May 10, 2022
Manta Partners with Leading Web3 Tech Companies to Launch Challenge to Advance Zero-Knowledge Technology
ZPrize Contributes over $7 million to advance zero-knowledge on Web3 with partnerships by 21 of the leading blockchain and Web3 companies.
Manta has partnered with a coalition of 21 of the leading blockchain and Web3 technology companies, foundations and funds to promote the advancement of zero-knowledge technology. The competition will have teams compete for awards by engineering new algorithms and techniques that achieve performance metrics unmatched by the best zero-knowledge systems deployed in the blockchain industry today.
Manta Network has joined forces with the Polkadot Pioneer Challenge to solve the multiscalar multiplication (MSM) and number-theoretic transform (NTT) operations, which are essential building blocks for ZK computations. The prize will focus on maximizing throughput/minimizing latency of these operations on client-type devices and blockchain-based VMs, specifically the WebAssembly (WASM) runtime.
“We have chosen to be the architect and sponsors in the open division because we truly care about WASM ZKP performance. We view the WASM ZKP performance as the ‘last mile problem’ for mass ZKP adoption. In order to get massive ZKP and privacy adoption, we have to get ZKP prover integration with popular wallet, and having improved WASM prover performance is the way forward.”
- Shumo Chu, Co-Founder and core contributor to Manta Network.
From Manta's internal benchmark, WASM gives users a 10x — 15x performance penalty compared with native speed. To make a smooth user experience, we developed Manta-Signer, however, we view this as a temporary solution, because our final goal is to get rid of the signer and let our users choose the wallet of their choice and create more of a seamless user experience.
“The sponsors of ZPrize not only represent an industry but a united community of believers in this technology. We share a collective desire to turn these exciting academic ideas into a deployed reality. With the ZPrize, we’re advancing the state-of-the-art to form the bricks of the technological foundation that will scale and secure the next-generation web.”
- Alex Pruden, COO of Aleo & founder of the ZPrize initiative.
The importance of innovation in the ZKP space cannot be understated and this could be the game-changing technology in this century. The prize amount is 750K and the winners of the competition must open-source their challenge solutions so that the entire community can access and benefit from them fully. The future possibilities that this will open up for the entire ecosystem are vast. All of these efforts would not be possible without the collaboration of the many projects that have come together to launch this. The hope is we will look back at this time as a pivotal time in the development of ZK and the beginning of the big leap forward for decentralized protocols and applications to enable secure, interoperable and scalable applications.
About ZPrize
ZPrize is modelled after the XPRIZE and other similar contests and aimed at employing private funds to accelerate the advancement of zero-knowledge prover technology essential for extending blockchain features to accommodate numerous mainstream use cases. ZPrize sponsors include, in alphabetical order, 0xPARC, Aleo, Algorand, Anoma, Aztec Protocol, Celo, CoreWeave, DZK, Espresso Systems, Ethereum Foundation, Findora, Harmony One, Kora, Manta Network, Mina Protocol, the Polkadot Pioneers Prize, Polychain Capital, Polygon, RISC0, Trapdoor Tech, Zero Knowledge Validator. More information can be found at https://www.zprize.io/.
About The Polkadot Pioneer Prize
The Polkadot Pioneer Challenge was designed to solve some of the biggest challenges facing Polkadot and Web3. Polkadot features an on-chain treasury managed by the network’s token holders via Polkadot’s on-chain governance system. Currently containing over 20 million DOT tokens, the treasury is designed to fund projects that benefit the Polkadot ecosystem. The Polkadot Treasury represents a completely new paradigm, where decentralized networks have the financial agency previously limited to centralized organizations. If you are interested in viewing the on-chain bounty proposal that brought the Pioneers Prize to life, you can do so here.
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.
