The latest crypto news is about the Swiss non-profit organization ZeroSync, which has officially implemented a STARK evidence-based ZK light client dedicated to Bitcoin.
It is a system focused on zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs that will allow users in the Bitcoin ecosystem to effectively validate network state without having to download the entire blockchain.
Considering that the weight of the latter currently exceeds 515 GB, we can easily guess that this innovation facilitates the work of many developers and supporters of the network, as well as providing greater privacy and scalability.
ZeroSync’s mission in the long run goes beyond all this and is focused on bringing a new layer-2 protocol to Bitcoin that can support up to 100 transactions per second.
See all the details below.
Latest news: ZeroSync implements a dedicated zk client for Bitcoin
The latest crypto news features Swiss nonprofit organization ZeroSync (not to be confused with Ethereum’s L2 network ZkSync) as the main protagonist and the development of a light client based on zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs for the Bitcoin network.
These proofs, which rest their foundation on the well-known Cairo programming language, allow users to easily validate the state of the network without necessarily having to download the entire blockchain, which currently weighs over 515GB.
In doing so, anyone can use a simple proof-of-work ( more precsiously proof-of-payment SPV) centered on STARK, which incidentally represents the same zk proof model used by ZkSync, to verify block headers, proof-of-work and difficulty adjustments on Bitcoin.
These kinds of zero-knowledge proofs, generally applied within the Ethereum ecosystem and now pioneered on Bitcoin for the first time, bring greater privacy and scalability to the chain.
In fact, while this technology makes it possible to verify the authenticity of a piece of data on blockchain without having to reveal information about the sender, the application of these concepts in a layer-2 sidechain could significantly accelerate the amount of transactions that can be handled by the network.
On the mere light client front, the landing of ZeroSync represents a significant step forward in that it allows the inclusion of transactions on Bitcoin to be verified by storing only part of the chain and avoiding annoying memory issues.
Other examples of light clients (which, however, do not use zk proofs) are Electrum and Multibit.
On the important ZeroSync news, project co-founder Robin Linus commented in these words hinting at the immense potential behind it:
“This lowers the barriers of entry to participate as a first-class citizen in the Bitcoin network by orders of magnitude. In the long term, we hope to bring mass scalability to Bitcoin using Stark Proofs.”
ZeroSync’s mission
The work of the ZeroSync association, physically located in the Swiss canton of Zug, takes inspiration primarily from the strong development that ZK proof-based systems have found in recent years on the Ethereum ecosystem, with the intention of replicating the same success on Bitcoin.
Indeed, this is the first project to use ZK proofs developed by software development company StarkWare outside of Ethereum.
On Bitcoin, this paradigm shift on the technology front holds great promise: continuously proving hundreds of gigabytes on the chain represents a very computationally expensive task, but these kinds of compressions allow for instantaneous synchronization independent of the growing size of the chain.
In addition, these test systems allow the network structure to be augmented with additional data, such as a UTXO set commitment, without requiring any consensus changes and without changing the principles on which the protocol was built.
Anyone can decide to use this signature STARK technology on their own, the project being completely open source with a code library available on GitHub.
Now, although the reduction of computational work for network synchronization over Bitcoin seems like an incredible innovation in itself, we must consider that ZeroSync aims to do much better.
The association’s mission is to explore a new range of applications on Bitcoin by bringing greater privacy and scalability to the network, seeking to mimic the development that is taking place on Ethereum
In fact, the project is aiming to implement a layer-2 protocol that can enable raising the maximum number of manageable transactions (TP/s) from the current 7 to over 100.
Who knows, in the not-too-distant future we may see a wide range of Bitcoin layer-2s that lay their foundations on zero-knowledge cryptosystems and come to compete with the well-known Lightning Network, which to date appears to be Bitcoin’s dominant side-chain.
Robin Linus is optimistic about the future of ZeroSync and believes that the latest work has been instrumental in being able to pursue the ultimate goal of improving the Bitcoin ecosystem.
These are his words:
“ZeroSync has designed and is currently implementing a Layer 2 protocol that has remarkable privacy and scalability properties, enabling Bitcoin to process more than 100 token transactions per second. This could be a major feat in bringing Bitcoin toward the scalability it needs.”