A Look at the Dark Horse Projects in Solana's ZK Privacy Ecosystem
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A Look at the Dark Horse Projects in Solana's ZK Privacy Ecosystem
From the release of ZK compression to the future rollout of various system calls, ZK's importance to Solana cannot be underestimated.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Yash Agarwal & 0xIchigo
Translation & Editing: Pzai, Foresight News
Broadly speaking, Solana's infrastructure helps developers save costs on network performance, provides asynchronous execution and state growth solutions, and enhances security by offering privacy, confidentiality, verifiability, and decentralized proof networks for on-chain applications—let’s explore these in detail.
Privacy and Verifiability
Arcium enables privacy for on-chain applications by providing a trustless, verifiable, and efficient framework for performing encrypted computations. For example, AI models can be trained on private data, while DeFi applications can leverage it for private transactions.
Anagram’s Bonsol is Solana’s native verifiable computation system, enabling developers to create fully verifiable executables over private and public data, mathematically guarantee their validity, and integrate results into Solana smart contracts for on-chain verification.
Anonymous Transactions and ZK-Based Scaling
Darklake is building a privacy-focused AMM trading application, aiming to become Solana’s first DEX offering real-time, MEV-resistant order execution.
Dark Protocol is developing a market-governed anonymous protocol powered by ZK-SNARKs.
ZK Compression, developed by the ZK proof protocol LightProtocol and Helius, is a new Solana account primitive featuring zk proofs and state compression mechanisms that reduce rent costs for Solana developers and provide scalable state growth solutions.
ZK-compressed state is stored in compressed accounts. These accounts resemble standard Solana accounts but include several key differences designed to improve efficiency and scalability:
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Hash Identification: Each compressed account can be identified by its hash value
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Hash Changes on Write: Any write operation to a compressed account changes its hash
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Optional Address: An address can optionally be set as a permanent unique ID for the compressed account. This is particularly useful for certain use cases like NFTs. The field is optional to avoid computational overhead, as compressed accounts can be referenced by their hash.
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Sparse State Tree: All compressed accounts are stored within a Merkle tree, with only the root of this tree (i.e., the Merkle root) stored on-chain in account space. More specifically, the state tree is a concurrent Merkle tree based on Poseidon hashing.
Many Solana teams are already building ZK compression use cases, including:
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Backpack wallet users holding tokens without paying rent (gas).
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Consumer social apps like Tribe.fun enabling creators to send tokens at low cost.
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Airdrop tools such as Helius Airship.
ZKVM and Network Scaling Stack
RiscZero and SuccinctLabs help prove arbitrary computations on-chain, unbounded by chain-native compute limits. This enhances ZK-powered Solana light clients, enables simplified DePIN networks, and supports secure, seamless ZK logins.
In addition, zkSVM is being used across various use cases:
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Solforge Network leverages a ZKP scaling stack and zk compression to enable provable state updates, optimized for proof generation via LightSVM.
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Terminaxyz, an SVM network deployment platform, optimizes applications for specific use cases by reducing latency, improving privacy, and lowering computational costs.
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SonicSVM, an SVM stack for gaming and applications, focuses on scaling through zk and Hypergrid.
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ZetaMarkets’ Bullet L2 scales to extremely high throughput, with all state transitions being provable.
Additionally, teams like Aerius are experimenting with zk proofs.
Other initiatives include the ZK Token Proof program, which supports private transfers via Anza—encrypting SPL token balances and transaction amounts to protect privacy in use cases such as payments. Homomorphic encryption allows computations on encrypted data without decryption. To achieve this, private transfers use Twisted ElGamal encryption for hidden arithmetic operations on ciphertexts and employ Sigma protocols to verify transfers without revealing sensitive information. Only account holders possessing the decryption key can view their encrypted balances. However, Solana’s Global Auditor System (GAS) allows selective read access via a separate decryption key to support compliance and auditing requirements.
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