There’s a question I find more interesting than “how fast is ZK”:
Can privacy on the blockchain truly become useful if the computational cost is still too high?
That’s why I started paying attention to the cryptography behind Dusk.
Zero-knowledge proofs are powerful because they allow a network to verify that something is true without disclosing all the original data. But that power comes with a price too: the process of generating and verifying proofs can become a significant part of the workload.
Dusk has researched this issue at the level of cryptographic primitives, including PlonKup — a work that combines Plonk with plookup to improve how checks are handled inside the proof system. PlonKup is currently listed by Dusk in its research papers group.
I like this because it shows that privacy infrastructure is not just a marketing story like “we have ZK.”
Behind a confidential transaction lies an entire cryptography stack that must be efficient enough for the blockchain to use it in real-world practice.
And this is also where I think Dusk has a tough problem.
Financial applications need privacy, but privacy can’t be traded off for an experience that’s too slow or infrastructure that’s too heavy.
On the other hand, optimizing proof generation can’t only focus on the speed of the end user; the network still has to maintain stable verification and operation.
So what I want to track at @Dusk is not just how many additional privacy features they have.
But rather:
Can they turn cryptography technologies that are inherently very complex into practical infrastructure for regulated finance?
If they can, then that’s what would be genuinely noteworthy.
#dusk $DUSK
Can privacy on the blockchain truly become useful if the computational cost is still too high?
That’s why I started paying attention to the cryptography behind Dusk.
Zero-knowledge proofs are powerful because they allow a network to verify that something is true without disclosing all the original data. But that power comes with a price too: the process of generating and verifying proofs can become a significant part of the workload.
Dusk has researched this issue at the level of cryptographic primitives, including PlonKup — a work that combines Plonk with plookup to improve how checks are handled inside the proof system. PlonKup is currently listed by Dusk in its research papers group.
I like this because it shows that privacy infrastructure is not just a marketing story like “we have ZK.”
Behind a confidential transaction lies an entire cryptography stack that must be efficient enough for the blockchain to use it in real-world practice.
And this is also where I think Dusk has a tough problem.
Financial applications need privacy, but privacy can’t be traded off for an experience that’s too slow or infrastructure that’s too heavy.
On the other hand, optimizing proof generation can’t only focus on the speed of the end user; the network still has to maintain stable verification and operation.
So what I want to track at @Dusk is not just how many additional privacy features they have.
But rather:
Can they turn cryptography technologies that are inherently very complex into practical infrastructure for regulated finance?
If they can, then that’s what would be genuinely noteworthy.
#dusk $DUSK