Cosmos Privacy & ZKP Showcase
Recap
On March 26th we invited the Cosmos community to the Cosmos Privacy & ZKP Showcase, hosted by Zero Knowledge Validator!
This was the first in a series of planned events with a focus on privacy & zkp tech in the Cosmos ecosystem. During this inaugural event, we hosted several inspiring speakers, most of whom are working on innovative new privacy-focused projects in the Cosmos ecosystem, as well as kicked off a discussion about what terrain we should be exploring going forward.
The event was supported by the Interchain Foundation (ICF) and had Zero Knowledge Podcast as a media partner.
Key Takeaways:
- There are a handful of new privacy projects led by veteran Cosmos contributors, each tackling different parts of the Cosmos stack.
- The “Business case” for privacy on Cosmos remains an open question.
- Rules vs Norms: If the rules around privacy in the early designs of a protocol are too flexible, then as the community grows, it may rely on norms to maintain “good behaviour”. However, once it is large enough, these norms won’t be able to keep actors from reducing the privacy in a system. Thus there is a need to ensure that clear structures and incentives are overtly implemented early on to build robust privacy systems.
- Privacy is easier to lose than to regain.
- Standardisation of privacy tech will make it easier to incorporate into the Cosmos stack.
- Tools for ZK and privacy are missing, mainly due to the fact that the CosmosSDK is written in Go, and many of the zk related libraries are written in Rust and the zk community is primarily focused on building with that language.
- Participants’ feedback suggested that privacy is an increasingly important topic in the Cosmos ecosystem. Earlier, there was more of a focus on Stargate, but now the priorities can shift in this direction.
Event Schedule
The event kicked off with a ZKValidator introduction, and intro from the ICF followed by 4 talks and a panel. Check out the entire playlist on youtube, but here is a run down of what was discussed:
Talk #1: Zaki Manian — Missing public goods in the Cosmos privacy ecosystem
Zaki discusses the question of why all this cool ZKP and Cosmos stuff doesn’t mesh together at the moment. The biggest breach point between the privacy world and the Cosmos world is that the CosmosSDK is written in Go, whereas a lot of the privacy tools have been developed for the EVM and also written in Rust. He discusses possible approaches to bring zkps to Cosmos and ends with an Q&A.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd5qguag4r4
Talk #2: Christopher Goes — Private bartering in the Anoma protocol
In this talk Christopher introduced a new project, Anoma. Anoma is designed to allow you to operate in a many-dimensional system, while protecting privacy. You can send an asset privately using a multi-asset shielded pool, building on ECC’s Sapling work. You can also do multi-party, multi-asset exchanges.
Talk #3: Henry de Valence — Penumbra
Henry shared his work on Penumbra, a research project that explores ways to integrate privacy and proof of stake including:
- Private transactions
- Private delegation
- Private governance
- Private swaps
Talk #4: Dev Ojha — Threshold Decryption for mempool privacy
Dev presented his project which focuses on building a private mempool where only the transaction creator knows the transaction data at the time of the transaction. Once the transaction is included in a block, this information is made visible to all. By doing so, miners are unable to single out transactions for censorship to extract MEV, thus solving the MEV problem.
Panel: Sunny, Christopher, Zaki, Anna, Henry
The panel kicked off with panelists commenting on each others presentations and proceeds to discuss:
- What is the preferred zk system in Cosmos?
- Thoughts on Go vs Rust?
- How else can ZKPs and privacy be used in Cosmos?
- What is the sentiment of the Cosmos ecosystem toward privacy?
Event Stats and Participant Feedback
Out of 150 signups for the event 89 attended and we asked participants to provide feedback via a google form. 100% of respondents rated the event 4/5 or 5/5 (5 being good, 1 bad) and all feedback comments were positive. Around 80% of respondents said that privacy only has a low to medium importance while 20% rated it of high importance. We asked for the biggest blockers for privacy on Cosmos. The answers can be summarised as follows:
- Privacy technologies and products are currently not in demand by the industry and there is a lack of users
- Cosmos SDK is not quite ready to “easily” integrate ZK mechanisms, and new cryptographic schemes
- The choice of Go versus Rust
Conclusion
Our goal is to promote privacy and ZKP adoption and the event was a great step towards that. We had great talks from prominent guests and participants seemed to love it. We want to keep the momentum going and are currently putting forward a Community Spend Proposal for additional future events. See our current proposal here. Hope you will support this initiative!
