proof. Generally speaking, ZK's Layer 2 only needs to wait for the Ethernet layer 1 network to verify the proof. The transactions of the other entire Layer 2 in the past block can already achieve finality, instead of a waiting period of about 7 days like Arbitrum or Optimism, before they can complete the confirmation of Layer 2 transactions.
Let’s talk about the bottleneck stage again. Cora has already talked a lot about it just now. Let me add one more thing. If you want to fully realize the complete equivalent to the Ethereum EVM in ZKevm, it is currently a very difficult problem.
The most obvious thing that this place is stuck now is because the original code of the entire evm is compiled into the entire circuit of zk. This is a very unfriendly solution, which is equivalent to two sets of designs, and the compatibility will not be very friendly. .
Then if you must compile 100% EVM equivalent into the page, there will be a problem. The generation time of your corresponding proof will be very long. You may have read an article written by V God last year, a The time for a completely equivalent evm to generate a proof will probably be on the order of several hours.
This lengthy time will have a very obvious impact on the transaction efficiency of this type of ZKevm Layer2. It takes several hours for the transaction proposed by the user to be confirmed. Such a time is too long, and the article also involves Optimization of the entire circuit section.
I personally understand the optimization of this part. Whether it is Ethereum’s own team or an external team, everyone is trying to achieve optimization as much as possible, so that an absolutely completely equivalent ZKevm can be adopted by everyone as soon as possible. use it.
Before that, just like what you said just now, like Scroll or Polygon, everyone may choose some ZKevm like Type2 or type3. Although the equivalence is not so strong, it is also possible for developers not to change the past. Some applications can be realized by developing habits.
Jesse: What are the characteristics of the three different projects Polygon, StarkNet, and Scroll for the ZKevm solution? And the current progress and future development plan?
Leo:
Let me introduce StarkEx and StarkNet now. StarkEx is a commercial customized solution, just like dydx and other projects that specially customize zk circuits for him, and because of its application in ZK expansion, this is individually customized for each application It is very easy to say it, but it is actually not open.
Starkware wants to do another expansion solution, an open license-free solution, and this general-purpose Layer 2 solution launched StarkNet. Cora said just now that it would be very difficult to make such a general-purpose circuit that is fully compatible with evm.
I just mentioned that its speed will be relatively slow, so Starkware has made its own language in this regard, called Cairo, Cairo is also a general-purpose language, and it is a language specially designed to deal with stark proofs.
A previous version of Cairo was more similar to Python. Recently, a major update has to be done to upgrade to Cairo1. Cairo1 is a brand new language based on Rust.
After Cairo1 is upgraded, it will be more developer-friendly. If you have previous Rust development experience, you can easily integrate it into the StarkNet ecosystem.
Previously, Cairo did not support loops, only recursive forms. Now developers can use this loop, and there are many new functions. Cairo1 has now opened the alpha test, and you can start writing ERC20 contracts and then test them on the test network. Come up and test it, and then it will be gradually updated so that all the functions of the previous version of Cairo will be implemented later.
In addition, recently at the end of 22 and January 23, the open source of sequencer and prover was released successively. Now the sequencer has implemented parallel transactions in the last version. If it is open source, some other functions will be added to improve the transaction speed. Later, there will be a sequencer on the sequencer that will greatly improve the performance of the entire network.
In addition, the open source of the prover is based on the previous general-purpose prover, that is to say, a prover can only handle one type of transaction and do one type of business logic proof, while a general-purpose prover can be made into multiple types. Business types can generate proofs, and StarkEx’s prover will also be open source.
After open source, these applications are developed on Stark, and developers can customize some better solutions according to their own needs.
There's also Papyrus, a new Rust full node from StarkWare's full node. Now there are three full nodes in the StarkNet market, Pathfinder developed by Equilibrium, and Juno developed by Nethermind. After Cairo 1.0 is updated, StarkNet will have a major update, which is StarkNet version 0.11. This version will also be fully compatible with Cairo 1.0, which is the Rust version of Cairo.
This upgrade will be decided by a community vote, and everyone can come and participate in the entire ecology. In addition, I mentioned Evm just now. Starknet is actually not one of the Evm mentioned by Vitalik, but a translator developed by Nethermind can translate Solidity into Cairo. This is Warp.
