Vitalik Buterin, Barry Whitehat, Ye Zhang, Jordi Baylina, and Eli Ben-Sasson join together at #EDCON2023 and talk about zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) in a panel. Barry from Ethereum Foundation is the moderator of this panel, and he says we've been doing zero-knowledge proof for five or six years and this panel gathers together some of the key people pushing forward the zero-knowledge technology. Vitalik introduces himself and says he has written a couple of blog posts trying to explain various zero-knowledge proof protocols and the space has been really fun for the last 5 years. Ye Zhang, Co-founder of Scroll, says his team is building a bytecode-level compatible zkEVM. Jordi Baylina says he is the Technical Lead at Polygon zkEVM, and Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-founder of StarkWare, says he fell in love with cryptographic proofs more than 20 years ago when he was doing his postdoc at MIT and wrote a bunch of academic papers which led to things like Zcash (of which he was a co-founder) and StarkWare (of which he’s a co-founder).
Barry asks Eli the first question: over the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of things that we wanted to do with ZKPs, and the first main use case was Zcash, and it was a very small circuit and the performance limitations were quite important design considerations, and 5 or 6 years late we have like zkEVM and all these other incredibly complicated things, so could you talk about what’s the blocker for us when we try to make ZK applications? Eli thinks today the blocker is not the generation of proofs, it’s having end-to-end integrations and tooling for developers, because the generation of proofs, even on existing hardware, can be done very efficiently, so the main blocker is just having an end-to-end system with a lot of tooling around it that works from the developer cycle to testing, to deployment, to integrations.
Barry’s next question is for everybody in the panel: what is the thing that you wanted to do that we’re currently just not in? Do you have some examples of applications you want to build and are just not possible to build right now? Jordi says we’re in an era of writing hardware and we will enter an era of software when people will be able to just program normal circuits or normal programs in a regular software language, and the thing he wants to see and we’re starting to see now is we’ll not have to write electronics anymore and the users will be able to use normal compilers that will compile on top of these ZK processors and execute that normally, which he thinks will change the ZK space. Vitalik says there are two types of ZK, like the SNARK usages, there are the scalability-related things and privacy-related things, and they often have some often pretty divergent considerations, like on both sides prover time is obviously an issue but on the privacy side we’re talking about prover time on a user’s computer and the applications tend to be fairly simple and a lot of it is just reusing very similar codebases to what has already been used, and for privacy, people just want to keep the same type of stuff private over and over again, but on the scaling side people want to make totally different things scale and it involves writing a lot more code and he thinks in both of those situations, there’s a bunch of different software things that exist to some extent but we have to keep leaning on our improvement. Barry says he disagrees with Vitalik about the assumption that private applications are going to be inherently super simple and just prove the same thing over and over again. Vitalik maintains that in reality, 80% of the use cases will be the simplest stuff.
The next question is for Ye Zhang and is about ZKP security: what are you afraid about ZKP security? What things can we do better? Ye says if we’re talking about the security of ZKP, there are multiple levels like there is the theoretical level as you’re using some algorithm and people should try to use more standard algorithm which has a sound, clear and complete proof and you can’t do whatever arbitrary things you want, and another thing he thinks is really important is people usually ignore the security problem of their own proof because security is not so explicit, as people care about how fast the generation of proof is but don’t care what the tradeoff is. You can learn more about their insights into zero-knowledge proof via this ZK panel at EDCON 2023!
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