The Zcash Company has announced its investment in Starkware Industries, a company that has developed the so-called STARKs system, a new cryptographic proof system that is even more scalable and resistant to quantum computers.
The StarkWare was founded by the founding members of Zcash: among them the professor Eli Ben-Sasson of the IIT of Israel and the professor Alessandro Chiesa cryptographer of UC Berkeley.
Among the venture capital investors there are also Bitmain, Pantera, Polychain Capital and Vitalik Buterin.
The solution devised proves the existence of a document and any other information without having to break the privacy of the owner.
The application would have reached higher levels of scalability than previous solutions, improving the speed of transactions.
STARK technology: an ingenious cryptographic solution
The ingenious system fuses the need of private citizens to protect their privacy and the need of government authorities to preserve institutional integrity.
To explain the cryptographic system, Professor Ben-Sasson and his collaborators make this example: suppose that the police must prove to the public opinion that the DNA of a candidate in the next general election does not appear in the ‘National Database of DNA for forensic use ‘(database that retains DNA profiles of criminals and missing persons).
Through the use of STARKs, the police is able to generate evidence without relying on third party trust bodies and without being forced to disclose further information on the candidate’s profile and DNA information.
The so-called zero knowledge proof systems were first described in the 1990s, but the first applications were impractical.
