The Bull Case for ZK

We're all here cause we believe that blockchains will play a role in serving as the underlying rails upon which the internet runs.

And while integrated, high-throughput chains like Solana do a fantastic job of sufficiently serving the demand for blockspace today, on a long enough time horizon, modular chains will necessarily play a key role in serving global demand.

Zero-knowledge technology complements the modular architecture by helping make it scalable, private, and interoperable.

The Problem: ZK Is Expensive and Slow

The primary criticism of ZK, though, is that it is not only difficult to build with, but also expensive and slow.

Until recently, you had to write complicated custom circuits to incorporate ZK into your tech, which only a few thousand engineers across the world could do.

Projects like Jolt from a16z Crypto, RiscZero, Succinct Labs, Lita, and Project ZKM are doing a fantastic job of addressing this challenge by introducing performant zkVMs that allow programmers to build ZK with much more commonly used languages, like Rust. This increases the pool of devs that can build in ZK by a few orders of magnitude.

And while the pace of improvements in cost and latency have been incredible and exceeded most experts' expectations (thanks to work at the bleeding edge by teams including Zcash, Aztec Network, and Polygon), we're still not quite at the point where ZK is the default.

The Fix: Aggregate the Demand

Today, the largest component in a ZK transaction is the cost of generating the proof.

Generating proofs is extremely resource-intensive: it requires expensive, powerful physical infrastructure. It's a hurdle for developers to source, deploy, and maintain this infrastructure.

And even if they manage to do it, most of this proving infrastructure is unutilized for the majority of the time. The underutilization of this hardware inflates the price users pay for each ZK transaction.

The solution is demand aggregation. Instead of every rollup, every bridge, and every ZK application running their own proving infrastructure, you pool the demand into a shared proving layer. These market dynamics enable a reduction in costs for proof generation.

The Flywheel

In turn, the range of use cases that can practically leverage ZK technology grows. This creates a flywheel that grows the aggregate demand for proofs, and hence enables further economies of scale to lower costs.

This flywheel makes the economics of ZK viable across a much broader range of use cases. Soon enough, ZK will power not only blockchains but also the internet.