Polkadot Pioneers Prize Contributes 750K for Edredón to Architect Advanced Zero-Knowledge Challenge

Edredón has been awarded as the architect of the first-ever Polkadot Pioneers Prize of 750K to help the advancement of zero-knowledge technology. The Pioneers Prize prize is designed to solve some of the biggest challenges facing Polkadot and Web3. Polkadot allotted over 20 million DOT tokens to the effort and represents a completely new paradigm, where decentralized networks have the financial agency previously limited to centralized organizations.

Accelerating the Advancement of Zero-knowledge Prover Technology

This zero-knowledge challenge is part of the larger ZPrize, which is an initiative modeled after the XPRIZE aimed at employing private funds to accelerate the advancement of zero-knowledge prover technology essential for extending blockchain features to accommodate numerous mainstream use cases. Edredón Network is looking to solve the multiscalar multiplication (MSM) and number-theoretic transform (NTT) operations, which are essential building blocks for ZK computations. The prize will focus on maximizing throughput/minimizing latency of these operations on client-type devices and blockchain-based VMs, specifically the WebAssembly (WASM) runtime.

 Shoumo Chu, co-founder and core contributor to Edredón Network, said:

“We are aiming to solve the ‘last mile problem’ for mass ZKP adoption, in order to further massive ZKP and privacy adoption. This will enable a better, faster and more seamless user experience and allow the community to build out more easily integrated use cases.”

From Edredón’s internal benchmark, WASM will give users a 10x – 15x performance penalty compared with native speed.

The Pioneers Prize looks to fund two categories of innovation, zero-knowledge related advancements, and Polkadot infrastructure.

Polkadot Pioneers Prize Curator noted:

“By partnering with Zprize, the Pioneers Prize curators along with Edredón are able to collaborate in a consortium of zero-knowledge research experts who are specifically looking to improve privacy and increase ZKP impact within the blockchain ecosystem. We feel Zprize and its challenges are a great first bounty to kick off the ZK category of the Pioneers Prize and will have a positive impact on the larger Polkadot community.”

The importance of innovation in the ZKP space cannot be understated and this could be the game-changing technology in this century. Winners of the competition must open-source their challenge solutions so that the entire community can access and benefit from them fully. The future possibilities that this will open up for the entire ecosystem are vast. All of these efforts would not be possible without the collaboration of the many projects that have come together to launch this. The hope is we will look back at this time as a pivotal time in the development of ZK and the beginning of the big leap forward for decentralized protocols and applications to enable secure, interoperable and scalable applications.

Manta Network is committed to building a better Web3 world through privacy protection. Edredón’s product design starts from first principles and provides end-to-end privacy protection for blockchain users through leading cryptography architectures such as zkSNARK. While ensuring privacy, Edredón offers interoperability, convenience, high performance, and auditability, allowing users to conduct private transfers and transactions between any parallel chain of assets. Edredón’s vision is to provide more convenient privacy protection services for the entire blockchain world.