The development of zero-knowledge technology and its track has received a lot of attention with the emergence of Ethereum L2 ZK Rollup.
At the beginning of 2023, talking about the past progress of the ZK (zero knowledge) track and predicting the future development of the ZK track has become a very important thing in the Web3 or encryption circle.
Because whether it is L2 ZK Rollup built on Ethereum or Aleo, a public chain project built from scratch with its own ZK attributes, the ZK track is showing rapid development that is obvious to all.
Review: 3 Development Trends for Privacy Computing Projects in 2022
Aleo CEO Alex Pruden said: "One of the technologies that will change Web3 is undoubtedly zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography. As a game-changer for the blockchain application ecosystem in terms of privacy, security, and integrity, ZKP (zero-knowledge) Accelerated investment and development is an important sign that it is preparing for prime time."
It can be seen that ZK is endowed and regarded as an important factor of change in Web3, and is ushering in its golden age.
In addition, from the user's perspective, the protection of personal information data has become more and more important, and privacy computing has become one of the best solutions for data security and privacy protection.
Looking back on 2022, the development trends of privacy computing public chain projects can be summarized into three aspects:
1. Technological innovation: Privacy computing technology will further develop in 2022, and more efficient and secure privacy protection technology will be developed. For example, hybrid encryption technology, private key encryption technology, aggregate signature technology, etc. will be more widely used.
2. Market expansion: Privacy computing public chain projects further expand their market share and gradually become the mainstream technology in the blockchain field. For example, the privacy computing project Zcash has become the project with the largest market value of the public chain that supports privacy computing.
3. Application expansion: The privacy computing public chain project gradually expands its application fields and expands to more industries. For example, used in medical and DeFi industries.
Specific to the ZK field, as one of the solutions in the industry, it holds the key to blockchain privacy protection applications in terms of privacy protection. In summary, zero-knowledge technology not only allows developers to take advantage of the security of the public chain, but also improves transaction throughput and speed. At the same time, it can store users' personal information off-chain to protect user privacy.
In 2022, the privacy computing project has developed rapidly in terms of technology, market and application, and it is predicted that it will continue to develop rapidly in 2023. Specifically, at the ZK track, the following projects will be focused on.
Outlook: 5 major projects worth paying attention to in 2023
The ZK track can be divided into two sources in terms of projects. One is the ZK project (Aleo) that is built with ZK attributes from 0 to 1, and the other is ZK that creates ZK protocol solutions (ZK Rollups) on the blockchain. project.
Rollups are a common scaling scheme where ZK Rollups work by processing and executing transactions outside of L1 (off-chain) but publishing transactions to L1. This allows Rollups to provide extended functionality while gaining security from L1 with very low gas costs. This model is the model of the Ethereum L2 scaling solution.
Currently, Aleo, zkSync, StarkWare and Scroll are all actively promoting the application of ZK technology, and they will become an important starting point for large-scale testing of applications (using this algorithm) with real users.
1、zkSync
Zksync has $53 million in TVL and is the third-largest L2 by number of transactions according to @Orbiter_Finance data; at least 300 projects have joined the ecosystem so far.
Zksync was developed by Matter Labs, and team members include co-founder and CEO Alex Gluchowski and senior software engineer Danil Lugovskoi. Zksync adopts the ZK-SNARK technology paradigm.