Why zk-SNARK Is The Future Of Blockchain?

In the future, the increasing size of blockchains going be a big problem, and in this article, we will discuss how zk-SNARK can be a solution to it.

Published in

Coinmonks

4 min readSep 6, 2021

Blockchain is the solution to many real-world problems, but blockchain has some limitations, and with time, these limitations can become issues for the users. It can harm not only the blockchain network but also the ecosystem participants.

For instance, bitcoin’s blockchain is growing every day, and now the size of Bitcoin blockchain is more than 300GB which is impossible to process using a light end device. Thus, many miners stopped mining, and this leads to the centralization of bitcoin mining. Once Bitcoin becomes centralized, the controller can change blocks hence the transactions, which is not a good thing, but anyway, in this article, we will discuss what is zk-SNARK ?and the benefits of zk-SNARKS.

What is zk-SNARK?

It stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge, a digital certificate that can prove anything without disclosing the information, and using zk-SNARK MINA protocol, creating a succinct blockchain of 22kb.

Let’s understand how zk-SNARK helping MINA protocol to create a succinct blockchain of 22kb, but before that let’s understand how mining works in Bitcoin. So when you initiate a transaction by sending some Bitcoins to your friend, Bitcoin never virtually transfers, but the owner of the Bitcoin changed. The Bitcoin remains in the network, but your data goes into a block when you initiate the transaction. That block stands in a queue for verification, then between miners, a war of computer power started where the powerful computers mostly win.

During this war, computers verify that block’s data and find out whether the transaction you want to do is legit or not by checking the genesis of that Bitcoin. but zk-SNARK can help miners by saving their time and efforts because they just need to verify one thing which is zk-SNARK.

So zk-SNARK can be taken as a virtual certificate that generates whenever a new block is produced by replacing the latest one. Suppose a blockchain can create three blocks like block 1, block 2, and block3 for the first block, zk-SNARK 1 generated with size 22kb, then for the second block zk-SNARK 2 generate of size 22kb and zk-SNARKS 1 + zk-SNARK 2 combine to generate a single zkSNARK which is 22kb. After block3 producing zk-SNARK3 of 22kb, it combines with the exiting zk-SNARK of size 22kb to again create a single zk-SNARK of size 22kb. Hence, as a miner, you don’t need to verify block 1,2,3, but you only need to verify the final zk-SNARK, which will save your time, efforts, energy, etc.{Reference}

Benefits of zkSNARK

The best benefit of the zk-SNARK is that it can reduce the size of the blockchain to 22kb only. So the size of the blockchain will never increase, so we will never face any blockchain size-related problems, and every light-end device can be a node of the blockchain to benefit from all the features that blockchain provides.

zk-SNARK helps provide data protection, so when you connect to a third party, it never discloses your data but allows you to prove anything you want. For example, suppose you visit for account opening somewhere on the internet, and that party asks you for your data. Then instate of data, you provide zk-SNARK of your data to prove that you have a real name and address but don’t need to disclose. SNARK powered applications can help us protect thousands of data floating out from your family’s devices.

Conclusion:

MINA protocol is only exiting blockchain that uses zk-SNARK to reduce the blockchain size and planning to create a blockchain ecosystem that can be accessible from a mobile device and can interact with the Internet by protecting the Internet users data. zkSNARK is still, in a nutshell, having many possibilities and MINA protocol providing grants to developers to build anything with zk-SNARK. In my opinion, zkSNARK going to be a revolution in the blockchain space.

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Why zk-SNARK Is The Future Of Blockchain?

In the future, the increasing size of blockchains going be a big problem, and in this article, we will discuss how zk-SNARK can be a solution to it.

What is zk-SNARK?

Benefits of zkSNARK

Conclusion:

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