ZK is a multi-billion dollar industry today and it is the key to a scalable, private future. But how can you tell if the "zero-knowledge" you're hearing about is actually private? The vast majority of the ZK systems deployed today, including Starkware, Succinct, and RiscZero, only tap into the (succinct) verifiability property of these systems and haven't reached privacy applications. With Stablecoin and RWA adoption growing, ZK for privacy will be the only way to bring it mainstream for compliance and security. Here is the tl;dr on what it means for a system to have the "succinct verifiability" property versus the "privacy" property, and how do you tell which systems deliver the critical privacy property.
All proof systems, including how mathematical proofs are taught in high school, have to satisfy two basic properties:
- Correctness: If the statement is true, the prover can generate a proof that the verifier accepts
- Soundness: If the statement is incorrect, no matter how a proof was generated by the prover, the verifier rejects
Here is an unwritten property that we tend to ignore in proof systems, but, nevertheless, is just as important - it must be easy to verify a proof. Because if it is not efficient to verify the proof, the verifier can D-I-Y the proof. As an example, consider verifying the proof that the 100th Fibonacci is 354224848179261915075. If this takes longer than computing it, the proof system is useless.
Succinct verification addresses precisely this conundrum. A proof system with succinct verification allows one to verify such a computation in time significantly less than the time required to compute it.
What does it mean for a proof to be zero-knowledge?
ZK is a multi-billion dollar industry today and it is the key to a scalable, private future. But how can you tell if the "zero-knowledge" you're hearing about is actually private? The vast majority of the ZK systems deployed today, including Starkware, Succinct, and RiscZero, only tap into the (succinct) verifiability property of these systems and haven't reached privacy applications. With Stablecoin and RWA adoption growing, ZK for privacy will be the only way to bring it mainstream for compliance and security. Here is the tl;dr on what it means for a system to have the "succinct verifiability" property versus the "privacy" property, and how do you tell which systems deliver the critical privacy property.
All proof systems, including how mathematical proofs are taught in high school, have to satisfy two basic properties:
- Correctness: If the statement is true, the prover can generate a proof that the verifier accepts
- Soundness: If the statement is incorrect, no matter how a proof was generated by the prover, the verifier rejects
Here is an unwritten property that we tend to ignore in proof systems, but, nevertheless, is just as important - it must be easy to verify a proof. Because if it is not efficient to verify the proof, the verifier can D-I-Y the proof. As an example, consider verifying the proof that the 100th Fibonacci is 354224848179261915075. If this takes longer than computing it, the proof system is useless.
Succinct verification addresses precisely this conundrum. A proof system with succinct verification allows one to verify such a computation in time significantly less than the time required to compute it.
