Zk-Starks? New Take on Zcash Tech Could Power Truly Private Blockchains

"A myth," that's what one developer called it.

At a meeting of the team behind the monero cryptocurrency last week, suspicion was high about a new item on the roadmap – so-called "zk-starks." Described as a "trustless" solution to a problem that's long prevented anonymous blockchains, to some of the developers assembled it sounded like fantasy.

But while the blockchain industry is certainly no stranger to outlandish claims, the cryptographic technique is perhaps setting records in the levels of eyebrow-raising it has triggered. Heralded as a more secure version of zk-snarks, the creators of zk-starks claim their cryptography can remove the need for the contentious "trusted setup" necessary with the previous iteration of the idea.

Stepping back, zk-snarks are an evolution of a cryptographic technique first described in the 1980s. While seemingly complex, the idea is simple at heart – zero-knowledge proofs enable parties to verify if a statement is correct without receiving anything more than a true-or-false statement. In the blockchain world, the idea has become most often associated with zcash, the first large-scale blockchain that baked the cryptographic tool into its protocol layer.

Read more @ the source: https://www.coindesk.com/zk-starks-new-take-on-zcash-tech-could-power-truly-private-blockchains/