Why ZK and Aligned?

The following is an introduction to zero-knowledge/validity proofs to understand their utility and impact and why they may help you solve problems you can encounter when building your application. Before jumping on the explanation, we give some definitions:

• Validity/integrity proofs: These are cryptographic proofs that allow you to check that a computation was carried out correctly, without having to re-run it entirely.

• Zero-knowledge proofs: These are cryptographic that allow you to prove the validity of a statement, without revealing sensitive data.

The two terms are sometimes grouped under ZK, though depending on the use case, you may need it to be zero-knowledge or not. Validity proofs are widely used by ZK-rollups (though not rigorously zero-knowledge), while Schnorr signatures are an example of the second (basically, they let you show to others that you have a secret key, without leaking it).

In blockchains, we need to coordinate between different parties that do not trust each other. How can we agree on whether something has happened? The logical construction involves independently re-executing transactions and reaching consensus. However, the number of transactions we can process is limited by the weakest devices in the network, acting as bottlenecks. Moreover, adding more hardware does not make the system faster (as in web2), only more robust. ZK allows the situation to scale, allowing the system to process more transactions with the same guarantees. ZK proofs allow you to verify a computation much faster than re-execution: we can use more powerful machines to run the transactions and generate the cryptographic proof, and the rest of the network verifies the proof. If the proof is valid, it is the same as if all the nodes had re-executed the transactions, but with less computational effort. More concretely, a ZK-rollup can generate a proof that it processed 10,000 transactions correctly, and submit to Ethereum the proof with the state diff (or other information necessary to update the state), and Ethereum can check very quickly that all those transactions were correct! ZK is also useful whenever you need to show the integrity of some computation, for example, that an image you published in the newspaper is the result of enlarging an image from a real camera. You can generate the proof and then use Ethereum as a settlement layer, in charge of performing the verification of your proofs, though there is a problem: it can be expensive, and you have limited throughput. This is where Aligned comes in.

Aligned offers you two different products to reduce your costs and increase throughput: fast mode and the proof aggregation service. Once you know that you want to use ZK for your product and Ethereum, Aligned fits perfectly. Whether to use fast mode or proof aggregation depends on your needs:

• Fast mode: a decentralized network of verifiers that checks the proofs, signs messages stating the correctness of the proof and when a threshold is met, publishes the signature to Ethereum. Once Ethereum checks the signature, the state of the proofs is changed to verified, and you can use the result as always. It has very high throughput, reduces costs significantly (depending on the number of proofs that are sent) and has low latency.

• Proof aggregation service: performs recursive proof aggregation of several ZK proofs. The final proof is sent to Ethereum, and if verified, it implied the validity of your proof. It has higher latency and lower throughput than the fast mode, but achieves the full security of Ethereum.

How can you write ZK applications and generate proofs? There are many different technologies and libraries to build ZK applications. Until recently, it was fairly complicated, since you needed some background of math and write circuits (you can think of it as coding in assembly). Luckily, there are several ZK virtual machines (zkVM) that allow you to generate proofs of code written in a higher level language, such as Rust. You write your code and run it on top of the zkVM, and you get a proof of its correct execution. To simplify things, we have zkRust, where you can run your code and send the proof directly to Aligned!

Projects or ideas using ZK

The list below contains examples or projects using ZK. It is meant to illustrate some use cases, but it is not meant to be exhaustive.

• Rollups

• On-chain gaming

• ZK Machine Learning (zKML)

• ZK-TLS

• Bridges

• Oracles

• Data processors

• Voting

• ZK-Email

• Identity protocols

• IoT