It’s finally on the horizon. Months and many planning sessions have gone by and we’re excited to announce that ZPrize 2023 will happen! Read on for a retro on last year’s competition, the impact it made and what’s in store for the next ZPrize.
Last year’s Zprize was a resounding success. Over 30 companies across both Web2 and Web3 sponsored over $7 million worth of prizes, and 220 globally distributed participants competed to accelerate zero-knowledge primitives such as multiscalar multiplication, Poseidon hash function optimization, and proof-generation on low-powered mobile devices.
Read the full competition results on the ZPrize blog, and check out the repository containing the open-source submissions from last year’s competition, or dive into our 2022 competition retrospective.
ZPrize was created to push the boundaries on what is possible with zero-knowledge cryptography. All in all, we’re proud to say that the impact generated by the inaugural ZPrize competition greatly surpassed all of our expectations.
As we can see, the average improvement from baseline was more than 5x. Most importantly, every submission was open-sourced for the benefit of all - which pushed the industry forward by leaps and bounds. For some, such as those focused on FPGAs, no prior benchmark had ever existed. In some cases, ZPrize 2022 marked the first time performance was formally measured for such endeavors and the first time implementations of these algorithms were open-sourced.
Furthermore, the ZPrize results have become the standard to which further improvements to these algorithms are being compared. Several of the ideas and submissions from ZPrize are being incorporated into projects to help increase the performance of real-world systems
For those of you that have been waiting since the close of last year’s competition to hear what’s next, now’s the time! We’re happy to share that we’re doing a 2023 ZPrize and we’ll have more in the way of rules and guidelines for you in the near future.
As a first step, we’ll be forming a steering committee consisting of Alex Pruden (founder of ZPrize and CEO of Aleo), Anna Rose (founder & host of ZK Podcast, founder of ZKValidator and ZKHack), Luke Pearson (cryptographer & partner at Polychain Capital), Philipp Jovanovic (Cryptographer at ZKValidator), and John Reynolds (Product Manager at Aleo).
First, it will facilitate the ZPrize II competition this year by soliciting sponsors, coordinating logistics, and processing prize payments. We expect the process to go more smoothly this year now that we have the benefit of experience, but are always keen to receive additional feedback. If you participated in any capacity in last year’s ZPrize, click here to provide your thoughts.
Second, the steering committee will begin the process of forming a ZPrize DAO, progressively decentralizing this effort into an on-chain organization focused on the promotion of collective public goods for zero-knowledge and other advanced cryptography applicable to Web3. And that’s where you come in…
For now, if you’re interested in shaping the future of ZPrize in any capacity please join our Discord, where you’ll find channels for sponsors, participants, architects and every aspect of the competition. Look out to our Twitter for happenings and here to our newsletter for future specifics on this year’s contest as we close in on the date. To all of you who sponsored, architected and competed in last year’s ZPrize, thank you, and we look forward to your involvement this year!