Vitalik: Client Proof Speed Limits ZK-VM Privacy Applications

Odaily Star Daily News ETH co-founder Vitalik Buterin explains the limitations of ZK-VM (Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine) in privacy use cases. Some users pointed out that ZK-VM is superior in almost all aspects, but ironically, the only use case it fails to cover is privacy. Vitalik responded: The explanation is simple: privacy use cases require client-side proofs, and the current client-side prover is not fast enough to handle anything beyond the Merkle branch. “What’s worse, client use cases require proof from each user, which means the proof size is small, and the proof time of the proof system based on elliptic curves is slow. You can solve this problem by having the client create (ZK) STARK and send it to the intermediary. The intermediary will wrap it in a SNARK based on elliptic curves, but this is an additional foundational dependency, which will bring other problems.”