🔐Trusted Setup Ceremony

What is a Trusted Setup?

Many zero-knowledge proof systems, including Groth16, require a layer of entropy (randomness) to be applied to circuits in order for the proofs to be secure. ZKP2P uses Groth16, therefore, requires this randomness. The catch, however, is that nobody can know that randomness, which is referred to as “toxic waste”. We must ensure that no one person holds onto the randomness, otherwise the zero-knowledge proof scheme will be broken.

Trusted Setups are those events or ceremonies that one needs to perform to generate the parameters that can kick off SNARK based systems. It is an MPC – or multiparty computation – that involves a number of participants sequentially downloading software, running a computation that includes some randomness that they generate and re-uploading their result to be folded into the next participants computation. At the end of this process, there is a hidden parameter that is used to create the keys that are used to create and verify proofs. Trusted setups rely on a 1 of N honest participant assumption. As long as just one participant actually discards their “toxic waste”, the proof system will be secure.

Prerequisites

1. We assume a base level of technical background. In particular, we assume you’ve used Node.js / npm before and you know your way around a terminal.

2. You are running Mac or Linux. The contributor CLI tool does not natively work on Windows, so if you are on Windows, you will need to run it using WSL. The tool does not support being run inside VMs and Docker containers at the moment.

3. In order to run the contribution CLI, you must have Node.js version 18. It is less likely to work with newer versions. If you don’t have it installed, you can install it using a tool like nvm or volta or directly from their website.

4. As a sybil-resistance mechanism, you must have a GitHub account such that:

   1. You have 1 public repository

   2. You have at least 1 follower

   3. You are following at least 5 other GitHub accounts

   4. The account is at least 1 month old

5. Check your internet connection. Since one of our circuits is somewhat large, we recommend contributors have an upload bandwidth of at least 1 Megabytes per second (~1Mbps).

6. If you’d like, take a look at the circuits and protocol code here: https://github.com/zkp2p/zk-p2p/

How to Contribute

🤝Contribute

Contributors

We thank the following people for contributing to our trusted setup ceremony so far.

😎Contributors

Disclaimer

The tool we’re using (p0tion) is pretty new, so you may experience issues that prevent your contribution from being completed. While we’ll do our best to provide support, we can’t guarantee that it will work for everyone their contribution since most of our bandwidth is being spent on getting the protocol ready for mainnet.

In many cases, if the CLI fails or gets stuck, you can re-run the command and it will fix itself.

Further Reading

• Nocturne's trusted setup

• p0tion