frequently asked questions

We are accepting applications starting on April 21st through June 10th. The competition begins on June 10th. During this time, we will be holding an Aleo Ask Me Anything sessions on Twitter Spaces on a weekly basis, on Thursdays in May at 9:00am PST.

The competition duration will be between two and six months, depending on the specific prize.

There are two prize categories: an open division and team division.

The open division is intended for “public goods” or items of general interest to multiple teams. Each open division prize has a single prize sponsor, which has contributed the most resources towards that prize among the sponsoring teams. The prize sponsor is in charge of designing and running the competition for their prize specifically. The prize sponsor may also delegate that work to a prize architect.  Prizes from the team division consist of only USD & USD-equivalents or liquid tokens of a post-mainnet project.

The team division is intended for problems that are specific or only relevant to an individual team. There is only a single sponsor for these prizes. In addition, these prizes can consist of pre-launch tokens according to the rules set out by the prize sponsor.

Please note that prize winners and payouts will be determined in good faith and at the sole discretion of prize sponsors, consistent with any compliance requirements.

Please visit our prizes page for more information on the individual prizes.

32 teams from across the industry are supporting the ZPrize initiative. Of those, 20 teams are contributing resources or tokens to the prizes amounting to roughly $7 million. Each of those sponsors chose which prizes they wanted to support, and their logos are listed on each prize page. We’re also thankful to AMD and Coreweave for being official technology providers of the ZPrize competition.

We are looking for applicants with a demonstrated industry or academic experience in a technical area such as computer science, electrical engineering, optimization, or math. Strong preference will be given to those with prior experience with relevant ecosystems such as CUDA. As additional incentive, we are offering a scholarship program to the competitors that prize sponsors consider to be the most promising. Details about that program, as well as the prize specifications (including the specific objective, constraints, and judging criteria) are being defined now and will be posted shortly

Yes, all work submitted as part of the ZPrize competition will be open-sourced.

At a high-level, their main utility is to secure and scale decentralized networks. A zero-knowledge protocol consists of two parties: a prover who makes a claim and a verifier who validates it. Typically these protocols are designed so that the vast majority of the "work" happens in the proving part versus in the verification part.

This cryptographic protocol that provides the following guarantees:

• All possible statements can be proven
• Provers can’t forge proofs that claim something is true when it is false or vice versa
• Verifiers learn only whether or not a claim is true or false and nothing more.

Zero-knowledge cryptography secures Web3 by providing a proof of a given transaction or computation, rather than publishing the transaction itself. Thus, it conceals private information and enables interesting new use cases like on-chain identities and private smart contracts.

Zero-knowledge also scales Web3 by compressing multiple transactions/transitions into a single proof, saving block space on Layer-1, and  enabling trustless light-clients and lightweight mobile wallets.