ZK is quietly becoming the backbone of crypto's next evolution & here are the projects I'm watching👇 ➠ ZK proofs let you prove something is true without revealing how you know it ➠ The crypto applications keep expanding beyond privacy ➠ ZK rollups bundle 1000s of transactions into one, drastically reducing costs & increasing speed ➠ Privacy coins hide transaction details while proving legitimacy ➠ Crosschain bridges use ZK to verify events without trusting middlemen @VitalikButerin perspective has evolved dramatically too… 1/ In 2021, ZK was just part of Ethereum's endgame 2/ By 2024, he mentioned that all rollups will be ZK in 10 years > Few days back we saw calls for fast withdrawals through ZK proofs, marking a shift from seeing ZK as optional to viewing it as essential Early ZK implementations were expensive & slow. Hardware acceleration + algorithmic improvements are making ZK proofs practical for mainstream use. Now the projects I'm tracking each tackle different pieces of this puzzle. I’ve selected them on the basis of infra plays & most of them are next gen ZK projects. ➠ @SuccinctLabs ➤ Acts as an infra layer by providing decentralized prover networks + zkVM tools ➤ Let devs generate ZK proofs without building complex hardware ➤ They're making ZK accessible to teams that can't afford specialized infra ➠ @boundless_xyz ➤ Focuses on universal ZK protocols + verifiable computation marketplaces ➤ They're decoupling computation from consensus, letting any chain get proof verification at fixed costs ➤ Their Proof of Verifiable Work model incentivizes nodes to generate proofs ➠ @cysic_xyz ➤ Handles the hardware acceleration problem ➤ ZK proofs require massive computation, so they're building GPU/ASIC solutions to make proof generation faster + cheaper ➤ Their Proof of Compute model combines PoW + PoS to incentivize hardware providers ➠ @Starknet ➤ Forms the application layer (a full ZK rollup using zk STARKs with their custom Cairo programming language) ➤ They're proving ZK can work at scale for actual user applications Why the urgency around ZK now? 1/ As institutional adoption accelerates, user experience becomes critical 2/ Ethereum's scaling roadmap depends on ZK + it reduces withdrawal times to under an hour for L2s