The Verification Layer for a Trustless Digital Future | Rolf Versluis - zkVerify Foundation

[Music] welcome thanks for joining our ZK verify buildon presentation I'm Ral Rus uh with ZK verify Foundation I'm going to go through this is specifically for the builders here in the audience so I'm going to talk loud all right got a quick agenda so you can see what we're going to go over basically with ZK verify we're doing ZK ver ZK proof verification knowledge proofs is kind of an esoteric type thing so I'm going to do a brief explanation of it I'm going to talk about what it can be used for then talk about what ZK verifies bring into the party who we are to be building this stuff and why you can rely on us and then talk about specifically what our awards are how they can be stacked with some of the other Awards here and how you going to get support to build an awesome project so let's go through and do that all right so first off zero knowledge proofs they're kind of a new well they're not really that new but they're new inuse technology that allows you to prove that a computation happened which seems kind of boring Until you realize you can do private transactions you can prove that an AI model was run uh without exposing the underlying model you can do private polling and voting there's all sorts of different things that it enables also supply chain but the big idea that I think zero knowledge proof is going to be used for over the next few years is to be able to allow web 2 to interact with web 3 so you can prove that something in a web 2 application was done and then you can bring that information along with it zero knowledge proof into any type of web 3 system the important thing to know about zero knowledge proofs in this advanced cryptographic mathematics that it does is that you have to prove you have to create the zero knowledge proof and then you have to verify it doesn't do you any good to create it without verifying it and I can so you can probably guess what it is that we do by the name of our project we verify ZK proofs now that seems kind of basic but there's actually a really big problem in the industry so uh I'm wearing my zen shirt because I'm the co-founder of Horizon and that's one of the first projects that was launched that had a ZK circuit in it that was back in 2017 so Zen Horizon still an ongoing project ZK verify is from the same team that has all this experience and we recognized over the years with this experience that the problem for zero knowledge proofs is they're slow and they're expensive and I mean who wants to pay5 to $10 to do kind of private polling or voting you need to be able to pay one or two cents you need be able to able to do it quickly so that's the specific problem we're addressing we're making zero knowledge proofs fast and inexpensive and to do that we have two things that we're doing so first off there's a bunch of new ways to create zero knowledge proofs using new cryptography it makes it much more accessible for people that don't understand how to build all the circuits and the logic to do that so one of them is ZK virtual machines um so risk zero is an example of that you can take any type of rust code run it in the ZK virtual machine and it'll create a zero knowledge proof that the rust code was run properly another is many different types of elliptic curves the elliptic curve that's on ethereum which is where most people have been verifying their ZK proofs is an older curve there's newer and more secure curves and as many of y'all know ellip curves aren't Quantum Computing safe so we have to look at new types of zero knowledge proofs that are quantum Computing safe if we really want to look uh to the Future then another thing is plish types of proofs so these are proofs that are optimized for being able to be used on enduser devices like mobile phones or web browsers in a lot of cases you want to be able to do your proofs right where the information is right where the user is the cool thing about doing them on your devices is they have a very low cost to create them and so with the flexibility of plish proofs and Aztec has created the Noir system to create these proofs uh it's a great domain specific language now the next part is the verification so our developers decided that the best way to be able to address the the two main problems of slow and expensive was to make an optimized blockchain system that's built on new technology this is built on substrate blockchain framework very similar to um uh to polka dot and you can see over on the diagram that we have multiple different types of proofs that can be sent to our proof verification system and once two of three validators verify the proofs they're put it onto onto the blockchain for a lot of web 2 applications that's all you need right there fast quick uh inexpensive proofs however we also integrate with many different types of ethereum virtual machines so we can take a bunch of these proofs the receipts for them send a uh data structure to our smart contract on an evm and then the proof verification is a is available to any web3 contract that wants to to use them so this is our system ZK verify is not a smart contract platform it's a system that enables people to use new Fast and inexpensive proofs for many different types of applications so who's building this can you rely on us for doing this all right let me tell you a little bit about the team that's building ZK verify this is Horizon Labs Horizon Labs has been has eight years of experience building blockchains and zero knowledge systems we got people all over the world we've worked on many different projects with many different organizations so first if you like our first project Zen you can still buy it on binance and coinbase it's been active since 2017 our team developed zenu a ZK based side Chain Bridge this is actually designed to help a utxo protocol like Bitcoin extend its capabilities by having a side chain to another blockchain we implemented that for Horizon and so right now the Horizon Project is actually two blockchains a utxo proof of work and an evm side chain which happened to be a custom evm developed by The Horizon Labs team uh one of our cryptographers was a a key contributor to the Poseidon 2 hash function paper for us ZK technology Geeks poseiden 2 is a pretty Advanced hash system uh and then last summer we