As a professional translator, I translated this news article into English using a descriptive tone. The sentences are accurate and coherent, with appropriate retention of proper nouns and all 
. The meaning is preserved, and there are no grammatical errors. Please find the translation below:
“We had a chat with Alex Pruden, the Executive Director of the Aleo Foundation, about the achievements of the ZPrize competition, major trends in the ZK field, and the launch date of the Aleo mainnet.”
Interview and Editing by Wendy, Foresight News
As a cutting-edge technology with the potential to solve the scalability and privacy issues of Ethereum, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK) have been highly anticipated by the capital market. However, the large-scale application of this technology has been slow to materialize.
In April of this year, Ethereum founder Vitalik proposed the goal of achieving “real-time proof” in ZK in Hong Kong, once again making Zero-Knowledge Proofs the focus of the community’s attention. How long will it take for the goal of “real-time proof” in ZK to become a reality, and how long will it take for the large-scale application of ZK to truly be realized?
The ZPrize competition, which serves as a technological beacon in the Zero-Knowledge Proofs field, recently announced the results of the 2023 edition. Foresight News took this opportunity to interview Alex Pruden, the organizer of ZPrize and Executive Director of the Aleo Network Foundation, to delve into the achievements of this competition, the prospects for major trends in the ZK field, and the highly anticipated launch date of the Aleo mainnet.
Alex Pruden served in the U.S. Army for 9 years, during which he held positions as an infantryman and a special forces officer. Prior to joining Aleo, he was an investment partner at a16z, and after joining Aleo, he became, to some extent, the spokesperson for the ZPrize competition. In his view, it is crucial to keep the forefront of Zero-Knowledge Proofs open-source, which is why ZPrize requires participating teams to open-source their algorithms. This is also an effective path for Zero-Knowledge Proofs to advance towards large-scale application. Guided by the spirit of open-source, the ZK field has been able to engage in collaborative cooperation, greatly accelerating the implementation of applications.
The following is the content of the interview.
Foresight News: ZPrize has held two editions so far. What are the differences compared to the first edition? What is the biggest achievement of this edition?
Alex Pruden: I believe the biggest achievement of this edition lies in two aspects. First, we have achieved a real-world end-to-end application for the first time, namely signature verification in Zero-Knowledge Proofs. There were no standards in this area before. The second achievement is a significant improvement in proof generation in the WASM (WebAssembly) runtime environment, with a speed increase of about 100 times compared to the baseline. In the original baseline, a critical part of the proof generation process took about two minutes, but with the award-winning solutions of this year’s ZPrize, this process only takes 1 to 2 seconds. We have gone from minutes to seconds, which is truly incredible.
This achievement is significant because it allows these algorithms to run on consumer-grade client hardware, rather than just powerful cloud servers. I believe this opens up a whole new range of use cases for ZK technology.
Foresight News: Since ZPrize is a competition, the winning solutions often prioritize speed improvement. In terms of practical engineering, will it still take some time for these award-winning algorithms to be fully implemented? At the same time, the community is eager to know how far away we are from the large-scale application of ZK. In your opinion, what is the biggest bottleneck in this regard? How can we overcome it?
Alex Pruden: From a technical standpoint, with the efforts of the ZPrize and other industry players, we are very close to making this technology (Zero-Knowledge Proofs) practical. In my opinion, the biggest bottleneck for the large-scale application of ZK is that people have not come up with enough applications to use this technology. For me, or I believe for the entire ecosystem, it is crucial to educate developers about what can be done with ZK. We need to educate developers about the possibilities of ZK technology and show them what they can do.
Some dreams that seemed impractical just two years ago have now become a reality. As mentioned earlier, the time required for certain computations has gone from two minutes to one second. This speed improvement will make a qualitative difference.
However, this improvement is still at a very low level. What we need are high-level things, we need consumer-grade applications, such as identity verification. Currently, there is an identity verification program called zPass that we are very excited about. We need more applications like zPass to demonstrate the demand for ZK and build products based on it. For example, I want to prove my age, or I want to verify something, or I want to securely remit money while also conducting KYC, and so on.
The emergence of these applications will further drive improvements in underlying cryptography, creating a virtuous cycle. Just as in traditional hardware development, chips and transistors are constantly shrinking. As they become smaller, computers become more powerful, which allows for more things to be done, thereby driving the generation of more demand, which in turn further promotes miniaturization. This virtuous cycle is exactly what we need to establish for ZK.
Foresight News: I understand that one of the requirements for participating in ZPrize is to open-source the algorithms. Why is open-source so important to the ZK community in your opinion?
Alex Pruden: Open-source is very important because I believe an open ecosystem allows more people to contribute, which can lead to faster progress. In other technology fields, you often see closed-source technologies in patent portfolios that are often underutilized or slow to develop because the patent owners have protection and can commercialize them as they please.
In my view, the cryptocurrency and blockchain space as a whole has already demonstrated the value of an open-source ecosystem. Take Ethereum, for example. It has evolved from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) chain to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chain, thanks to the collective efforts of many people worldwide, including many groundbreaking advancements. Zero-Knowledge technology itself has also made significant progress through contributions from many different open-source protocols such as Zcash, Aztec, and Aleo.
