Broadly speaking, Solana infrastructure helps save developers costs in terms of network performance, providing asynchronous execution and state growth solutions; in terms of security, Solana provides privacy and confidentiality for on-chain applications, and even verifiability and decentralized proof networks. Let’s explore more of each one here.
Privacy and Verifiability
Arcium helps achieve privacy for on-chain applications by providing a trustless, verifiable, and efficient framework for running encrypted computations. For example, AI models can be trained on private data, and DeFi can use it for private transactions.
Anagram’s Bonsol is Solana’s native verifiable computation system, enabling developers to create fully verifiable executables of both private and public data, mathematically guarantee their validity, and integrate the result into Solana smart contracts to prove it on-chain.
Anonymity and ZK-based scalability
Darklake has built a private AMM trading application that aims to be the first DEX on Solana to provide real-time, MEV-resistant order execution.
Dark Protocol has built a market-governed anonymity protocol powered by ZK-SNARKS.
Developed by ZK proof protocols LightProtocol and Helius, ZK Compression is a new Solana account primitive with zk proof and state compression mechanisms that reduce rental costs for Solana application developers and provide state growth solutions.
ZK compressed state is stored in compressed accounts. These accounts are similar to regular Solana accounts. Other initiatives include the ZK Token Proof program, support for private transfers through Anza - encrypting SPL token balances and transaction amounts to protect the privacy of use cases such as payments, and homomorphic encryption allows calculations to be performed on encrypted data without decrypting it. To do this, private transfers use Twisted ElGamal encryption to perform hidden mathematical operations on ciphertext and the Sigma protocol to verify these transfers without revealing sensitive information. Only account holders with the decryption key can view their encrypted balance. However, the Global Auditor System on Solana allows selective read access via a separate decryption key for compliance and auditing. Although Solana is based on the same open-source blockchain as Solana, it has several key differences that improve efficiency and scalability:
Hash identification: Each compressed account can be identified by its hash value
Hash changes on write: Any write operation to a compacted account will change its hash
Optional Address: The address can be optionally set as a permanent unique ID for the compressed account. This is useful for certain use cases such as NFTs. The reason this field is optional is to avoid computational overhead, as the compressed account can be referenced by its hash.
Sparse state tree: All compressed accounts are stored in the Merkle tree, and only the state root of the tree (ie, the Merkle root) is stored in the on-chain account space. More specifically, the state tree is a concurrent Merkle tree based on the Poseidon hash.
Many Solana teams are already building ZK compression use cases in areas such as:
Backpack wallet users can hold tokens without paying rent (Gas).
Consumer social apps like Tribe.fun allow creators to send tokens at a low cost.
Helius Airship and other airdrop tools
ZKVM and Network Expansion Stack
RiscZero and SuccinctLabs can help prove arbitrary computation on-chain and not be constrained by chain computation. This can enhance ZK-powered Solana light clients, enable simplified DePIN networks, and secure and seamless ZK logins.
Additionally, zkSVM is being used in many use cases:
Solforge Network uses the ZKP network expansion Stack and zk compression to enable scaling of transfer state update proofs, and is optimized for proof generation through LightSVM.
Terminaxyz, a SVM network deployment platform, targets specific use cases by reducing latency, improving privacy, and lowering computational costs.
SonicSVM, an SVM stack for games and applications, is also working on scaling with zk and Hypergrid.
ZetaMarkets Bullet L2 is scaling to extremely high throughput and all state transitions are provable.
Additionally, teams such as Aerius are experimenting with zk proofs.
Other initiatives include the ZK Token Proof program, supporting private transfers through Anza - encrypting SPL token balances and transaction amounts to protect the privacy of use cases such as payments, and homomorphic encryption allows calculations to be performed on encrypted data without decrypting it. To do this, private transfers use Twisted ElGamal encryption to hide mathematical operations on ciphertexts and the Sigma protocol to verify these transfers without revealing sensitive information. Only account holders with decryption keys can view their encrypted balances. However, the Global Auditor System on Solana allows selective read access through a separate decryption key for compliance and auditing purposes.
