ViaBTC Capital｜An inventory of the ZK project donated by Gitcoin in its 13th round

background

Gitcoin is the largest financing and construction platform in the field of Web3.0. Creators and builders of Web3.0 projects can obtain funding from community users on Gitcoin. As of the end of March, there were more than 2,400 projects and 312,000 active developers on Gitcoin, with a funding amount of $54.6 million. Gitcoin Grants is a regular crowdfunding event held by Gitcoin, where community users can support potentially high-quality new projects with an unlimited amount. The 13th round of Gitcoin's project Gitcoin Grants event (GR13) started on March 9th and ended on March 24th. There are more than 800 projects. The projects are classified by multiple tags, and there are more than 20 projects under the zkTech tag.

zkTech projects refer to early, open source or public application projects centered on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). ZKP is playing an increasingly important role in the blockchain. For example, Zcash, a well-known privacy project, uses ZKP to protect users' transaction privacy. The expansion of ZKP in Ethereum has also received great attention. Vitalik has highly praised ZK Rollup based on ZKP on many occasions, and even believes that ZK Rollup is a long-term solution for the second-layer expansion of Ethereum ( https://zeroknowledge.fm/120 -2/ ). According to the statistics of L2BEAT ( https://l2beat.com ), there are currently 4 ZK projects in the top 10 second-tier projects of TVL, including zkSync, dYdX and Loopring. This article will mainly take stock of more than 20 ZK projects under the zkTech label to peek into a corner of the ZK world.

community education

Project: learn.0xparc.org

Website: https://0xparc.org/

The 0xPARC Foundation aims to promote the research and educational development of Ethereum and other decentralized applications. Projects that have been funded, provided operational support or otherwise participated in include Dark Forest, EthUniversity, Reboot, Project Sophon, etc. 0xPARC organizes learning resources from learning groups that apply ZK and integrates them at learn.0xparc.org. On this learn.0xparc.org site, we can find resources such as preschool material requirements, study group handouts, and demos. This is a constantly updated learning resource collection platform, which aims to provide and organize the best resources for lovers of learning ZK space. The funds that 0xPARC receives from donations are mainly used to support administrators and volunteers in maintaining the resources of the entire project.

Project: ZK Travel Scholarships

Website: https://0xparc.org/

This project is also initiated by the 0xPARC Foundation, which is similar to a grant. The 0xPARC program cooperates with the Stanford Blockchain Research Center to fund researchers or students in the field of encryption to participate in ZK-related or other encryption conferences. The initiative hopes to provide ongoing fundamental research for long-term applications of blockchain by bringing academic researchers closer to the blockchain community by engaging them in Ethereum and blockchain community events and conferences.

Project: Blaine Bublitz

Website: https://github.com/phated

This project is a bit special in that it directly funds the work of developer Blaine Bublitz. Blaine is an active ETH/ZK infrastructure and ecological developer, and has participated in the development of several open source ZK tools.

Project: ZK HACK

Website: https://www.zkhack.dev/mini.html

ZK HACK is a short-cycle online activity platform. Through introductory workshops and advanced puzzle-solving competitions, participants learn how to use ZK tools.

Project: MoonMath Manual to zk-SNARKs

Website: https://leastauthority.com/

Least Authority is a consulting firm that provides security services. They hope to provide newcomers to cryptography and programming with their own guide to zk-SNARKs, enabling readers to step by step implement complex ZK designs.

Project: zkApe

Website: https://zkape.substack.com/

zkApe is the ZK Newsletter in Turkish, which regularly brings together developments, updates, publications and podcasts about ZK technology.

development class

Project: Circom

Official website: https://iden3.io/circom

Circom is an important circuit programming language and compiler in the ZK domain, allowing programmers to design and create their own arithmetic circuits with zero-knowledge proofs. The first version of Circom was developed in 2018 by Jordi Baylina of iden3, the Ethereum scaling solutions technical team. As an important development tool for zero-knowledge technology, Cicom has been successfully used in projects such as Tornado Cash, Dark Forest, and Polygon Hermez.

