Ethereum Is Researching zk-STARKs: Improving the zk-SNARKs Protocol

Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, has announced in his latest blog post an enhancement of the zk-SNARKs protocol called zk-STARKs. Zk-STARKs will eliminate the weak points of the "little brother".

The concept for zk-SNARKs is probably known to you from the token Zcash or the Byzantium update from Ethereum last month. If not, we recommend that you read our article on Zcash. Otherwise, we only want to give a brief explanation: The Blockchain is basically public. This means that all transactions are publicly known in terms of sender address, receiving address and the amount of coins transferred. The zk-SNARKs protocol masks these three pieces of information so that the transactions become anonymous and make the application especially interesting for privacy-conscious users.

In his blog post Vitalik Buterin has now reported that he and his team have found a solution to eliminate the vulnerabilities of zk-SNARKs.

Zk-SNARKs are accused of not being a trustworthy setup because of the complicated cryptographic and mathematical assumptions. Ultimately, according to many critics, the protocol lacks transparency. Furthermore, it is criticized that the protocol could be vulnerable in the future by quantum computers.

Zk-STARKs should fix these two problems now. As the "T" in zk-STARKs is aptly "transparent". Buterin describes in his blog post that the "untrusted setup" will leave. The new protocol is realized with simpler cryptographic means, such as hashes and information theory. As a result, zk-STARKs should also be protected against attackers with quantum computers.

Although with zk-STARKs also the size of a proof of 288 bytes rise to a few hundred kilobytes. Compared to the advantages gained, however, these "costs" are definitely worthwhile from the perspective of Butternut.

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