Harmony is committing for zkDAO and privacyDAO, bringing the best research to production, especially for zero-knowledge proofs and other cryptography primitives.
We should focus on products with 100x benefits, magical uses, or universal constructs. The following 6 products are the most ready. We put an estimated numbers of users per product below as a measure of success.
- Succinct – rollups (10M users), stateless (100K)
- Private – mixers (1M), authentication (10M)
- Fair – randomness (10M), anti-collusion (100K)
💥 Join our ZKU.one Course “Zero-knowledge Products on Mainnet”!
In September during ETH Lisbon 2021, we were announcing our $300M ecosystem fund for 100 DAOs. Today I am proud to report that our 23 DAOs are now funded with Gnosis Safe multi-signatures and Snapshot votings. Our Research DAO already has multiple top professors as governors and giving travel grants to students; our Wallet DAO spawned three mobile clients and pushed through many security audits. Our bottom-up approach is the "Basic Income" DAO, paying creatives and builders at $75 per hour – globally for at-will contributions. Our top-down approach is the "Organic Liquidity" DAO, market-making across tens of exchanges by thousands of strategy bots – with aligned and public incentives. Harmony has committed millions of funds to these initiatives. More importantly, we have pushed their formations, governance, and milestones in the public – all as open development across chains. Here, we are launching zkDAO for zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic primitives, and privacy. That's where the 100x benefits and the magical use cases come in. We are focusing on ZK innovations that are the most likely to reach millions of users in 2023. We are most interested in universal ZK constructs that are the building blocks for Web3. In particular, here are six ZK products that already have prototypes on mainnet. The first is compressing computations and states to succinct representations – namely, low-fee zkEVM rollups, trustless Flyclient bridges, and stateless Non-Interactive-PoPoW clients. The second is protecting privacy across multiple chains and Web2-to-Web3 actions. For example, cross-chain coin mixers like Tornado – which is a top use case with 35K users and $6M revenue; Ethereum Foundation's Semaphore Project now enables anonymous authentication and voting. Lastly, fairness is now guaranteed on blockchain. Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF) will be a key primitive for randomness in games and lotteries; anti-collusion for quadratic funding will be critical for anonymous and open grants.
ZK Light & Stateless Clients (SoK survey)
- Celestia’s data client: modular architecture for consensus & data but not execution, sampling w/ 2D Reed-Solomon erasure coding, interoperable w/ Tendermint & IBC. (github, binary, tech)
- Celo’s Plumo & Valora: verify epoch block headers of the validator set changes once per day, BLS aggregate signature, checkpoints with hundreds of epoches. (research, audit, ops)
- Harmony’s Horizon: Flyclient’s probablistic sampling of logarithmic # of headers from PoW w/ variable difficulty, Merkle Mountain Range as updatable committment. (networking, data)
- Nil’s Mina client & Auro: 22KB recursive SNARK proof (architecture, roadmap, wallet)
- Ethereum 1.5 & 2.0: stateless w/ sharded accounts & fast sync (verkle tree, state expiry)
- Cardano’s Mithril: noninteractive proof of PoW (NiPoPoW) (miners, velvet fork, multisig)
- Facebook’s Novi Diem: full epoch proofs for BFT consensus. (SoK survey, proof of assets, spec)
ZK Trustless & Secure Bridges (SoK survey)
- Interlay’s Bitcoin bridge: multi-collateral, w/ Polkadot & Cosmos (SoK, txchain, reduction)
- Celo’s Optics & Nomad: 1-of-N fraud-proof, batch committment, bond forfeits (evmos, github)
- Harmony’s Horizon: 200K gas w/ BLS checkpoints, proof of burns between epoches (assets)
- Near’s Rainbow & Aurora: 6-minute (20 blocks) & 500K gas (ux, ecosystem, governance)
- Nil’s Solana client: 100KB & 2M-gas proofs, 5X reduction w/ PLONK (architecture, libraries)
- Celestia’s inter-cluster: composable w/ trust-minimized synchrony assumption (SoK, trilemma)
Other Products
- https://starkware.co/use-cases (25K users in 2021)
- https://gubsheep.substack.com/p/six-moonshot-zk-applications (100K users in 2023)
- https://medium.com/o1labs/10-snapps-use-cases-on-mina-83e646010e52 (10K in 2021)
- https://zeroknowledge.fm/the-l2-roundup-discovering-new-things-about-ethereum-l2-platforms/ (100K users in 2021)
Q1 Action Items
- 20 scholars on our ZKU.one Course “Zero-knowledge Products on Mainnet”
- Port Dark Forest (already live on Ethereum and xDai mainnets)
- Grants to port Starkware’s NFT SDK (already live for Immutable X marketplace)
- Grants to port Matter Lab’s zkSync 2.0 (as Volition with optional data availability)
- Grants to port Polygon’s Miden (Distaff-based zkEVM)
Research DAO
The Research DAO stands at the intersection of three fields of computer science: Cryptography. Cryptography concerns the design and analysis of protocols in the presence of adversaries. A strongly mathematical field, it touches upon both low-level primitives such as signatures, encryption schemes and zero-knowledge proofs, as well as higher level protocols such as blockchains, consensus algorithms, and authenticated data structures. Prominent academic conferences in the field are CRYPTO and EUROCRYPT… Privacy. Blockchains are the first practical application of zero-knowledge proofs, a much loved if not idolized concept in cryptography. The ability to perform private transactions that enable untraceability and unlinkability is one aspect. The ability to have fully private smart contracts and smart contract state, whether on layer 1 or on layer 2, is a much more difficult goal. New blockchain-centric primitives that enable zero-knowledge creation of stake and signatures are central to these systems. The two primary peer-reviewed conferences in the blockchain field are currently Financial Cryptography (FC) and the ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT). We are also recruiting works in the top security and cryptography conferences in the field.Research DAO – Bring Best Results to Production
Latest Development
- https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/11/05/halo.html
- https://zkmesh.substack.com/p/zkmesh-oct-2021-recap
- https://0xparc.notion.site/ZK-Learning-Group-Topics-f53933eecc2f41438c6c2bdd5b42ee2d
- https://www.zkhack.dev/#workshop
Current Metrics
- $6.23M fees, $4.36B assets, 34.1K users
- dydx, Immutable X
Our Research & Surveys
- Top conferences: IEEE S&P, ACM CSS, USENIX Security
- Related conferences: NDSS, NSDI, SOSP
- Specialized conferences: FC, Scaling Bitcoin, Breaking Bitcoin, Bpase