Through Warp, Type 4 EVM can actually be compatible with the Ethereum language level. Warp has previously transferred all UniswapV3 contracts to Cairo in November last year, and AAVE will also use Warp to translate into Cairo, so developers with development experience in soildity can easily connect with Warp into the Starknet network.
Young:
Different projects are not the same for ZK's current solution, which is mainly divided into language level or bytecode level.
Scroll is a bytecode level to enter Ethereum's ZK Rollup in terms of finance. The advantage of this is that for some developers of evm, their development experience on Ethereum is exactly the same as that on scroll.
And now the Dapps in the entire evm ecosystem can seamlessly migrate to the Scroll Network to deploy the entire project. In this way, the experience for developers is very good, and the growth of the developer community will be very fast.
Another point is that we started to build zkevm from the first day and built it with the Ethereum Foundation on open source. The advantage of this is that the entire Scroll project will have a very good code because its code is open source. safety. Because all PRs and codes have been reviewed by a large number of contributors and community peers.
In addition, such an open source culture community will attract a lot of talents who are widely concerned about zk, and will also attract a lot of developers to contribute to the community. , Scroll will also have its own Grant, in order to strengthen the infrastructure construction of the entire ecology on Scroll, and at the same time serve the builder of the entire ecology and promote the connection of the entire network.
The current Scroll focus field includes, for example, some public goods, and some research projects including infra, and the standard is the same as our own open source culture. We will fund some open source projects and let the projects give back to the entire Scroll , and the entire community of Ethereum.
In terms of Grant, Scroll not only provides some financial support, but also provides technical or other resources to help ecological developers solve some of the problems they currently encounter, which is currently the most important purpose of Scroll.
In addition to the third point, Scroll should be the first to propose the concept of proving outsourcing. In terms of provers, Scroll will have a Prover Network, which will launch a decentralized prover network this year, and a very fast GPU solution to support the Prover network.
In this way, Scroll will provide great support for the entire Layer 2 to generate Proof, and at the same time, it will provide Layer 3 with some high-performance applications in the future, and will provide them with some support for this Proof generation.
In terms of proving the network, Scroll will open source a hardware acceleration algorithm this year. In addition, Scroll is now cooperating with some hardware manufacturers at home and abroad. It may develop an API for application acceleration, and then find some partners. To test, it is mainly for the current entire model, including some overall optimization tests.
In terms of the current progress of the entire network, Scroll launched the Pre Alpha testnet in August 2022. In October, Scroll made a relatively large upgrade, and then the entire testnet will be migrated to Ethereum goerli in the middle and late February. Version, scroll is expected to launch our Prover Network around the end of Q2 this year, and then launch the main network at the end of this year. Before the main network, some very strict security audits will be conducted.
In terms of Sequencer, Scroll will do a decentralization after the mainnet goes live, and this year will also publish some articles about dcentralise sequencers.
Because we feel that the decentralization of the sequencer in the early stage is not necessarily very good, but the decentralization of the sequencer is still a long-term solution. At present, in terms of the entire ecology, Scroll has contacted a large number of infrastructure projects to do basic construction for the growth of the ecology later.
Cora:
Polygon zkevm currently realizes the open source of zk proof, including the zk proof system with complete available source code, and promises to be completely open source, and then it is a community-driven permissionless coordinator network and a decentralized one with verification reward tokens Auction model.
Polygon zkevm has passed 100% of the Ethereum test vectors suitable for zkevm. Developers can copy and paste the code suitable for Ethereum and use it to build on Polygon zkevm without making any changes.
Therefore, all Ethereum tools can seamlessly connect and cooperate with Polygon zkevm, so Polygon zkevm will not sacrifice performance for evm equivalence. At present, the proof time for a batch of hundreds of transactions is close to two minutes, and the throughput will increase in the near future. It needs to be emphasized that the proof time determines the delay rather than the scalability, so Polygon zkevm can generate proofs in parallel, and realize high-throughput transactions on Layer 1 within a few minutes.
Polygon zkevm launched the test version of the main network on March 27. After running the test network for 6 months, Polygon zkevm registered more than 84,000 wallets, generated more than 300,000 blocks, and generated more than 75,000 Zk proofs, more than 5,000 smart contracts deployed, and two public third-party audits.
After 6 months of public testing, 100% passed the Ethereum test volume applicable to zkevm, and shortened the proof generation time to nearly two minutes, and the cost of generating proofs for a large number of transactions is now reduced to almost $0.06 .
