ZPrize today announced the winners of the inaugural ZPrize competition giving away total prize of $4.415 million. zkSync emerged as the winner of one of the 8 categories and a total of 32 participants.
According to the organizers, the inaugural ZPrize competition enhanced the baseline ZK technology algorithm and demonstrated the value of cross-industry collaboration in accelerating the future of the technology.
Why does it matter?
- Zero-knowledge cryptography has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with the world. Imagine secure, cookie-free private browsing across the internet where you and you alone decide who gets your data and when.
- Or swift and secure digital payments via your mobile phone that don’t leave a trail of breadcrumbs back to you for advertisements you don’t want.
- This is a future where your important information is never stored on a server, shared with advertisers, or most importantly hacked for someone else’s benefit; in this reality, you choose what to share and what not to share, not the other way around.
ZPrize Competition
In March 2022, Aleo, the leading ZKP protocol, launched the ZPrize competition, an industry-wide initiative to promote ZK hardware development and hyper-charge the deployment of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs).
The idea of a hardware-based ZK competition was first conceived at ETHDenver in 2022 by a group of expert technologists and cryptographers, led by Aleo CEO Alex Pruden.
The goals of the ZPrize competition include:
- Improve Baseline Performance of Key General Algorithms
- Increase Diversity and Availability of Low-Level Libraries for Cryptographic Proofs
- Increase Awareness of the Groundbreaking Potential of Zero-Knowledge Crypto
From these goals emerged a competition with two overarching divisions, Open and Team.
- The Open category would come to consist of seven main categories for public goods with benefit to multiple protocols/proof systems.
- The Team category would consist of five categories defined by the individual teams specific to a given protocol/proof-system.
Most importantly, every submission regardless of category would be open-sourced at the end of the competition, pushing forward the industry and technology as a whole.
Alex Pruden, CEO of Aleo, said:
“While software-based zero-knowledge cryptography has advanced significantly over the past several years, hardware acceleration still has a lot of room for improvement. We are already seeing important improvements in hardware performance because of the competition’s embracing of community and openness.”
“In order to provide the foundation for a more developed ZK infrastructure, it is essential to create an ecosystem that encourages innovation,” Alex added.
As an open-source endeavor, ZPrize brought together traditional hardware behemoths like, AMD and CoreWeave with investment groups like Samsung Next, and web3 projects such as Mina Protocol, Polygon, Manta Network, Anoma, and Aleo.
Competition At a Glance:
Here’s a quick rundown of what happened during the 2022 ZPrize competition.
Total Improvement Across Categories: 2,536.26%
Submissions: 32
Total Prize Money Awarded: $4,415,000
The 2022 Annual ZPrize winners in each category include, zkSync & Yrrid Software (tied for first place), Gregor Mitscha-Baude, Manta Network & Jump Crypto, ConsenSys, Snarkify, Euler’s Smile, and ZPrize (Baseline).
More details on the challenges, architects, and winners, the comprehensive results of the inaugural ZPrize is available here.
Read Also: Alex Pruden Appointed As New CEO Of Aleo