A quick overview of ZK and verifiability projects on Solana

Source: Solana; Translation: Jinse Finance xiaozou You may not know much about Solana's ZK (zero knowledge) and verifiability fields, but it is definitely a dark horse. This article will take you to quickly understand ZK, verifiability, and privacy projects on Solana.

In general, the Solana infrastructure helps with:

• Network performance

-- Save a thousand times the cost for application developers

-- Asynchronous execution

-- State growth solution

• Security

-- Verifiability

-- Decentralized prover networks

There’s even a ZK-rollup on Solana!

Let’s look at each in turn:

-- Privacy and Verifiability

-- Anonymity

-- ZK-based extensions and ZKVMs

-- ZK network scaling stack

-- The ZK Initiative

Please note: for ease of understanding, these are recategorized below and may overlap.

1. Privacy and Verifiability

Arcium helps provide privacy for on-chain applications by providing a trustless, verifiable and efficient framework to run encrypted calculations. For example: AI models can be trained using encrypted data, and DeFi can use it for confidential transactions.

Bonsol, launched by ANAGRAM, is a Solana native verifiable computing system that enables developers to create:

a fully verifiable executable file of private or public data → mathematically guarantee its validity → integrate the results into the Solana smart contract for verification on the chain.

2. Anonymity

Darklake has created a private swap AMM that aims to become Solana's first decentralized exchange to provide real-time, MEV-resistant order execution. Dark Protocol has developed a market-managed anonymous protocol powered by ZK-snarks.

3. ZKP-based extensions

ZK Compression is a new Solana primitive with ZK proof and state compression jointly launched by Light Protocol and Helius, which can reduce the rental costs of Solana application developers by a thousand times.

The team has developed ZK compression in the following aspects:

-- Wallets (such as Backpack): Users hold tokens without paying rent.

-- Consumer socialfi applications (such as Tribe.run): Creators can send tokens at a lower cost.

-- Airdrop tools (such as Helius Airship)

4. ZKVMs

RISC Zero and Succinct can help prove arbitrary on-chain computations without being restricted by chain computations. This can support: - ZK-based Solana light client - Streamlined DePIN network - Secure and seamless ZK login 5. Solana network expansion stack zkSVM is being applied to: - Solforge: This network expansion stack uses ZKP method and Light Protocol to support scaling of state update streaming proofs and LightSVM optimized for proof generation.

-- Termina: A platform for deploying SVM networks for specific use cases with lower latency, better privacy, and lower computational costs.

-- Sonic SVM: An SVM stack for games and applications, with ZK scaling in progress via Hypergrid.

-- bulletxyz: An ultra-low latency rollup developed by ZetaMarkets, which is expanding to extremely high throughput, and all state transitions are provable. In addition, teams such as Aerius Labs are conducting ZK proof-related experiments.

6. ZK Initiative

Other initiatives such as Anza’s ZK token proof initiative support confidential transfers—encrypting the balance and transaction amounts of SPL tokens to protect the privacy of use cases such as accounts payable.

From the recently released ZK compression to the various system calls that are about to go online, Solana is becoming a powerful ZK engine. This article is just a brief summary to help everyone understand the early development of ZK and verifiability on Solana.