really got into the uh the middle of doing uh Defi and uh web3 experience by working with the ape Dow to bring ape chain onto arbitrum as Norbit chain so we're experience in a lot of different aspects specifically with zero knowledge proofs and with blockchains all right so what are the awards that we got here at the eth Denver we got $25,000 in prizes five different prizes all for the same thing build us a really cool app a web 2 app a web 3 app that uses zero knowledge proofs and integral to the application creates a proof verifies it on ZK verify pretty straightforward we got lots of people that can help you and spe specifically this week we deployed our ZK verify attestation smart contract onto other um sponsors so you can stack prizes you can stack prizes with flow with Bass with B&B chain arbitrum or ethereum so not only can you do ZK proofs and get prize money from us for a good project but also from these other projects as well so we want to help you be successful with that now how you going to learn and use ZK verify we have outstanding documentation go to our documentation website it explains what it is how to use it we got links to tutorials on using these three main verifiers then we got example code on games and then recently we just wrapped up a online hackathon uh that was done with dead folio and you can see the screenshot to the right here of some of the winning projects and so let's talk about some of those winning projects because they can provide inspiration for the projects that y'all might want to uh build and these were this was a web three online hackerson so these are all web 3 projects that integrate the ZK verifi smart contract one of them uh I I'll just go across the top so Shadow ml was a way to be able to use a machine learning algorithm prove that it was used but hide the actual algorithm and I can think that many people who would develop proprietary training algorithms and sell their usage uh whether through tokens or fees or whatever um but they can generate a ZK proof that this algorithm was actually used windwave is a cool way of selecting a winner uh in a social media platform so uh from like X you know the number of likes or the number of follows or different things like that and it does it in a provably fair way and uses ZK proofs for that ZK leaderboard is a project where when you have a game a web 3 game okay that's fun but it's more fun when you can beat other people because winning is fun and that's what the leaderboard is all about it prove takes the proof that you got a specific score in a game brings it to a leaderboard and shows the winners and you know that the the people on that leaderboard are correct because it use a zero knowledge proof to do that now once you have a leaderboard other people can you know bet on it and stuff like that but I think the leaderboard is a really important part of it edifi was a neat project that allows people to get micro loans in a uh a private way so you can have people some people like to contribute to charity but they like to do so privately so this way you are able to pay for people to get educational loans with microloans in a uh in a private way proof of Med another neat idea where you have pharmacists or or doctors that create a prescription and then pharmacists that fill it but the current way to do it at least what I've seen is the doctor writes a piece of paper and you bring that to the pharmacy and that's pretty much what you get there's a lot of opportunity for uh some things in between there where you can just pretty much get anything from the pharmacy that you want so you this system would allow doctors to create a zero knowledge proof of what the prescription is and that can be verified at the pharmacy now the one on the bottom right wasn't actually a a web 3 prize but I included it here anyway because it's pretty neat uh so the Eliza OS is an AI agent type application and so this integrates ZK proofs into the AI agent it's worth taking a look at um and allows you to uh prove that something certain things are true and uh improves your interaction with the agent all right so how are we going to help you build winning prizes well what we learned in our online hackathon is that it's great to have mentors and people to assist you in doing these kinds of things and that we separate the mentors from the judges so we got our main development team in Milan we got a devell team also in Europe and in India so we should have round thee clock support uh on our hackathon Discord but we've got and I got pictures here of Steve and Rog there are two of our main contributors to the ZK verify project they try to sit here and help people every day so if you're looking how to use ZK verify or want to talk about ideas and we got about 10 people here all together but these guys are here to help you and that's what they want to do all right so let's go over again what our award is so if you go to the eth Denver Dev folio you can see what our award uh list we've got a a Bounty video where I talk about it quickly we got a ton of links to including the hackathon the tutorials all sorts of different things uh we really filled it up so we want you all to build a web 2 or a web 3 application that creates and verifies a ZK proof it's got to be useful and interesting um I mean it can be crazy nonuseful we were talking to a group that was you know proven how big of a fish you catch in a legal area I thought that was a really cool idea it doesn't need to be serious idea it doesn't need to be infrastructure like roll up as a service or anything like that it can be just a fun end user app and we actually like those kind of apps because the more proofs that are sent to ZK verify for us to verify the better off we are and here's the important part the ZK proof has to be part of the application functionality you can't just build an app create a proof send it over to ZK verify and then not care whether it got verified or not and it's really helpful to our judges which are going to be part of our extended Team all over the world to have a video of how it works so that's my guidelines for you please look at stacking our prize with others and if you have any questions we're going to be here we got a booth on in the main uh floor where we sit at tables here every day and we walk around and just talk to people about projects thank you Bo