Be Part of Privacy and Web3 History by Participating in Our Trusted Setup

You can participate in one of the only decentralized Zero Knowledge Trusted Setup ceremonies in Web3 history. We wanted to invite our community to be a part of a historical Web3 event by participating in the ceremony that creates the infrastructure needed to generate Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs).

As we approach the launch of MantaPay, we’re excited to announce an opportunity for our community members to contribute through our setup ceremony. ZKPs are used to guarantee the validity of private transactions without posting any private information to the blockchain. Our community has been critical in building privacy in Web3 and we want you to be a part of the historical event. Y

ou can ensure the security of the prover/verifier keys by participating in the ceremony and destroying toxic waste. As long as you’re confident that you participated honestly, then you can be confident that the setup is trustworthy.

What is a Trusted Setup?

Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) allow someone (the prover) to prove the correctness of a statement to someone else (the verifier) without disclosing any information. ZKPs are core to Manta Network’s privacy preservation functionality to enable privacy for all crypto assets, and fulfill the vision of the Network to be the privacy layer for Web3.

In order to generate a ZKP, both the prover and the verifier need to commit to some shared secret and use this shared secret to generate public parameters. A Trusted Setup generates the prover and verifier keys that are computed and verified, moreover, the computation of these keys produces some toxic waste that has to be discarded (meaning you trust that the toxic waste was thrown away).

How is the Trusted Setup Ceremony Conducted?

The ceremony will have over 1000 participants conducted in a decentralized manner. It will start in Bogota, Columbia as part of Devcon, the conference for developers, researchers, and thinkers in the ZK Hacker House, and then spread globally. Each participant will be asked to complete complicated computation which will produce some toxic waste. The participant destroys the toxic waste and then reports the result of their computation.

How Do I Participate?

Participation is simple. All you have to do is follow the following instructions.

How Long Does the Ceremony Take to Complete?

The math is complicated but the computation is fast. Each participant will have to download a little under 20 Mb of data, do some computations that take somewhere from 1 to 5 minutes (depending on your machine), and then upload 20 Mb of data to our server. There will be about 1 minute of downtime while we check that calculations are correct for each participant, then it moves on to the next participant. This will happen sequentially until we have reached the last participant, which will take about one week. The results will be audited and shared to ensure accuracy and validity.

Why Complete the Trusted Setup?

This will be used to launch MantaPay, the first service that offers private payments between two parties using Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). The verifier keys are central to everything to the network, so it is important that they are constructed correctly. There are complex specific mathematical rules for how they must be formed, the main idea being that we start with a secret number, do some pretty intense computations, which then produce the prover/verifier keys.

How Can I be Sure that it is Secure and Trustworthy?

By participating! Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin, notes that “not all trusted setups are created equal. 176 participants is better than 6, and 2000 would be even better.” In order to ensure the most secure and trustworthy ceremony, you can ensure the security of the prover/verifier keys by participating in the ceremony and destroying the toxic waste. As long as you’re confident that you participated honestly then you can be confident that the setup is trustworthy.

About Manta Network

Manta Network is committed to building a better Web3 world through privacy protection. Manta’s product design starts from first principles and provides end-to-end privacy protection for blockchain users through leading cryptography architectures such as zkSNARK. While ensuring privacy, Manta offers interoperability, convenience, high performance, and auditability, allowing users to conduct private transfers and transactions between any parallel chain of assets. Manta’s vision is to provide more convenient privacy protection services for the entire blockchain world.

Manta’s founding team is made up of several cryptocurrency veterans, professors, and academics with experience from Harvard University, MIT, and Algorand. Manta’s investors include Polychain, ParaFi, Binance Labs, Multicoin, CoinFund, Alameda, DeFiance, and Hypersphere. Manta is also an official Web3 Foundation grant recipient, a member of the Substrate Builder Program, and a member of Berkeley Blockchain Accelerator.