Leading Web3 Tech Companies to Launch Challenge to Advance Zero Knowledge Technology
A coalition of 22 leading zero-knowledge technology companies, foundations, and funds including Aleo, Anoma, the Ethereum Foundation, Matter Labs, Mina Protocol, Polkadot Pioneers Prize, and Polygon, joined by tech giant Advanced Micro Devices (“AMD”) announced the launch of ZPrize, an industry-sponsored contest offering $7 million in prizes to accelerate zero-knowledge cryptography to enable the technology to help scale blockchain networks. The challenge is modeled after the famous XPrize competitions that have used private contributions to fuel advances in a variety of areas including spaceflight, adult literacy, and ocean health. For the ZPrize, teams will compete for awards by engineering new algorithms and techniques that achieve performance metrics unmatched by the best zero-knowledge systems deployed in the blockchain industry.
One of the most promising approaches for scaling zero-knowledge technology is to use specialized hardware like graphics processing units (GPUs) or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). So ZPrize is collaborating with AMD-Xilinx to provide access to cutting-edge hardware such as the Varium C1100 blockchain accelerator card for competing teams to develop the best solutions to the ZPrize challenges.
“Incorporating zero-knowledge cryptography in a blockchain platform is critical for widespread adoption of the technology, but it comes with a significantly increased compute workload,” said Hamid Salehi, Director of Product Marketing, AECG Data Center Group, at AMD. “FPGAs are uniquely positioned to accelerate the zero-knowledge protocol efficiently, at the hardware level, to create scalable blockchain solutions. AMD-Xilinx is proud to support the ZPrize competition with our FPGA-based accelerators to enable the community to create innovative solutions that help advance zero-knowledge technology.”
As blockchain technology and Web3 expand into more use cases, it faces the challenge of scaling to hundreds of millions of users while at the same time remaining trustless, secure, and accessible. Zero-knowledge is a new technology that shows great promise in solving these problems. Since its introduction by ZCash in 2016, the technology has evolved through rapid-fire innovation. That’s why industry and academic experts alike view it as the key to enabling mainstream adoption of Web3 and blockchain technology.
“Espresso Systems is proud to sponsor the ZPrize, an industry-wide collaboration which we believe will be crucial to advancing zero-knowledge as a technology,” said Jill Gunter, Chief Strategy Officer for Espresso Systems. “Zero-knowledge systems are paving the way toward mass adoption of decentralized applications as they transform the way we interact and transact online and the ZPrize is an important effort to accelerate that progress.”
Teams will compete to win financial rewards in both dollars and tokens across a range of categories that the sponsors have identified to be of particular importance for practical application of zero-knowledgesystems. Submissions will be judged against the existing technical benchmarks, with the highest rewards paid out for the greatest improvements on the current state-of-the-art.
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