Internet of True Things: How ZK Tech Is Transforming Blockchain, Kurt Hemecker, MINA Foundation

Transcript

how's everyone doing today excellent let's get the energy going [Applause] fantastic excellent again thank you to Nikki thank you to CVA um really a pleasure to be here and in Switzerland and I'm really excited to talk to all of you today about the transformative impact that zero knowledge or ZK is having on blockchain and in particularly through the lens of Min a protocol and just you know it's interesting how privacy is treated today and how it's going to be treated in the future and what we're hoping is that privacy it's not an afterthought or an add-on but it's embedded and woven into the fabric

of our everyday lives of all the applications and interfaces we're using that there'll be ZK apps zero knowledge proofs built into those so that we all have control over what we want to share who we want to share it with and when we want to share it so selective disclosure and you know if you listen to some of the the people predicting the future particularly the the Sci-Fi folks there's some very wild and maybe not so pretty ways in which our privacy risks to be invaded and violated in the future think of AI profiling Nano swarms recording everything around us or brain

hacking while that while that future might be hopefully uh a bit far away the other future which is much near is the fact that AI is moving to the edge what does that mean it means it's moving into devices so anywhere everywhere that information can be captured around us it will be through your phones through your glasses through appliances and so that you know the days of a friendly chatbot on your web browser that that's going to be a relic pretty soon it's going to be in devices and that's that's why having zero knowledge embedded will help us counterbalance

that and provide us the control over the Privacy that we want and deserve and so that that puts us we on the brink of a new error the internet of true things and much like the Internet of Things was connected devices communicating with each other the internet of true things is a vision for a global open database of verified statements of Truth and that will let us to eliminate not have to rely on trust but verified truth and enhancing the security and the privacy of our everyday digital transactions if we to put this in perspective we can take a quick walk

down blockchain memory lane and I have 20 9 up there I know people are going to be like wait the Bitcoin white paper came out October 31st 2008 well I think it was 2009 that really people started noticing Bitcoin and waking up to what digital cash was and is however Bitcoin as we all know only supported simple transactions and had privacy issues nonetheless I I do credit at least in my opinion Bitcoin with Paving the way for decentralized finance and then ethereum burst upon the scene and bringing with it full programmability scripting and the introduction of smart contracts was an

amazing advance for blockchain but as many of us here know that brought with it scaling issues and high costs then interestingly in 2016 zcash introduced us to private payments with zero knowledge snarks succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge say that five times um and so while zcash brought enhanced privacy for payments it it didn't have programmability so it's use cases were limited however again I give it credit to Paving the potential for showing us the power of ZK and also showing that more advances were needed to make it

useful then we started seeing in 2020 the uh scaling Solutions coming out for ethereum optimistic Roll-Ups ZK used for roll-ups to help address some of the scaling issues however those still settle back and rely heavily on ethereum and then in 2021 a project very near and dear to my heart Mina was launched and Mina was was a significant breakthrough a blockchain whose entire State could be verified in milliseconds and the entire state of that blockchain contained in a small instance of memory less than 22 kilobytes so a light design just ripe for scalability and

efficiency compared to traditional blockchain and now where we stand today you know I don't know how many times you guys have heard the word ZK during this conference but it's it's hot right now this is the space to be in and programmable ZK especially so bringing ZK adding a layer of ZK across any type of data set on any industry if you think Finance Health news media AI combating deep fakes so the world is now ripe for ZK and it means that ZK is the missing one of the missing pieces a critical missing piece in the puzzle that's going to help bring blockchain to mainstream users and

