2019 - The Year In Snarks [Part 1 - Events]
By Pranay Mohan
This pop-up newsletter is all about why SNARKs represent such an important technology for the coming decade. Part of understanding the possibilities of that future, however, comes from looking at where we’ve been.
For the next two issues, we’ll be looking at the 2019 year in SNARKs, with today’s part 1 focused on the events that made the year notable and tomorrow’s part 2 focused on the key people. Let’s dive in.
5 Key Advancements that Drove SNARKs Forward (in no particular order)
Updatable & Transparent Setup SNARKs
Historically, SNARKs have employed trusted setups, requiring expensive multi-party computation. In 2019, we saw a key improvement via updatable setups which never terminate, and allow honest parties to keep updating the shared reference string. Additionally, while it is still early, Fractal shows that we can have transparent SNARKs - in other words, SNARKs that don’t require a trusted setup.
Read more about Fractal
Universal SNARKs
Before universal SNARKs like Sonic, each circuit required its own setup. Universal SNARKs can support arbitrary computations bounded by the size of the circuit. This is promising because we can leverage the trust in any one setup or ceremony without each application having to run its own setup phase.
Read more about Sonic
Recursive composition using ordinary elliptic curves
Recursive SNARKs allow one to create proofs that include previous SNARK proofs. This is very powerful, as it can enable protocols like Coda -- which recursively proves that each block update to a blockchain is valid. Previously, this could only be done using pairing friendly curves (like MNT4/MNT6). Halo, released in 2019, is promising as it demonstrates recursion using ordinary curves.
Read more about Halo
SNARKs on Layer 2
The Ethereum community coalesced around Layer 2 solutions to scaling, one of which included ZK Rollups. The Ethereum Foundation gave Matter Labs a grant to help support this effort. Other chains such as Tezos also began exploring both privacy and scaling using SNARKS (see Marigold)
Read more about Tezos and SNARKS
SNARK Challenge
Coda Protocol created a competition, inviting the community to help speed up SNARK proof speed. The top-prize winner sped up the Groth16 Prover 3.6x from its baseline proof speed. This is an important step forward in realizing the potential of zk-SNARKs in regards to scaling and privacy solutions in crypto. Teams like Coda, Zcash, Filecoin, Celo, Tezos, 0x, Ethereum and more will benefit from this technical achievement. This solution has been open-sourced for all to continue to improve upon and work is being done everyday to advance this.