It's perhaps no surprise Jacob Eberhardt is being given the stage at ethereum's annual developer conference.

With scalability and privacy top of mind for the blockchain network, now valued in the billions, the Ph.D. researcher at the Technical University of Berlin is set to debut a new programming language at the Cancun, Mexico, event, one designed to help ethereum improve on these key weaknesses.

Called ZoKrates, the goal of the project is to provide developers with a toolkit that could help them realize the potential of a much-anticipated blockchain privacy tool called zk-snarks.

Pioneered by the cryptocurrency zcash, ethereum's recent software update, enacted in October, paved the way for the easier use of the code, and because it effectively unlocks the use of this feature, the implications of ZoKrates are potentially vast.

For one, it's designed to be simple for any ethereum developer to deploy, which could lead privacy features to begin surfacing in decentralized applications and tokens. And second, because zk-snarks compress information, ZoKrates has the potential to help scale the ethereum platform by moving computations off the main blockchain, easing data storage.

In short, ZoKrates allows information to be obscured off the main ethereum blockchain and then uploaded into a smart contract the network can still verify, all without exposing contract information.

Eberhardt told CoinDesk:

"Zk-snarks were discussed a lot, but the gap between the theoretical concept and its practical application seemed huge. This gap, I try to bridge."

Cost benefits

Also of note is how exactly Eberhardt believes he's accomplished the feat.

To start with, ZoKrates is a type of ethereum smart contract. A custom version of the self-executing code that runs on top of the network, the tool serves as a way to transfer a zk-snark operation onto the blockchain and to verify that that information is valid.