While blockchain technology has many advantages, it still faces some challenges that may prevent widespread adoption. The slow throughput rate, insufficient scalability and interoperability of legacy blockchain networks are all reasons for concern. While progress has been made in some areas, privacy remains a major concern and must be addressed quickly.
Zero-Knowledge (ZK), a rapid technological advancement, has been able to emerge as a solution for all of the current problems in the blockchain industry. Since ZK is a relatively recent introduction, most of the blockchain universe isn’t fully aware of its potential. This realization led 22 Web3-ZK companies to form a group to push zero-knowledge for mainstream Web3 adoption.
In this context, Manta Network, the Polkadot-based plug-and-play privacy protocol for Web3 and one of the core sponsors of the ZPrize competition, has announced that it is joining forces with Mina Protocol to sponsor ZPrize’s “Open Division” competition.
Manta Network will be awarding the prize to the projects that are focused on maximizing throughput, minimizing latency and operations on blockchain-based Virtual Machines. (VMs) include client-type devices (e.g. the WebAssembly runtime). Manta Network and Mina team will also sponsor Open Division. They will work together to solve multi-scalar multiplication and number-theoretic transformer (NTT), which are prerequisites ZK computations.
Shoumo Chu is a Manta Network Core Contributor and Co-founder. “We have chosen to be the architect and sponsors in the open division because we truly care about WASM ZKP performance. We view the WASM ZKP performance as the ‘last mile problem’ for mass ZKP adoption. In order to get massive ZKP and privacy adoption, we have to get ZKP prover integration with popular wallets, and having improved WASM, prover performance is the way forward.”
Increase Zero-Knowledge Growth Through Competition
ZPrize is an all-inclusive competition that awards $7 million to promote Zero-Knowledge technology. The ZPrize competition has several sections that each address different aspects of Zero-Knowledge technology advancement.
Numerous foundations, funds and companies are supporting the ZPrize competition. The organizations sponsoring the ZPrize competition include 0xPARC Foundation, Aleo Foundation and CoreWeave Foundation.
This competition will see participants create open-source projects which benefit all blockchain communities while they compete for cash prizes. The primary goal of the ZPrize competition is to increase awareness of zero-knowledge cryptography’s potential while improving the performance of key general algorithms and increasing the diversity and availability of low-level libraries for cryptographic proofs.
According to Alex Pruden, the COO of Aleo & Founder of the ZPrize initiative, “The sponsors of ZPrize not only represent an industry but a united community of believers in this technology. These exciting ideas are shared by us all. We want to make them a reality. With the ZPrize, we’re advancing the state-of-the-art to form the bricks of the technological foundation that will scale and secure the next-generation web.”