Polygon's goal is to achieve the type2 that V God said, which means that Polygon zkevm looks exactly the same as Ethereum from the inside. Polygon zkevm is still being optimized, and more projects are welcome to come to us. The test version of the online main network is tested.
Jesse: What role will zero-knowledge proof play in the future Web3? In addition to the expansion and privacy that are often talked about, are there any scenarios that have not been explored? What other early projects are worthy of attention in the zero-knowledge proof track?
Pan Zhixiong:
I think expansion and privacy are definitely two major directions. In terms of expansion, we can see that everyone is trying to do things related to zkevm, but from a longer-term perspective, the more general evm may not need to carry the burden of Ethereum The EVM may also be a relatively long-term direction.
Some projects are already doing these early attempts, including the new Layer1 or Layer2. I think at least some people will do these general-purpose evms, like starknet. In fact, I think it may be relatively long-term. And the privacy thing actually has There are many scenarios, such as assets, transfers, etc.
Recently, we are investigating an applied zkp team, an applied zero-knowledge proof team under the Ethereum Foundation. Their semaphore is a code library tool library. They released the V3 code, called semaphore here, and they actually packaged a lot of bottom layers. circuit or something.
For developers, there is no need to understand zero-knowledge proofs, but for Dapp developers, after you understand this, you can directly use semaphore V3, and you can do some specific ZK scenarios.
For example, the two scenarios they provide now can prove the relationship in a certain group you are in, and the other one can prove that people in a certain group voted or said something, but you don’t need to expose yourself. Who is it, but he and you are in the same group.
After the tool code library is open source, there will be many new social products that may use them. For example, last year, a team showed a project called unirep.social. They combined semaphore with some concepts. Made a product like blog and twitter, users can vote for some people anonymously.
I think that under the framework of zero-knowledge proof, many new interesting and specific scenarios will be subdivided, and then they can be used on this relatively general platform as new functions that can be given to everyone.
Todd:
Let me make a supplement to what Mr. Pan just said about privacy. Recently, I have seen a number of projects trying to do the part about KYC based on ZKP. I want to realize the authentication of the identity of traditional users under the chain. Finally, the The result of the authentication is sent to the chain.
That is to say, the customer has been KYC, but the customer's specific information will not be sent to the chain, because the database on the chain is a completely open situation, if you put the user's information completely on the chain, It does not meet some scenarios or needs in traditional finance.
In addition, it is to use ZKP to apply to the direction of cross-chain. The main value is actually to use ZKP to record the cross-chain mode of the entire light client, which will verify the entire system, then use ZKP to replicate it, and finally send the entire result to the chain in ZKP.
The final effect that can be achieved is to allow the Blok Header of a single block to be sent to any target chain in a trustless situation, and finally fall into the entire cross-chain field, complete the information in a trustless and efficient way Such a support for cross-chain.
If you usually use cross-chain, everyone knows that there used to be a so-called impossible triangle in the field of cross-chain. In terms of your efficiency, set up, and cost, there is actually no way to satisfy several parts at the same time.
But in these new things like ZKbridge based on ZKP, if these projects can be fully implemented according to their own white papers, then everyone can use a safe, efficient, and completely trustless in the future. Also very low cross-chain tools. This is to make a direction that said that in the past period of time, ZKP has been seen more and can play a value.
Cora:
What I originally wanted to share about ZK is actually a bit similar to what Todd said. Now the entire industry actually has a relatively large expectation for DID, and the future value of DID will not be lower than that of the public chain.
Polygon also has the product PolygonID, which is also made with ZK technology. Now you can not only focus on zkevm, but also focus on privacy computing, for example, because zk also has privacy functions.
If privacy computing is added with a zero-copy technology, the zero-copy technology is also being researched by some major Web2 manufacturers, and the technology of adding zero-copy technology to privacy computing may cooperate in the future.
For example, functions such as coordinating multi-party computing, as Todd said, some projects may not require your real data. You only need to give a data frame to calculate and find the data yourself, and then upload the calculated results to the chain through ZK’s privacy calculation. superior.
In fact, I think everyone can pay more attention to diverse things, that is, projects based on the zk technology and other technical highlights.
For example, most people think that Layer 2 must be a hot spot in the future. With the technology of zk, including DID, socialfi and gamefi are all very big. But from a personal point of view, for example, the track of Social fi combined with DID's fusion technology will be more worthy of attention.
