GKR Company reduces ZK proof costs by only committing to inputs and outputs, skipping all heavy intermediate steps.
The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, presented a cryptographic protocol called GKR, which stands for Goldwasser–Kalai–Rothblum, to make zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) much faster and more scalable.
The protocol will reduce the cost of computing ZK proofs, which form the basis for privacy and scalability solutions in the Ethereum ecosystem.
How GKR accelerates the process of error proofing without the need for large commitments
In a detailed tutorial on his personal blog, Buterin described how GKR makes computations involving more than one layer of data, such as cryptographic hashing or neural network inference, more efficient.
According to him, traditional systems, such as STARKs, require users to commit to every step in a computational process, which means performing hundreds of hashes for every byte of data. However, GKR completely bypasses these intermediate commitments, only committing to inputs and outputs, which greatly saves time and resources.
The underlying mechanism relies on a mathematical process known as "comprehensive verification." This process allows the prover and verifier to validate complex computations by only looking at some randomly selected points instead of examining the entire dataset.