Polkadot Pioneers Prize Pays $750,000 for Manta at Architect Advanced Zero-Knowledge Challenge

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Manta has been awarded as the architect of 750K’s first-ever Polkadot Pioneers award for helping advance zero-knowledge technology. The Pioneers Prize is designed to solve some of the biggest challenges Polkadot and Web3 face. Polkadot has allocated over 20 million DOT tokens to the effort and represents a whole new paradigm, where decentralized networks have the financial agency previously limited to centralized organizations.

Accelerating the Advancement of Zero-knowledge Prover Technology

This zero-knowledge challenge is part of the larger ZPrize, which is an XPRIZE-inspired initiative to employ private funds to accelerate the advancement of zero-knowledge proof technology essential for extending blockchain functionality to adapt to many common use cases. Manta Network seeks to solve Multiscalar Multiplication (MSM) and Number Theoretical Transformation (NTT) operations, which are essential building blocks for ZK calculations. The award will focus on maximizing throughput/minimizing latency of these operations on client-like devices and blockchain-based virtual machines, specifically the WebAssembly runtime (WASM).

Shoumo Chu, co-founder and main contributor of Manta Network, said:

“We aim to solve the ‘last mile problem’ for mass adoption of ZKP, to drive mass adoption of ZKP and privacy. This will enable a better, faster and more seamless user experience and enable the community to create more easily integrated use cases.

According to Manta’s internal benchmark, WASM will give users a 10x to 15x performance penalty over native speed.

The Pioneers Prize aims to fund two categories of innovation, zero-knowledge advances and Polkadot infrastructure.

The Polkadot Pioneers award curator noted:

“By partnering with Zprize, the Pioneers Prize curators along with Manta are able to collaborate in a consortium of zero-knowledge research experts who specifically seek to improve privacy and increase the impact of ZKP within the blockchain ecosystem. We believe that Zprize and its challenges are a great first bounty to launch the ZK category of the Pioneer Prize and will have a positive impact on the wider Polkadot community.

The importance of innovation in the ZKP space cannot be underestimated and this could be the breakthrough technology of this century. The winners of the contest must open their challenge solutions so that the whole community can access them and fully benefit from them. The future possibilities this will open up for the entire ecosystem are vast. All of these efforts would not be possible without the collaboration of the many projects that have come together to launch this. The hope is that we will see this time as a pivotal time in ZK development and the start of the great leap forward for decentralized protocols and applications to enable secure, interoperable, and scalable applications.

Manta Network is committed to building a better Web3 world through privacy. Manta’s product design starts from first principles and provides end-to-end privacy protection for blockchain users through state-of-the-art cryptography architectures such as zkSNARK. While ensuring privacy, Manta offers interoperability, convenience, high performance and auditability, allowing users to perform private transfers and transactions between any parallel chain of assets. Manta’s vision is to provide more convenient privacy services for the entire blockchain world.

The Polkadot Pioneers Prize was designed to solve some of the biggest challenges Polkadot and Web3 face. Polkadot has on-chain treasury managed by network token holders through Polkadot’s on-chain governance system. Currently containing over 20 million DOT tokens, the treasury is designed to fund projects that benefit the Polkadot ecosystem. Treasury Polkadot represents a whole new paradigm, where decentralized networks have the financial agency previously limited to centralized organizations.

ZPrize is inspired by XPRIZE and other similar competitions and aims to use private funds to accelerate the advancement of zero-knowledge proof technology essential to extend blockchain functionality to fit many different business cases. common use. ZPrize sponsors include, in alphabetical order, 0xPARC, Aleo, Algorand, Anoma, Aztec Protocol, Celo, CoreWeave, DZK, Espresso Systems, Ethereum Foundation, Findora, Harmony One, Kora, Manta Network, Mina Protocol, Polkadot Pioneers Prize , Polychain Capital, Polygon, RISC0, Trapdoor Tech, Zero-Knowledge Validator.

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Donald E. Patel