Zero Knowledge Proofs — The Next Big Thing in Blockchain
The 1980s and 1990s were the heydays of Hong Kong TV drama series, with martial arts, legal, police, and medical dramas, among others, sending Chinese cultural influence to new heights. Those classic clips, dialogues, scenes, and industry terminology on the TV screen even directly opened up a part of the cognitive enlightenment of the “young viewers” in front of the screen, throughout their upbringing.
The two subjects that I find most amazing overall are unquestionably martial arts and police dramas. During the breaks, we mimicked the action sequences from popular martial arts films, and we preferred to whisper in class using the Morse code we had learned from police dramas, despite the fact that the strange dots, lines, and circles were actually confusing. Memory labels from when I was young have stayed with me to this day. When I first learned about cryptography, they even got mixed up in my mind.
Morse code is essentially a code for communication encryption that is employed in the military. Later, it extended to the general public and was frequently shown in dramas and films about police and spies. On the other hand, cryptography has evolved into a discipline that is systematically learnable, based on a large number of extremely difficult computations, and is often regarded as a subordinate topic of computer science and mathematics in academic categorization. Among these, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, a crucial subject in cryptography, have gotten a lot of attention from those outside of academia.
The leading new project, Aleo, which received a series B investment of up to $200 million and had a valuation of $1.4 billion this February, made the privacy track even more popular. This wave of momentum has also pushed the cryptography technology regarding Zero-Knowledge Proofs to the forefront.
Aleo can significantly offset the lack of privacy protection issues in existing public chains by combining the decentralization of blockchain with the privacy protection of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs).
ZKPs encountered the blockchain industry long ago, but if you dig deep, you’ll find surprises everywhere. Zcash and Monero apply the privacy-preserving value of ZKPs to wallet products. ZKSync, StarkWare, and others focus on solving the ETH scaling problem using ZKPs-related technologies. It remains to be seen what type of response Aleo, which is now in the testnet phase, will provide. It offers a hazy picture of the beginning of resolving privacy concerns on chain in terms of the project’s development and scope.
In addition to ZKPs, another major topic in cryptography, homomorphic encryption, has equally broad application scenarios. ZKPs can be crudely understood as zero-leakage proofs, where no additional information is leaked. Homomorphic encryption, on the other hand, focuses on processing the data while still getting the original encrypted result. This form of encryption can be used not only for privacy protection but is also a natural fit with cloud computing. At present, Chinese tech firms such as Huawei and Tencent Cloud have already started relevant research and layout.
As privacy leakage and other issues become more serious in the future, regardless of the current momentum of the Web2 industry and the emerging Web3 industry, information technology companies will focus on the use of cryptography-related technologies to develop privacy protection and privacy computing. Ordinary users can eventually unlock the sensational experience through the maximizing of privacy rights in an era of frenetic market competition and maximal commercial uses.
In the foreseeable future, more cryptographic primitives with mysterious veils will play their practical effects, and related exploration and applications will also emerge. However, this time we’re the beneficiaries.
Learn more about Force Community
