In the late 1990s, Matthew Green (X:@matthew_d_green), as a computer science student, raised a key question:
If encryption cannot truly solve the privacy problem, can it still be considered protection?

In 2013, he collaborated with Eli Ben-Sasson, Ian Miers, and others to propose the Zerocash protocol, a zk-SNARK-based solution that enabled on-chain privacy transactions without revealing transaction details, opening up a new path for privacy protection in the digital age.

However, zk-SNARKs are not perfect:

❌ Extremely high computational complexity,
❌ Requires a large amount of resources to generate and verify
❌ Proof generation is slow and costly

Early prototypes even once 'froze,' leading to doubts about their feasibility. To break through this bottleneck, Green and his team proposed the 'Powers of Tau' scheme, a multi-party computation protocol that allows multiple independent participants to jointly generate the public parameters needed for zk-SNARKs, reducing the risk of the 'trusted setup' being attacked.

In 2018, the 'Powers of Tau' was officially implemented, with hundreds of cryptographers and developers worldwide, including Edward Snowden, participating in this 'trusted setup ceremony.'

It solved the 'single point of trust' problem of zk-SNARKs and became one of the most influential public verification experiments in the history of cryptography.

To further enhance the efficiency of zk-SNARKs, the Green team optimized the circuit structure and introduced the 'Groth16' proof system.

These improvements ultimately propelled Zcash to successfully launch in 2016, becoming the world's first large-scale commercial privacy coin project – the anonymous coin Zcash was born, fundamentally changing the landscape of blockchain privacy.

The impact of zk-SNARKs is not limited to the privacy coin Zcash.
zk-SNARKs are also widely used in DeFi, enterprise-level privacy protocols, and cross-chain solutions, such as Aztec, ThorChain, and Nightfall, significantly improving transaction efficiency and greatly enhancing data security.

Today, zk-SNARKs have become an important part of the Web3 ecosystem, supporting scalability solutions like Polygon zkEVM and zkSync.

At ZEROBASE, we uphold the same philosophy:

Privacy is not only encryption, but also a mathematical proof of trustlessness.

☑️Privacy verification support: zkLogin and zkEmail ensure identity security

☑️TEE + Off-chain computation, building an efficient and trustworthy data verification system

☑️Batch verification reduces costs, achieving a win-win for privacy and performance

Matthew Green is still a pioneer in the field of cryptography.
He believes that in the increasingly severe digital age of information leakage, privacy is not only a right for users, but also a core value of a decentralized world.

Privacy protection, to be continued.