Member-only story
A Brief History of Zero Knowledge in Five Seminal Papers
Some of the major breakthroughts in zk research that are now powering blockchain innovations.
Zero-Knowledge(zk) technologies have been at the center of the crypto ecosystem in the last few months. The recent launch of Polygon’s zkEVM mainnet beta as well as the continuous efforts in layer 2 blockchains are projecting a picture in which zk technologies become one of the core building blocks of modern Web 3 architectures. A lot of content has been written in the last few months about the importance of zk technologies for the future of Web 3 but very little has been discussed about it’s history. What were the origins of zk methods?
It might not come as a surprise that the research for zk stacks dates back 30 years. However, it is only with the emergence of blockchain runtimes and some recent technological breakthroughs that zk have finally become a viable technology to use in mainstream applications. In this post, I would like to walk you through some of the most important research papers in the history of zk.
What are zks?
Zero knowledge proofs are a powerful tool in cryptography that allow one party, called the prover, to prove to another party, called the verifier, that a certain statement is true…
