The Ethereum Foundation continues its support for the network’s development community. This time, the recipient focuses on zk-STARK technology.
On July 15, Israel-based blockchain startup StarkWare Industries announced via Twitter[1] that the Ethereum Foundation has awarded the company a performance-based grant. The thread states that the funding "will allow StarkWare to explore STARK-friendly hash functions, to develop its technology, and to offer open source code to the ecosystem."
The company's announcement states that STARKs will "allow blockchains to massively scale (e.g. sharding), with transparent privacy (i.e. zk with no trusted setup) and post-quantum security." If these claims are true, StarkWare could help alleviate Ethereum's known scalability and privacy issues[2].
Vitalik Buterin himself has heralded STARK technology[3]: He is listed as an investor on StarkWare's website[4]. The company has not revealed how much funding it is going to receive, although the Twitter thread says it will be "BIG."
But what does all this mean? The "STARK technology" StarkWare is responsible for developing is zk-STARK. zk-STARK is an acronym for "zero knowledge scalable transparent argument of knowledge," and is a succinct zero-knowledge proof for verifying transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. The zk-STARK white paper[5] explains:
"Human dignity demands that personal information, like medical and forensic data, be hidden from the public. But veils of secrecy designed to preserve privacy may also be abused to cover up lies and deceit by institutions entrusted with Data, unjustly harming citizens and eroding trust in central institutions. Zero knowledge (ZK) proof systems are an ingenious cryptographic solution to this tension between the ideals of personal privacy and institutional integrity, enforcing the latter in a way that does not compromise the former."
