Usable privacy without trade-offs. How?

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) play a critical role in securing your on-chain privacy and anonymity, yet implementing them comes with a complex triple-headed challenge. Let’s dive into what that challenge is–and how to solve it.

Essentially, Zero-Knowledge Proofs prevent your financial history and identity from being exposed on a public chain through proving something is true without revealing the data. They can verify identity, assets, or transactions without exposing the individual behind them.

In order to do anything of that, you need to compute a ZK Proof. This is a computationally intensive process that leads to proving that a computation or data is correct without revealing it.

Sounds good, right? However:

• Computationally intensive typically means slow.
• No data revealed means that existing apps can be more difficult (or impossible) to use.
• And private data transfers can be less efficient.

So, here’s how we’re solving these issues.

Ensuring rapid proof generation

The first major challenge with ZK Proofs is that they require long computations that can last minutes. If the proof generation process takes ages–and I want to remind you that you’re freaking out when your internet connection is a bit slower than usual–users won’t bother. The benefits of privacy are overshadowed by a lack of usability. This is why ZK Proofs and privacy systems in general need to be fast.

As a single developer-friendly framework that integrates confidentiality features without requiring deep knowledge of the underlying cryptography, Aleph Zero’s zkOS solves this need for speed. zkOS makes web3 privacy infrastructure accessible, easy to use, and economically beneficial—but more importantly—it’s also incredibly fast. zkOS achieves this speed thanks to optimized proof systems, parallelized proof computation, and lightweight client-side computation.

Optimized proof systems: Advanced proof aggregation and recursive proof techniques ensure rapid computations while keeping costs low and security high.

Parallelized proof computation: Significantly reducing latency by efficiently splitting the process of creating proofs. 

Lightweight client-side computation: To ensure complete privacy, you always want to compute the ZK Proof on a user’s device, as you don’t want to store the secrets anywhere else but the user’s device. But instead of requiring resource-hungry computations on devices with limited power, zkOS offloads some operations without sacrificing privacy to maintain proof generation that’s incredibly fast and seamless.

Thanks to these crucial factors, Aleph Zero is the first EVM-compatible environment for ZK able to generate proofs in under a second. It makes private transactions just as fast as usual ones. You can test the process for yourself here.

Smooth dApp interactions

Interacting with dApps privately presents a key challenge for ZK Proof implementation because traditional front-ends like Uniswap, for example, rely on knowing user wallet balances in order to ensure a smooth user experience. In a private account setup, dApps can’t access this data, making standard wallet connections difficult.

There are two possible solutions here—employing an SDK for dApps or using one-time accounts. Aleph Zero offers the SDK to integrate privacy directly into dApps and wallets but to solve that issue for the existing DeFi space, one-time accounts are used within Common when connecting to a dApp. Users generate a temporary wallet for each dApp session—transferring funds from their shielded accounts before proceeding as usual. This makes it possible for dApps to function normally without needing to access users’ actual balances–it works similarly to allowances in wallets.

The typical process of dealing with dApps is ensured—but with an additional layer of privacy that doesn’t requirel front-end modifications.

Seamless data transfers

The third core ZK-related challenge revolves around seamless data transfers. With data transfer, privacy-sensitive blockchain designs require you to either download a torrent of blockchain data (a massive file with on-chain history) or ask for this data from a provider such as an RPC node operator. The first is not that easy. Downloading huge amounts of data feels unnecessary and is generally slow–while asking a provider about your data sacrifices your privacy.

To strike a balance in this efficiency/confidentiality trade-off, Aleph Zero’s zkOS utilizes fuzzy message detection. Fuzzy message detection is a cryptographic technique that allows users to choose their privacy level with a maximum efficiency mode or an enhanced privacy mode:

• Maximum efficiency mode: Users download only the data they need but share more data with the provider.

• Enhanced privacy mode: Users download additional (but not all) data to conceal their specific needs.

The benefit? Your privacy is preserved throughout the whole process, bandwidth costs are reduced, performance improved.

On-chain privacy, for everyone

Aleph Zero’s goal is to make Zero Knowledge-based privacy usable and widely accessible–across ecosystems and dApps within.

The first showcase of these achievements–Common–is scheduled to be released in just a few weeks–so stay tuned!