I know cryptocurrencies have a lot of problems, but this is one place where it’s good they exist: they’ve funneled a ton of money into researching new cryptography. The article claims that this research was developed for StarkWare, which developed its own form of zero knowledge proofs they called Starks, developed a programming language in which cryptographic proofs can be generated showing that the output of the program was truly produced from the inputs[^1], and continued to do more research like this. While I’m not a cryptographer, I think this sort of thing is super cool and I’m glad there’s a lot of attention and effort going into it.

^[1] the cool thing about these proofs is that they can be verified in much less time than is required to run the program. IIRC, starks can be verified in log-polynomial time, and snarks can be verified in constant time. This allows cryptocurrency protocols to have one computer in the network generate a proof of the state of the chain given a new block, and all other are able to quickly check it. Without this, you have a ton of waste because every computer in the network must duplicate the work of computing the new chain state. (although some new waste is introduced by the fact that producing a proof is very slow, although this is another area that cryptocurrency-funded research has improved dramatically)

Another cool bit of cryptography research that I think was motivated by crypto was “verkle trees”, an improvement on merkle trees that uses vector commitments rather than your typical hash. A vector commitment is like a hash, but it hashes an array of items and you can check that the hash was produced from an array with a certain item at a certain index without knowing the other items in the array. If you use this to back a merkle tree, you can increase the branching factor a lot and end up with much smaller proofs that a particular item is in the tree. This is because the proof size for a merkle tree is b * log_b n (where b is the branching factor and n is the number of items in the tree). The proof size for a verkle tree is just log_b n, so you can increase b as much as you want without making the proofs bigger.

Full disclosure: I work for a blockchain company, but not one mentioned here. I have no equity or stake in crypto outside of the fact that if the price goes to 0 my company probably can no longer afford to employ me

I know this is useful for crypto, but I think think I'm actually more interested in what new modes of remote code running on untrusted platforms this enables.