As the core technology faction under the concepts of L2, privacy, and cross-chain, ZK has continued to be popular in this sector since 2022; at the recent ETHdenver conference, ZK continued to be hot.

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BNB ecology: Zk zero-knowledge expansion and upgrade is expected to be carried out by the end of the year

The development of ZK can be regarded as an important detail of the iterative evolution of technology in the blockchain field: the technology initially demonstrated its superior privacy characteristics in early anonymous projects; it was used in the storage project Filecion to reduce the time required for all parties to verify storage ; The expansion advantage of ZK Rollup is derived from the L2 shared security verification; with the development of technology, ZK is moving towards generalization.

The current enthusiasm for ZK in the market mainly comes from the ecological advancement of Ethereum and the progress of ZK infrastructure, including ZK-EVM, ZK public chain, L2, ZK Bridge, ZK tools, etc. Or in the overheating stage, an ideal "ZK Season" still needs more time to prepare.

For example, in the recent hotspot of ZK expansion, what kind of ZK Rollup does Ethereum L2 ultimately need? How is technology progressing?

ZK Rollup is the mainstream expansion method that is also concerned with Optimistic Rollup. Zero-knowledge proof is based on mathematics and cryptography. Compared with the fraud proof adopted by Op, it can be technically safer and faster. However, it is more difficult to implement ZK’s EVM compatibility, and Op is easier. In addition, there are many applications of Op and the rapid development of the ecology. Therefore, the mainstream view is that “the ZK system is optimistic in the long term, and Op is optimistic in the short and medium term.”

If this kind of "long-term" ZK rollups wants to land, the premise is that ZK must first make real progress in EVM compatibility. Only by implementing a general-purpose circuit like zkEVM can it be compatible with various applications. The problems that need to be solved here include:

1) Circuit design is carried out for all instructions of EVM, so that applications written in smart contract languages ​​such as Solidity are compiled into EVM instructions, corresponding to circuits, and a corresponding proof system is formed. In short, write a zk circuit, write a zkEVM, and build a zk Rollup.

2) The amount of calculations and complex contracts to generate zk proofs is extremely large, and the circuit and proof system are also huge. The zk hardware acceleration track is improving its computing power with hardware solutions.

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(Some zk-rollup progress: https://yanglc.notion.site/zk-rollup-e 35 b 8 c 7 eb 8 ce 44 c 785 2c 4 aa 7 b 6 ef 270 d)

In addition, in the idea of ​​upgrading Ethereum, after Ethereum completes the expansion of the execution layer, it still needs zkEVM to realize the expansion of EVM itself. On the development path, zkEVM always needs to follow the changes of EVM. Every time Ethereum upgrades EVM, it also needs to consider zkEVM and affect the update of zkEVM track. On the whole, the technical progress of the ZK series is delayed by more than one year compared with the OP series.

Of course, ZK rollup is not the only ZK-based solution in the contemporary Ethereum expansion scenario (Validium and Volitions also use ZK technology), and ZK technology is not solely about expansion.

The essence of ZK technology is a mathematical method of information verification between two parties, which can "prove that the assertion is valid", and the verification calculation does not expose information about the input and calculation itself, and it can be proved without revealing the details of the transaction. Lower and more efficient, it shows very good universality in the application of blockchain.

Based on this, we sort out the current ZK track, and structurally divide the ZK projects in the primary and secondary markets into:

- ZK Ethereum compatible/circuit compilation (Starknet, zkSync, Scroll, etc.)

- ZK public chain (Aleo, etc.)

- ZK cross-chain bridge / oracle machine

- ZK hardware acceleration

- ZK tools

- ZK applications (Web3 applications developed using the ZKP protocol, including DeFi, NFT, games, decentralized identity, privacy, etc.)

Among the above classifications, the zkEVM head projects mostly launched the early version at the end of 2021, and then updated successively. However, referring to the ecological development in the early version of the main network of StarkNet and the business transformation recently announced by Aztec Network, these networks are in user experience (including verification speed). and Gas fees), the number of ecological projects, and the development of hot projects, etc., the development speed is still relatively slow.

To a certain extent, this shows some problems in the implementation of ZK, including high hardware costs and difficulty in implementing the technology.

Compared with the implementation of zkEVM, the development and implementation of zkBridge may be relatively faster: the difficulty of ZK cross-chain is not in technical documents or theory, but in how to "do it": the signature and hash algorithms of each chain are different, Whether a certain chain can support ZK needs to be resolved through a large amount of code, and such projects often require steady development.

If the cross-chain protocol supported by ZK can be developed, then many Rollup SDKs under development can benefit from it, and the cross-chain protocol supported by ZK will be a better tool to connect application chains with EVM or layer 2.

The development cycle of ZK public chain projects is relatively longer. Taking Aleo as an example, Aleo has become the target of "privacy public chain" and "ZKP mining", which is scarce in the market. The Aleo team was formally established in 2019, and its research on programmable zero-knowledge The time can even be traced back to 2016. Before the official launch of the main network, Aleo needs to better adjust and test the ecological environment in the three directions of developers, certifiers and verifiers. In the third incentive test to be launched in 2022, it is mainly for verifiers.

In the direction of ZK hardware acceleration, due to the promotion of ZKP mining related concepts, most ZK hardware acceleration theories and early projects were proposed last year. At present, ZK hardware acceleration mainly comes from GPU, and it is expected that after the end of 2023, dedicated hardware (ASIC) supporting zkEVM proof and relatively mature and available products will appear.

The maturity of ZK technology is expected to be at the end of this year at the earliest. The maturity of infrastructure is the prerequisite for the outbreak of application projects. If a large number of ZK projects and applications can appear, it will promote the real arrival of a "ZK Season". Fast, in terms of time, it is expected to coincide with the early stage of the next round of bull market.