Zero Knowledge Proofs on Smart Contracts?

[Abiky]

This may sound like a stupid question, but I've been wondering if Zero-Knowledge Proof on Smart Contracts are widely possible these days? Ethereum, being the world's second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is planning to use ZK-SNARKs for its own benefit. But I'm not sure if the Zero-Knowledge model will be used on the whole Blockchain itself or the smart contracts/dApps living on the ETH blockchain.

Anyways, I find Zero-Knowledge Proofs to be quite an interesting technology for preserving one's privacy. Imagine if smart contracts would gain the ability to hide sensitive information from prying eyes. Their uses can be expanded both in the corporate and government sector as we know it. ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens could benefit greatly from this as well.

Nonetheless, what are your thoughts?

[DarkDays]

If I recall, implementing zk-snarks on smart-contracts would massively increase the resource burden on the Ethereum blockchain. This is why they won't be implementing these until they have achieved parallelization, ergo-added sharding to help manage the additional load. However, by adding both sk-snarks and sharding, there will likely be no performance increase which is the entire purpose of ETH 2.0.

[Decracy]

This may sound like a stupid question, but I've been wondering if Zero-Knowledge Proof on Smart Contracts are widely possible these days? Ethereum, being the world's second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is planning to use ZK-SNARKs for its own benefit. But I'm not sure if the Zero-Knowledge model will be used on the whole Blockchain itself or the smart contracts/dApps living on the ETH blockchain.

Anyways, I find Zero-Knowledge Proofs to be quite an interesting technology for preserving one's privacy. Imagine if smart contracts would gain the ability to hide sensitive information from prying eyes. Their uses can be expanded both in the corporate and government sector as we know it. ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens could benefit greatly from this as well.

Nonetheless, what are your thoughts?

Your question is certainly going in the right direction for the way that infrastructures of Blockchain are to be designed.

This is being greatly accomplished - on its individual network: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5189918.msg52645959#msg52645959

Decracy

[Abiky]

If I recall, implementing zk-snarks on smart-contracts would massively increase the resource burden on the Ethereum blockchain. This is why they won't be implementing these until they have achieved parallelization, ergo-added sharding to help manage the additional load. However, by adding both sk-snarks and sharding, there will likely be no performance increase which is the entire purpose of ETH 2.0.

It makes sense to scale the ETH blockchain first, before adding Zero-Knowledge capabilities to smart contracts. If successful, then the ETH blockchain will be a game-changer as both ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens will gain a full-fledged privacy solution for mainstream businesses and corporations to use. The new ZK-STARKs technology aims to take less space (as it's compressed) than the current ZK-SNARKs used by Zcash and some other privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies. But it might take a couple of years from now before Ethereum adopts Zero-Knowledge Proofs for its own benefit. Hopefully, the next iteration of Ethereum (v2.0) would bring us Sharding and PoS to pave the way for privacy-oriented smart contracts. I wouldn't be surprised if another Ethereum fork takes birth in order to address the issue of privacy (in case ETH doesn't take the anonymity route).

In the meantime, we should focus more on ETH becoming widely used in the mainstream world than anything else. Then, we could talk about privacy and other optional features. Just my opinion