Author: Wendy, Foresight News
Guest: Alex Pruden, Executive Director of Aleo Network Foundation
As a cutting-edge technology with the potential to address the two major needs of Ethereum scalability and privacy, zero-knowledge proof (ZK) is highly anticipated by the capital. However, there have been no signs of large-scale application of this technology.
In April of this year, Ethereum founder Vitalik proposed the goal of achieving "real-time proof" of ZK in Hong Kong, once again making zero-knowledge proof the focus of the community's attention. How long will it take for the goal of ZK "real-time proof" to become a reality, and how long will it take for ZK to be widely applied?
The ZPrize competition, which serves as a benchmark in the field of zero-knowledge proof, recently announced the results of the 2023 competition here. Seizing this opportunity, Foresight News interviewed Alex Pruden, Executive Director of the Aleo Network Foundation, and delved into the results of the competition, the outlook for several major developments in the ZK field, and the highly anticipated launch date of the Aleo mainnet.
Alex Pruden served in the U.S. Army for 9 years, during which he held positions as an infantry and special forces officer. Prior to joining Aleo, he was a partner at a16z, and after joining Aleo, he became, to some extent, a spokesperson for the ZPrize competition. In his view, maintaining the open-source nature of cutting-edge developments in zero-knowledge proof is crucial. This is the reason why ZPrize requires participating teams to open-source their algorithms, and it is also an effective path for the continuous advancement of zero-knowledge proof towards large-scale application. Guided by the spirit of open-source, the ZK field has been able to engage in collaborative efforts, greatly accelerating the implementation of applications.
The following is the content of the interview.
Foresight News: ZPrize has now held two sessions. What are the differences between this session and the first one? What is the biggest achievement?
Alex Pruden: I believe the biggest achievement of this session lies in two aspects: first, we have achieved a real-world end-to-end application for the first time, namely, signature verification in zero-knowledge proof. There were no such standards before this. The second achievement is the significant progress in proof generation in the WebAssembly (WASM) environment, which is about 100 times faster than the baseline. In the original baseline, a key part of the proof generation process took about two minutes, but with the winning solution of this year's ZPrize, this process only takes 1 to 2 seconds. We have gone from minutes to seconds, which is truly incredible.
This achievement is very important because it allows these algorithms to run on consumer-grade client hardware, rather than being limited to powerful cloud servers. I believe this opens up a whole new range of use cases for ZK technology.
Foresight News: Since ZPrize is a competition, the winning solutions often prioritize speed improvement. From an engineering perspective, will it still take some time for these award-winning algorithms to be fully implemented? At the same time, the community is eager to know how far away we are from large-scale application of ZK. What do you think is the biggest bottleneck in this regard? How should it be overcome?
Alex Pruden: From a technical perspective, with the efforts of the ZPrize and other industry initiatives, we are very close to making this technology (referring to zero-knowledge proof) practical. In my opinion, the biggest bottleneck in (the large-scale application of ZK) is that people have not yet come up with enough applications to use this technology. For me, and I believe for the entire ecosystem, it is most important to educate application developers about what can be done with ZK technology and show them what they can do.
Some dreams that were unrealistic even two years ago have now become reality. As mentioned earlier, the time required for certain computations has been reduced from two minutes to one second. This increase in speed will make a qualitative difference.
However, this improvement is still very fundamental. What we need are higher-level things, we need a consumer-grade application, such as identity verification. Currently, we are very excited about an identity verification program called zPass. We need more applications like zPass to show people the demand for ZK and build products on this basis. For example, I want to prove my age, or I want to verify something, or I want to securely transfer money while also being able to perform KYC, and so on.
The emergence of these applications will further drive the improvement of underlying cryptography, forming a virtuous cycle. Just as in traditional hardware development, chips and transistors are constantly miniaturized. The smaller they become, the more powerful the computer becomes, which in turn enables more things to be done, driving the generation of more demand, and then further promoting miniaturization. This virtuous cycle is exactly what we need to establish for ZK.
Foresight News: It is also a requirement for ZPrize participants to open-source their algorithms. Why do you think open-source is so important for the ZK community?
Alex Pruden: Open-source is very important because I firmly believe that an open ecosystem allows more people to contribute, thus enabling faster progress. In other technology fields, you often see closed-source technologies in patent portfolios, which are often underutilized or develop slowly because the patent owners are protected and can commercialize them at will.
In my view, the overall cryptocurrency and blockchain space has already demonstrated the value of an open-source ecosystem. Take Ethereum for example, it has evolved from a proof-of-work (POW) chain to a proof-of-stake (POS) chain, which is the result of the collective efforts of many people worldwide, including many breakthroughs. The zero-knowledge technology itself has also made tremendous progress through the contributions of many different open-source protocols such as Zcash, Aztec, and Aleo.
