Coda Protocol, CoinList, and DeKrypt are partnering to launch a $100k global public research challenge to dramatically speed up zk-SNARKs. We expect the contest to produce huge advancements in the state of the art. We’ll be contributing all of those advancements back to the public domain with a permissive open-source license that allows them to be used by the broader crypto ecosystem.
SNARKs have been developing rapidly in the past few years, and in crypto they’re one of the most promising ways to bring scalability and privacy to blockchains. But in many ways we’re still at the surface of what’s possible. This gap between opportunity and current state is due to the significant increases in SNARK performance that remain to be unlocked. For example, while many of the computational steps involved in SNARK proving are perfectly parallelizable, this property hasn’t yet been fully implemented on hardware designed to exploit it, such as GPUs.
In the open and collaborative spirit of the crypto space, we’re partnering with teams from around the ecosystem to improve zk-SNARKs and share the resulting research with the broader community. CoinList and DeKrypt will be co-organizers, and sponsors include the ZCash Foundation, Tezos, and Protocol Labs. In addition to the contest, we’ll be hosting regular office hours from top researchers and practitioners and sending out online tutorials. There will be tracks to improve zk-SNARKs through both cryptographic improvements and optimizing existing implementations. Sign up here if you’d like to get involved.
About Mina Protocol
Mina Protocol is being incubated by O(1) Labs, the leader in zk-SNARKs and verifiable computation. Mina Protocol, the world’s lightest blockchain, provides a foundation for the decentralized digital economy (Web 3.0), by affording all participants fully P2P, permissionless access to the chain, from any device. By utilizing recursive zk-SNARKs, the Mina blockchain always stays the same size — about 20 kilobytes (the size of a few tweets). Recursive zk-SNARKs allow nodes to rapidly share and update proof of the correct blockchain state across the network. This breakthrough application of zk-SNARKs solves the issues of scalability and high barrier to entry for nodes that have plagued legacy blockchains to-date. By making it easier for nodes to participate, Mina improves decentralization and therefore security of the network. The Mina blockchain can be easily accessed from any device, including phones and browsers, and can be seamlessly integrated into new decentralized applications (dapps).
