After many months of incredible collective effort we are proud to announce the official kickoff of the ZPrize competition. The interest both from prize sponsors and competitors has far surpassed expectations and has lead to make ZPrize THE largest collaborative public good funding enterprises in the history of zero-knowledge technology.
Over 22 teams are sponsoring 12 different categories totalling $7M in prizes, with many teams offering additional network tokens on top of that. Because of this support, we have already received nearly 600 competitor applications.
We all know how many exciting world-changing applications there are for zero-knowledge technology, but currently we are stuck in the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma where most interesting applications can’t scale due to the lack of efficiency optimizations and there is no market incentive to create the efficiency optimizations without the demand of said applications. The core motivation of ZPrize is to break that dilemma and provide a bootstrapping incentive to help kickstart a scalability flywheel for zero-knowledge cryptography, and to ensure that the innovations discovered to do so are “locked-open” under fully open-source licenses.
With the size of carrot that our sponsors have helped provide, and the resulting brainpower it has attracted, we feel that it is a foregone conclusion that radical improvements are going to be produced, the question is only how radical and which competitors will be able to claim the glory of producing them.
Best of luck to all competing individuals and teams, may the best code win.
