ZPrize 2023 Announcement

🎉Announcing ZPrize 2023

You’ve asked and patiently awaited our answer. Today, we’re thrilled to announce…

🥁 ZPrize 2023 is happening! And we want *you* to get involved.

Read on for a snapshot of the inaugural competition and what’s up next, or check out the full announcement.

🔍 ZPrize 2022 Recap

Last year, more than 30 web2 and web3 companies joined forces to launch the ZPrize competition to accelerate the progression of ZK technology.

Nearly two dozen projects around the world competed for over $7 million in total prize winnings over a six month period.

The results were extraordinary.

As we can see, the average improvement from baseline was more than 5x. Most importantly, every submission was open-sourced for the benefit of all - which pushed the industry forward by leaps and bounds.

Furthermore, the ZPrize results have become the standard to which further improvements to these algorithms are being compared. And several of the ideas and submissions from ZPrize are being incorporated into projects to help increase the performance of real-world systems.

Read the full competition results on the ZPrize blog, and check out the repository containing the open-source submissions from last year’s competition.

🚀 ZPrize 2023 is a go

For those of you that have been waiting since the close of last year’s competition to hear what’s next: we’re happy to share that we’re kicking off ZPrize II in 2023.

As a first step, we’ll be forming a steering committee consisting of Alex Pruden (Founder of ZPrize and CEO of Aleo), Anna Rose (Founder & Host of ZK Podcast, Founder of ZKValidator and ZKHack), Luke Pearson (Cryptographer & Partner at Polychain Capital), Philipp Jovanovic (Cryptographer at ZKValidator), and John Reynolds (Product Manager at Aleo).

The steering committee will serve two functions.

First, it will facilitate the ZPrize II competition this year by soliciting sponsors, coordinating logistics, and processing prize payments. We expect the process to go more smoothly this year now that we have the benefit of experience, but are always keen to receive additional feedback. If you participated in any capacity in last year’s ZPrize, click here to provide your thoughts.

Second, the steering committee will begin the process of forming a ZPrize DAO, progressively decentralizing this effort into an on-chain organization focused on the promotion of collective public goods for zero-knowledge and other advanced cryptography applicable to Web3. And that’s where you come in…

🤝 Get Involved

We invite our amazing community, including sponsors, architects, and competitors from last year to join the ZPrize DAO and help shape the future of ZPrize and Web3 privacy.

In our Discord, you’ll find channels for sponsors, competitors, architects and every aspect of the ZPrize competition. This will be the starting point for discussion on what the DAO should look like, and we’d invite anyone interested in being part of the DAO to share their feedback in that forum.

Make sure you’re following us on Twitter and subscribed to our newsletter to stay updated on all things ZK and ZPrize.

If you’d like to sponsor the second iteration of the ZPrize competition, please send an email to [email protected]. We look forward to continuing our efforts to push the boundaries of Web3 & ZK forward with all of you!

Yours in Privacy,

Team ZPrize