So, we set this requirement based on the idea that open-source software can help more people collaborate and ensure the existence of a spirit of cooperation and collaboration in the ecosystem.
Foresight News: What about the computational power demand? Do you think the demand for computational power from the ZK community will continue to grow?
Alex Pruden: I think it will. Currently, the main sources of computational power demand are the proof-of-work (POW) on traditional encrypted networks and artificial intelligence (AI). At Aleo, we have a mining component for ZK. I believe the demand will rise as a result, which is actually our goal.
On the other hand, I also think there is great potential to apply ZK to AI. One major drawback of AI is that many people are concerned about the collection and use of their data. Therefore, privacy protection technologies like ZK can become part of the solution. I think from a computational perspective, as the demand for AI grows, the demand for technologies like ZK will also grow.
Foresight News: In this cycle, what do you think are the most noteworthy trends in the ZK field? Is there anything that you think is important but has not been fully discussed?
Alex Pruden: In my opinion, the biggest trend in the ZK field right now is applications. People are now starting to create more ZK applications, although I believe that applications are a bottleneck for the large-scale use of ZK, the current momentum in this area is very good.
Another major trend is the integration of different systems using ZK. There is a project called ZK Email, which originated from TLS Notary, both of which are projects of the Ethereum Foundation. These essentially use ZK to combine two different systems. I think this is a very interesting trend and has great potential as an application.
Another major trend is ZK mining pools. Many people are now very interested in proving pools. We can adopt many of the same structures as Bitcoin mining and make these pools generate proofs for real-world applications, making their work meaningful. Now, many companies, including Aleo, are considering providing proof generation services for various ZK virtual machines. This is an area that I find very exciting.
The fourth trend I want to mention is ZK ASIC. All implementations of ZPrize are currently done on hardware, such as FPGA, GPU, or MacBook, but I think there is now enough demand and interest to implement it on ASIC, so I believe the development of ZK ASIC is imminent, and I am very much looking forward to it.
One thing that I think should be fully discussed but has not been discussed by many people is client-side proofs, that is, proving on consumer devices or mobile devices. In traditional areas outside of ZPrize and Aleo, such as the focus of most ZK rollup accelerations, it is all about server-side implementation. This is all related to latency. I think it is equally important to consider the case where the client wants to keep a secret and generate a proof about that secret. I think this is an area that many people in the ZK field may implicitly deny the existence of client-side provers. If privacy is needed, it is achieved through server-side solutions, such as MPC.
In the coming years, there will be intense debates in the ZK field about whether there is a need for proofs on consumer electronics or mobile devices. Personally, I tend to think that there is a need, and I believe that client-side proofs will make many special applications possible, especially in the area of personal identity verification. This is why I am so optimistic about this area and why I am so excited about the results of this year's ZPrize.
Foresight News: Speaking of Aleo, can you talk about the launch of your mainnet? It was originally planned for the first quarter, but now it has been delayed. Is there a new roadmap? Can you share a specific schedule?
Alex Pruden: We plan to launch the final version of the testnet next month.
Looking back, when we planned to launch in March, we felt that the technology had not been fully validated, and it would be safer to conduct several more months of testing and validation. Now, we have completed most of it and will launch a new version of the testnet in the coming weeks. By then, we have some conditions that need to be met, which we have shared in some core developer conference calls, such as client stability, validator stability, ensuring network activity, and so on. When these conditions are met, we will let the community decide whether to launch the mainnet.
I am very confident about launching the mainnet within this year.
Foresight News: Once the Aleo mainnet is launched, what kind of applications have demand or motivation to integrate with Aleo?
Alex Pruden: I think the most valuable thing Aleo offers is programmable and permissionless privacy.
In the short term, the most important killer use case in this regard is identity verification. Very unique identity protocols can be built, solving problems that cannot be solved in any other way. For example, zPass allows you to build age verification on the web. Age verification on the web is a challenge in a permissionless environment. I think it has tremendous potential in this regard.
Starting from identity, you can build a new generation of DeFi applications that can embed compliance but also aggregate a large amount of liquidity from different sources. Bridging is also very exciting, as I mentioned earlier, TLS Notary shows how to combine different systems using ZK. Finally, I think ZK ML is a very interesting area, as I discussed earlier.
The applications in these four areas all require three things that Aleo provides: programmability, permissionlessness, and privacy. These are the four types of applications that I am very much looking forward to implementing on Aleo.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