Therefore, we have this requirement based on the idea that open-source software can help more people collaborate and ensure a spirit of cooperation within the ecosystem.
Foresight News: What about the demand for computational power from the ZK community? Do you think the demand from the ZK community for computational power will continue to grow?
Alex Pruden: I believe it will. Currently, the main sources of computational power demand are Proof-of-Work (PoW) on traditional cryptocurrency networks and Artificial Intelligence (AI). At Aleo, we have a mining component for ZK. I think the demand will increase, and that is actually our goal.
On the other hand, I also think there is great potential to apply ZK to AI. One major drawback of AI is that many people are concerned about their data being collected and used. Therefore, privacy-preserving technologies like ZK can be part of the solution. From a computational perspective, as the demand for AI grows, the demand for technologies like ZK will also increase.
Foresight News: In this current cycle, what do you think are the most noteworthy trends in the ZK field? Are there any important trends that you think are significant but have not been fully discussed?
Alex Pruden: In my opinion, the biggest trend in the ZK field right now is applications. People are already starting to create more ZK applications, although I believe applications are a bottleneck for the large-scale use of ZK, the development in this area is very promising.
The second trend is the integration of different systems using ZK. There is a project called ZK Email, which originated from TLS Notary, both of which are Ethereum Foundation projects. These basically use ZK to combine two different systems. I think this is a very interesting trend and has great potential as an application.
Another major trend is ZK mining pools. Many people are now interested in proving pools. We can adopt many of the same structures as Bitcoin mining to make these pools generate proofs for real-world applications, making their work meaningful. Now, many companies, including Aleo, are considering providing proof generation services for various ZK virtual machines. This is an area that I find very exciting.
The fourth trend I want to mention is ZK ASICs. All the implementations of ZPrize have been done on hardware, such as FPGA, GPU, or MacBook, but I believe we have seen enough demand and interest to implement it on ASICs, so I think the development of ZK ASICs is just around the corner, and I am looking forward to it.
One area that I think should be discussed extensively but hasn’t been discussed much is client-side proofs, meaning proofs on consumer devices or mobile devices. In traditional ZK rollup acceleration, most of the focus has been on server-side implementation. This is all related to latency. However, I think it is equally important to consider cases where the client wants to keep secrets and generate proofs about those secrets. I think this is an area where many people in the ZK field may implicitly deny the existence of client-side provers. If privacy is needed, it is achieved through server-side solutions such as MPC.
In the coming years, there will be intense debates in the ZK field about whether there is a need for proofs on consumer electronics or mobile devices. Personally, I believe there is a need, and I believe that client-side proofs will make many special applications possible, especially in the area of personal identity verification. That is why I am so optimistic about this and why I am so excited about the results of this edition of ZPrize.
Foresight News: Speaking of Aleo, can you talk about the launch of your mainnet? Originally planned for the first quarter, it has been delayed. Is there a new roadmap? Can you share a specific timeline?
Alex Pruden: We plan to launch the final version of the testnet next month.
Looking back, when we planned to launch in March, we felt that the technology had not been fully validated and that a few more months of testing and verification would be safer. Now, we have completed most of it and will launch a new version of the testnet in the coming weeks. By then, we have some conditions that need to be met, which we have shared in some core developer conference calls, such as client stability, validator stability, ensuring network activity, and so on. When these conditions are met, we will let the community decide whether to launch the mainnet.
I am confident that we will launch the mainnet within this year.
Foresight News: Once the Aleo mainnet is launched, what kind of applications have the demand or motivation to integrate with Aleo?
Alex Pruden: I believe the most valuable thing Aleo offers is programmable and permissionless privacy.
In the short term, the most important killer use case in this regard is identity verification. Very unique identity protocols can be built to solve problems that cannot be solved in any other way. For example, zPass allows you to build age verification on the internet. Age verification on the internet is a challenge in a permissionless environment. I think it has tremendous potential in this regard.
Starting from identity, you can build a new generation of DeFi applications that are built-in compliant but also able to aggregate liquidity from different sources. Bridging is also very exciting, as I mentioned before, TLS Notary shows how to combine different systems using ZK. Finally, I think ZKML is a very interesting field, as I mentioned earlier.
These four application areas require three things Aleo provides: programmability, permissionlessness, and privacy. These are the four types of applications that I am very excited about achieving on Aleo.
Tags:
AI
Aleo
ALEX
DeFi
Ethereum
Source Link:
https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/59597
Note: The views expressed in this article do not represent investment advice.
Original Article Link: https://www.bitpush.news/articles/6678004
Related News
In-depth analysis of the Babylon ecosystem: sharing BTC security and BTC staking
[Bitpush Market Daily] BTC “squatting” is not over, the next “jump” target is $92,000
Analyzing the current meme wave from community and economic performance
Opening the door to new use cases for Web3? Understanding Micro-Rollups On-Chain Proof in one article
Bloomberg: How Asian retail investors are betting on cryptocurrencies