Enterprises so I'm not going to go through everything here in detail but you get the point ZK fills a gap in bringing scalability privacy interoperability reducing costs making it more efficient making it uh super efficient to verify and provide attestations at low cost so again getting to that truth that eliminates the need for us to have trust and this is how this this is how this works on Mina or how how is this working on Mina I guess is the question and Mina was designed from the groundup with recursive zero knowledge proofs as we were just looking at the history of blockchain and And discussing it we see

that ZK really fills a lot of gaps to address scalability privacy and security with blockchain however Mina leverages these proofs for so much more on a programmable ZK blockchain it unlocks and creates an open database of verified statements applications infrastructure that Fosters a new wave of innovation with an open composable database applications within the Mina ecosystem can seamlessly interact and build upon each other and and concretely what does that mean well for example you can prove that you're eligible to

participate in a permission pool on a DEX using combined proofs from Identity and kyc application that you've used previously and these proofs aren't static they build upon each other creating an open Global database of verified statements so really starting to to build this proof of everything and this opens up an un a new design space for unprecedented applications and again as we see blockchain helps create truth eliminating the need for us to rely just on trust but there scalability and cost issues recursive ZK proofs are

a great alternative great solution to address that and with Mina's ZK proofs it allows developers to build applications that can rely on the verified statements of truth of others without the usual high costs and that starts to unlock businesses previously blocked by data silos and allowing people to build uh uh with each other creating a more collaborative and open Digital World and that's really this Uncharted Territory is defined uniquely by Mina's proof of everything system and just peeling back another layer this is a a diagram of if you will

of a systems landscape cut up into four quadrants replicated distributed permissioned and permissionless and as far as I'm concerned Mina occupies completely new space in this wider Tech Systems landscape of a distributed permissionless system and think about that for a minute in replicated world like ethereum or SQL data has to be replicated across servers and that creates scalability challenges and issues with Mina it's a distributed system so that data and computation is distributed across Network participants and those Network parti ANS they don't

need to share that data or that computation back with the network they only need to share the proofs that it was true and that eliminates unneeded redundancy eliminates bloat creates scalability and um efficiency oh thanks um kind of lost my train there for a second but I guess ultimately the tldr on this slide is Mina underpins the in Integrity of the internet users can verify the work of other users from any device and users and given Mina's permissionless and uh decentralized system anybody can

contribute to this and anybody can contribute data to it as well provided that data is um provided that is verified as true and then as we were saying others can build upon that verified truth and use those statements and again just creating a much more open collaborative uh digital world and these are not just ideas these are some of the projects there's hundreds of developers and projects that are now starting to build on top of mina Proto kit is a layer to Smart contract solution if you will pretty much are the the the Mina solidity although it's it's not solidity but developers can develop smart contracts in a really friendly to

use development environment Zeo is a ZK rollup solution where developers can deploy isomorphic ZK rollups means it looks like they're deploying it directly on on Mina Punk pole is a voting application for those of you who were at the startup competition Punk pole was used earlier for voting for The People's Choice Award for startups and punk pole is a voting application that ensures the privacy and security of the individuals that are voting as as well as ensuring the validity and the eligibility of those voters for the organizers and they didn't win the People's Choice Award but Hakata is

another project building on Mina that actually won the the first place of the pro of the uh competition and they're building solutions that bring the Privacy that users want together with the compliance that regul Regulators require and so they're combining kyc and compliance data into zero knowledge proof so that get stored n test stations associated with people's wallets and again can participate in this open database of actually private the the data is not shared it's just the statements the validated statements that are true so it lets people participate for example in a permission de as we were saying before and so it's definitely the summer

of ZK it's definitely summer getting warmer today and I think it's definitely the year of ZK 2024 there's unprecedented amount of developers now creating applications with zero knowledge proof it's driven by the need for security privacy and scalability on blockchain however there's so much more Innovation now being created on ZK so it's being used for much more than infrastructure and Layer Two scaling but again can be applied across all different kinds of data sets and we're really proud to announce from what I understand Mina is the first layer one native ZK blockchain to bring ZK programmability onto its main net that's

another massive step forward so really just the beginning and this allows developers to start creating applications using this Global open verified database of true statements really building upon the proof of everything to start creating the internet of true things and I'm not going to take take any questions now but I'm going to be around tonight I'm going to be around tomorrow um so if anyone wants to chat more I'm here a few my colleagues are here you can get me on Twitter atkm or email Kurt Hemer mun foundation and thank you all