ZK12: ZK Trust Legos [ : Luring Web2 Onchain with ZK Primitives] - alizk

Transcript

[Music] hi everyone my talk is quick and high level and the tools and ideas that I'm talking about they have been around for some time but I think sometimes we may not be aware of something because we are in it I think collectively collectively they are part of like an emerging um an emerging paradigm so we have been at this blockchain thing for a while now right and uh what we have been saying to ourselves for a long time now is that Grandma is

coming on on chain any minute now um but obviously we can all agree that she hasn't she's not here um and we can't blame that on scalability because that has been solved that has been solved already so we can't use that execuse anymore um so things uh things are getting awkward I think um and I think we we we have to uh come to the to the realization that Grandma is not coming we we have to go to her grandma is not coming on chain anytime uh not now not uh not uh ever and uh the thing is um in my view uh the blockchain what we call the

blockchain has been isolated has been really isolated from the from the real world uh people will bring in oracles uh but I think uh oracles are not it um oracles may not cannot possibly support everything they can't arize private data and obviously also they come with a garden variety of assumptions which is defeats the whole purpose we are all here to dis intermediate things not to insert new intermediaries so Artic calls are not it um but program cryptography May finally uh be the thing that uh removes some of these barriers uh so with the advances in in proof systems for example we can take

anything now that has a signature and just shove it in a circuit uh and and then we use it and uh what we are now able to do is what I think of as Recycling and repurposing of any and all cryptographic artifacts whether they're coming from the blockchain or coming from web 2 we can now uh recycle them repurpose them and extend the life of them uh into uh fresh new uh use cases uh we also have New Primitives and these have been around as I said for a while for uh grouping signalings and many other things uh but they have existed in isolation and mainly I think it's because of this barrier this isolation from The Real World you can

create an anonymous group with super resistance but on its own it's not really that interesting what are you going to do you created a group you're part of a group now what do you do you need something it needs to be part of a whole experience um so um obviously we have uh you know the advances in in proof systems now regular expression should not come to us a surprise that we can prove it in circuits and uh some excellent developers have done exactly that and uh since emails have patterns that we can describe with the regular expressions and they also have a signature coming from a private key that belongs to a certain entity that we can verify publicly together we can get

something called Z ZK email so you can get a proof that I have received an email from uh um from a certain uh organization or something um and with that simple primitive you can do a lot of things in fact you would be surprised by how many use cases you can do with just this uh primitive we have semor which has been there for a while but again I think it hasn't been used to its full potential because it an environment in which it can grow as a as a seed uh Anonymous grouping and signaling you can signal and vote on on on uh on multiple things um uh in a non uh in fully Anonymous and without double signaling the same way that we uh in

zcash they prove uh they you cannot double spend a note you use a nullifier you can do that as well here if the Voting is high stakes you can use a tool called Macy uh which has been itrated upon many times and get some uh excellent uh uh features like collusion resistance so basically if you vote for someone you have possibly no way of proving to anyone else what you have voted for so if someone bribed you um you can get take the bribe but Al still vote for uh your conscience for example um uh now these things can already in between themselves without looking at the outside picture and the some of the things that I'll talk about you can already take some of them and and and

use them uh uh in a useful ways between each other so semaphore could be a gatekeeper for Macy and ZK email itself can be a gatekeeper for semaphor so you have to have received an email in order to join the semaphore and so on in fact I should mention uh the gatekeeping feature itself there is a whole new project at PSC that is uh uh launched this week just around this idea of creating as many uh a garden variety of Gatekeepers but also allowing you to create your own gatekeeping uh and then we have also so uh in ptls which has been gaining some some tractions there is a bunch of projects working on it uh basically you log into your bank and the the the TLs session is split between you and uh a verifier or a notary and the neat thing

is that the uh the verifier doesn't need to know the content or the server identity but you can still prove to them part of the uh of the data obviously that comes with some trust assumption in the notary if you're using it rather than verifying uh directly um and the the the the performance you have to be mindful with the performance as well of the NPC but it's it's usable and some of the new project emerging projects are improving upon that idea and finally the uh ZK Cod processors obviously uh uh my friend was just talking about lrange uh we can now uh uh recycle and repurpose historical uh cryptographic artifacts from the