Circom is a novel domain-specific language that aims to provide developers with a holistic framework for building arithmetic circuits through a simple-to-operate interface and outlines the complexities of proof mechanisms. Among them, CicomLib is an open source template library that provides hundreds of circuit templates, such as comparators, hash functions, digital signatures, binary and decimal converters, etc. All templates are manually verified and secured by construction. Circom helps programmers work in a modular fashion by defining small pieces and combining them to create large circuits that describe complex real-world problems. Alternatively, users can create their own custom templates.

Project: CircC

Website: https://circ.dev/

CirC is a compiler infrastructure that supports compilation from high-level languages to circuits, e.g. it can already be used to compile {C,ZoKrates,Circom} to {SMT,ILP,R1CS,MPC}.

Project: ZKxZK

Website: https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-ecdsa-1

ZKxZK is an open source effort funded by the 0xPARC Foundation to implement efficient proof-of-concept ZK circuits for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Bilinear Pair Based Cryptography (PBC) in cryptography through the Cicom language. The funds obtained by its donation are mainly used for the rental of servers to run the required programs.

Project: ZKML

Website: https://github.com/0xZKML/zk-mnist

ZKML hopes to develop zkSNARK circuits for machine learning through the Cicom language, and it is a project to be conceptualized and launched in the first study group of 0xPARC in 2021.

Project: Zk Block

Website: https://zkblock.app/

This project hopes to allow developers to quickly focus on developing high-quality ZK Dapps by developing a unified ZK template (called zkblock) that supports the latest web development technologies and ZK's common code base.

Project: zkREPL

Website: https://zkrepl.dev/

zkREPL is an online interactive playground based on zk-SNARK technology, where both beginners and experts can smoothly practice and build new ZK creative ideas online. zkREPL is a web-based SNARK development environment that community members can use to collaboratively build increasingly complex circuits and also serve as a testbed for new developer experience features. For example, on zkREPL, users can hover over any variable to see its value, just like a continuous debugger for zero-knowledge circuits.

Application class

Project: ZeroPool

Website: https://zeropool.network/

ZeroPool is a multi-blockchain DApp that allows sending completely anonymous, cheap, non-custodial transactions. ZeroPool recently partnered with Gnosis Chain (formerly xDai Chain), Gnosis Chain will build privacy features into EVM chain and cross-chain bridge through ZeroPool technology.

Project: Otter Cash

Website: https://otter.cash/

Otter Cash is similar to Solana's TornadoCash, but transaction fees are much cheaper, less than $1.

Project: zkC.REAM

Website: https://zkcre.am/

zkC.REAM is to allow ordinary citizens of Japan to participate in elections with complete anonymity, while maintaining the integrity and verifiability of final vote counts. The project has received a Grant from the Ethereum Foundation, and the DEMO has been released on the official website. A user-friendly desktop version and mobile client will be developed in the future.

Video link: https://youtu.be/plhcYwBmGY8

Project: ZK Data Marketplace

Website: https://modulozero.xyz/

ZK Data Marketplace is a data trading market based on ZK. Its business logic is roughly that the seller first promises that the data they sell satisfies certain computational properties, then the buyer locks the tokens in escrow, and finally the seller encrypts the data using the buyer's public key and submits a ZK proof to verify the data Consistent with the promise. If it works, sellers get tokens and buyers get data.

Project: Decentralisedvoting

Website: https://github.com/EDGDrummond/DeVo/blob/main/DeVo.pdf

This is an early project and currently only has a white paper. It hopes to realize a decentralized anonymous voting system based on PLONK's circuit and MPC, with key generation sharing and vote counting, to support the transition of more DAOs to a decentralized governance structure.

Summarize

We can see that the zkTech projects of GR13 are mainly divided into three categories. Community education accounts for about 1/3, including study group materials and grants initiated by 0xPARC, as well as online activities by ZK HACK. The development class accounts for about 1/3, which is basically infrastructure such as the Cicom circuit programming language and some code bases. This may be because ZK has a high development threshold, fewer developers, and fewer development tools, so the community hopes to integrate resources and provide various forms to cultivate more ZK developers to improve and optimize development tools.