The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the largest technical professional organization in the world, has awarded a research article that was published ten years ago and is considered a “blueprint” for the first practical application of zero-knowledge proofs, or ZK-proofs. The “genesis paper” titled “Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin” is said to have paved the way for ZK-proofs in the cryptocurrency space and has now won the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy’s “Test of Time” award. This information was shared with Cointelegraph.
“The award acknowledges the paper’s broad and lasting impact on both research and practice in computer security and privacy,” StarkWare wrote in a statement.
The paper, with 2,400 academic citations, did not transform finance but paved the way for the proliferation of projects using ZK-proofs, the firm added.
Additionally, it presented the first application of cryptography in a practical way to improve privacy in cryptocurrencies.Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, Madars Virza, and Eli Ben-Sasson are the publication’s authors who get the award.StarkWare, a blockchain scaling company, was founded by Ben-Sasson.
“The award reminds us that, looking back on it, this paper was the moment that ZK was catapulted onto the agenda of blockchain research,” said Ben-Sasson, who added that it was the moment that “started an ever-growing fascination with how it can help crypto to become the technology we all need.”
The study explained how to create a secret payment system called Zerocash that conceals the origin, destination, and total number of transactions by employing Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKS).Nowadays, Ethereum layer-2 solutions frequently employ ZK-proofs to demonstrate the authenticity of on-chain data without disclosing the precise content of that data. By making methods like rollups and the trustless validation of massive volumes of data off-chain possible, they can aid with scaling. ZK-proofs are presently being used by leading layer-2 networks such as Scroll, Polygon, zkSync Era, StarkNet, and Linea.
Authorities are stepping up their enforcement of privacy-preserving measures, according to a May 14 Cointelegraph article. But ZK-proofs, which protect privacy and make sure money doesn’t go to blacklisted organizations, might provide an answer. Privacy is important, Ben-Sasson told Cointelegraph.The addition of ZK capabilities to our prover Stwo will enable developers to access a more scalable version of the Zerocash construction on Starknet (and Ethereum) in order to facilitate this. Ernst & Young, a Big Four accounting firm, introduced an Ethereum-based solution in April that uses ZK-proofs to assist its private company clients in facilitating complex contracts.