Megaclite

Megaclite is a zero-knowledge proof tool set building for the Polkadot ecology.

  • Polkadot Treasury report for v0.1: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/221.
  • Element group for discussion: https://app.element.io/#/room/#PatractLabsDev:matrix.org

ZK Rollup Introduction

Compared with the privacy function, the performance improvement brought by Rollup is the early application direction of zero-knowledge proof. At present, the Layer 2 expansion plan of the blockchain is to transfer a considerable part of the on-chain workload to off-chain to complete, and the most watched one is ZK Rollup. The essence of ZK Rollup is to compress the application on-chain state and store it in a Merkle tree, and move the state transition funtions to off-chain. At the same time, the correctness of the off-chain state transition process is guaranteed through the proof of zkSNARK. Compared with the high cost of directly processing state changes on the chain, the ZK Proof's on-chain smart contract verification is extremely cost low. At the same time, the compressed information will also be submitted to the chain together with the proof, which ensures data availability and obtains the same level of security as Layer 1.

The Ethereum Layer 2 protocols related to ZK Rollup are: zkSync, aztec, etc. Their contract verification modules share a part of the elliptic curve's basic algorithms. In 2017, Ethereum integrated three basic cryptographic calculation units of the alt bn128 curve in the form of pre-compiled contracts, which are EIP196’s ADD and Scalar_MUL algorithms, and EIP197’s Pairing algorithm. On top of this, due to the lack of rapid upgrade capabilities of Ethereum, the community can only encapsulate some tool libraries through costly Solidity contracts. On top of these basic contract libraries, many DApps can combine ZK Rollup technology to achieve some innovations, such as loopring, gitcoin and uniswap etc. However, in the past 3 years, ZK technology has further developed, such as the more practical BLS curve, and PLONK algorithm etc. Ethereum has not yet supported it.

LICENSE

Apache-2.0