The highly anticipated white paper on zk-starks privacy technology has been published.

Proposed as a more secure version of zk-snarks, the privacy technology used by zcash, zk-starks removes the need for a "trusted configuration". The publication of the zk-starks white paper is likely to create a stir in the development community.

The paper is co-authored by Eli-Ben Sasson, a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who has been researching evidence of ZK-knowledge for nearly 15 years. ZK proofs can verify the information without revealing any information. Zk-starks offers an alternative to existing ZK cryptography that has long been criticized for its potential security flaws and weight, making systems that use slow and expensive technology.

The White Paper states:

"No ZK system realized up to here in the code (including the one used by crypto-currencies like zcash) has achieved both an acceleration of transparency and verification exponential, for general calculations. "

In the same article, a proof of concept is detailed, in which the police prove that the DNA of a presidential candidate is not contained in the database of offenders without reveal any information about the database or the DNA.

Zk-starks have been announced by a number of cryptocurrency development teams, including the monero project focused on privacy. Even the creator of the ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has been researching the technology.

As previously reported by CoinDesk, blockchain developers seem to draw their attention to some issues this year – one being privacy and the other scalability. While privacy protection technology is reaching new heights, other ZK systems such as Bulletproofs are generating widespread enthusiasm, the focus is on lightening these systems so as not to weigh down the blockchains.

Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which owns an interest in Zcash Company, the for-profit entity that develops the zcash protocol.

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