blockchain so something happened in the blockchain a long time ago the blockchain states contracts do not have access to them but we can reuse uh previous uh truths basically um uh I won't speak uh too much about this because you're I'm sure you're already familiar with it but the exciting thing about the co-processor is how different uh approaches uh uh have emerged people are coming at this uh from different directions and you know one of the things that we heard over the past year is that we have enough infrastructure we don't need any infrastructure we need ABS we need people to come we need use cases but actually this is one area where I think we need more we need

more not not to mean we need more projects and so yes we need more project but we need way more people to think about abstraction how do we abstract um uh the chains how do we how do we um create the right abstract so if you are a software developer or architect I think this is uh one of the most exciting areas you could be looking at um obviously zik copra do not have to be limited to uh historical blockchain uh facts you can uh use them or integrate them as well with proofs from web 2 from artifacts from web 2 and together we we can start creating a collective uh a holistic um non-trivial and fresh experience um yeah so one of the ways we

can reuse or recycle repurpose some of the things is Discord like in Discord a lot of us exist on discords we have roles we have communities so you can prove that you have a certain Discord role and based on that you are giving a certain tokens that you can vote uh or allocate to someone and that voting Could Happen through Macy for collusion resistance and to to uh start voting to begin with you would have to have a a ZK email proof that you're part of the organization um or a ZK email that you use to join a signal group so this use case alone giving appreciation tokens to colleagues you can see that it already uh employs all of these um Primitives together uh obviously this is a simple

example but just to drive home the idea that uh uh the uh the the hole is extremely exponentially larger than the sum of the individual Parts semaphore in its own is really not that interesting it's only when you integrate it with other things uh because this is the lightning talk I don't I didn't have time to go through all of them but they you'll have them on the the slides there are so many uh there are at least three dozens uh projects uh some of them uh proof of concept some of them actually um uh in production now um uh the folks at ZK PTP are creating uh Market places from only one primitive which is the ZK email which is exciting so there's a bunch of

projects there to to look at um so all of these what I have talked about right now I mentioned at the beginning of the talk that we might be part of of something but we're not aware of it and I think all of this together looked at together the recycling and repurposing of cryptographic artifact is is is sort of like here in the in the in the middle it's happening in the middle um and uh they coexist with other also exciting things the lower level things like pre-confirmation markets and the superb building and all of that and so what I if I may speculate like what I think is going to emerge uh over the next uh years is that this uh

this middle is going to get much much much larger than what what what it is now and what we have uh uh previously thought of as the uh blockchain I think it's going to you know go a bit further to the back you know you will blockchains will be similar to what you know the relevance to them to the average developer will be the same as the relevance of database management system um not all developers are writing SQL store procedures or things like that um so this layer I I speculate that it's going to get much much larger and this is one of the reasons why I say zqo processing we need a lot more uh projects a lot more uh ways of

abstracting things a lot of a lot more um um out of the box uh things that people use if you look at the ZK coprocessors you will notice that some of them you know they they um try to provide out of the box uh solution in there SD Cas for things like D5 for example so now if you are familiar with the Unis swap V4 for example they have hooks and there is nothing stopping this Hook from consuming uh an offchain computed zero knowledge proof proofing something about the history or the track record of this address so this guy is an OG we're going to give you a discount to trade on our deck and and and things like that so this is something like project like previs is is is doing for example um yeah this is the same thing so we'll

soon think of smart contract developers even I would I would even say that smart contract development itself is going to go all the way in the back and uh uh most developers will re will be U um dealing with with this big uh here which is something like the equivalence of Lambda functions and uh Cloud Solutions so this is the bizarre uh cloud of uh um of the blockchain compared to Cathedral Google cloud or Amazon or so on um so yeah with that uh I included a link but I think I forgot in the this the slide I'll uh find me after if you want a link to the

slides but that's my talk and thank you thank you