Jesse: The last question, as ordinary investors, if we want to take the express train of ZK, what can we do?
Cora:
You can read more. It mainly advertises ZK technology, but it is a project that uses zk technology. Its technical highlights may be, for example, multi-party computing or zero-copy. These are relatively bright projects.
If there is a major premise, such as DID or asset cross-chain projects that can solve the ecological technology bottleneck of the entire blockchain, in fact, everyone can read more.
Going back to the Layer 2 track for the expansion of Ethereum, it is actually very simple, or the projects that have not issued coins should participate in more interactions and get a little reward in the form of individuals or teams.
If you have issued coins, those like Polygon have already reached the second level. You can take a look at the fundamentals of the entire development of Polygon. Then you can consider whether to buy some tokens when they are relatively low. currency for value investing.
We often say that the current investment environment of the entire industry is no longer the same as in the early days when investment was only based on technical logic. Now it’s not just like this, it also depends on how your team’s operational capabilities and BD capabilities are. Does your team have a good strategy that can push your company forward in the entire industry? I think this is very important.
So now, many individual investors with more capital or assets are more optimistic about Polygon. One of the reasons why they are more optimistic about Polygon is that a fundamental aspect of Polygon has been shown to everyone. Last year, we were the only one that led the entire industry to promote Web2 assets. chain.
When the market was not good last year, Polygon’s tokens were relatively very valuable, so I personally think that investors may need to look at the comprehensive capabilities of a team for an investment in the future.
I think relatively safe investors who like value investing can choose Polygon. For those with a slightly higher risk appetite, they may want a greater return. Then you can look at some relatively start-up projects that use zk technology to do.
Leo:
In fact, the current ZK, as Mr. Pan said, is mainly about capacity expansion, and the solution is the projects of everyone here. Taking StarkNet as an example, the above ecology is now gradually prospering. The high-performance infrastructure of Layer 2 will definitely give birth to an ecology like Ethereum, and new things will definitely be born.
Now there are some interesting things, such as games on the whole chain, some of which are relatively active on StarkNet, and some other DeFi projects, everyone can pay more attention to them.
In addition, I just mentioned the application of zk. In fact, the Cairo language is not only used on StarkNet, but not a language for writing smart contracts. It is a general-purpose language, which is equivalent to the C language rust. The language is the same, it is not limited to writing smart contracts on StarknNt, it can do many other things.
In the future, zk is like what you just said. If the technology of zk develops in other fields, this Cairo can also get more applications outside of StarkNet. I will just say these two points.
Young:
I think for ordinary investors, and maybe for some institutions, ZK will still be a very big track in the future, and I can divide it into several major aspects.
First of all, the first thing about zk is the hardware acceleration. We know that the value of the original BTC is that it calculates some hashes. In the end, it consumes some resources and reaches a consensus. It has certain value.
Then for zkp, it essentially calculates some more useful calculations, does a lot of parallel calculations, and consumes a lot of computing power to generate proofs to support the entire infrastructure, including infrastructure some applications of .
So I think ZK has great potential in terms of hardware acceleration and ZK mining. Therefore, I think that ordinary investors can pay attention to this aspect.
The second point, you can pay attention to some applications of ZK in Gaming, that is, I think that in the future, ZK plus Game, including some with Gamefi, will have very large application scenarios.
Now Scroll is cooperating with Tencent, including some very large and well-known game companies, including that we will soon attend Tencent Cloud’s Web3 conference, and we may also go to chat with them. Let's talk, just some explorations based on zk in the game.
For example like then this is in terms of games. In addition, there are some good ones in middleware, such as the bridge project mentioned by Mr. Todd just now, and there are also some zk oracle projects. I think you can focus on these ZK-based middleware take a look.
There must be some scenes in zk's MeV aspect, so you can focus on it.
Otherwise we can also return to zk itself. I divide zk into 4 major directions. First of all, the first point is what new opportunities does the protocol have at the zk enterprise level.
Then at the circuit level, it may have some very good open source circuit libraries, and you can also pay attention to the teams behind them.
In addition, on the zk industry track, there are still some that show zk on the front end very well. They make some tools with Turing on the front end, including some tools on the back end. I think you can also take a look at these directions of making tools.
The last one is about some applications of zk, yes, so in essence, what zk can think of, there are many directions that are being worked on now, so the track has great opportunities. You can pay more attention to it, and you will definitely find it The future is some potential for particularly large projects.
