ZeroSync to Bring Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Bitcoin

The nonprofit organization ZeroSync Association разрабатывает инструменты, которые помогут масштабировать блокчейн биткоина с помощью zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP).

The project, based in the canton of Zug (Switzerland), aims to provide users with the ability to synchronize nodes almost instantly without having to download all of the network’s current 500 GB of data.

ZeroSync has already built a working client prototype that allows verifying the state and history of the blockchain.

The developers noted that ZKPs bring scalability and greater privacy. They said Bitcoin’s relative simplicity and the unspent transaction output (UTXO) model provide a “unique advantage” for implementing recursive proofs.

“Most importantly, these options do not require changes to the consensus and do not introduce additional trust requirements,” ZeroSync said.

The project’s solution can be used for a wide range of applications. To that end, ZeroSync is building a development toolkit.

The project uses ZK-STARK as the base technology from the startup StarkWare. The latter, along with Geometry, provided ZeroSync with initial funding in the form of research grants.

Contributions are provided by Lambda and the Bitcoin micropayment network Lightning Network company Lightning Labs.

ZeroSync emphasised that ZKP is widely used in various iterations by second-layer networks to scale Ethereum such as Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism and StarkNet. However, the Swiss project has become a pioneer in implementing such a protocol in Bitcoin.

As Vitalik Buterin has called the ZK-Rollups technology a priority tool for scaling and decentralisation of the network.