There’s one big competition in ZK, and it is called ZPrize. Every year, ZPrize rewards contestants who come up with the most performant implementations for a series of challenges. The goal is to push the limits of what’s possible with ZK, and to make sure that the best implementations are open-source and available to everyone.

This year, zkSecurity is proud to announce it’ll play the role of one of the three external architects for the competition, hosting the High Throughput Signature Verification ZPrize category.

For this prize, participants will attempt to produce the most performant implementation of a signature verification circuit using Varuna, the latest update of Aleo’s proof system. The goal is to be able to verify as many proofs of signatures as possible in a given time frame. Contestants will target ECDSA on the secp256k1 curve (the Bitcoin and Ethereum curve) and keccak256 hash function (the Ethereum hash function). In addition, they will have access to the latest version of the Varuna proof system, which includes lookups.

Verifying ECDSA signatures will involve the two hot problems of arithmetic circuits: non-native arithmetic (arithmetic in fields that are different from the circuit field) and bitwise operations (e.g. XOR, ROT, etc.). Optimizing these low-level primitives should impact all sorts of applications (and non-SNARK-friendly cryptographic algorithms).

We’re currently looking to obtain feedback on the current prize specification which you can find on the discord channel (you might have to register here before). We’re excited to see people compete and push the limits of what’s possible with ZK!