Introduction

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a cryptographic concept that allows one party (the prover) to demonstrate the truth of a statement to another party (the verifier) without revealing any additional information beyond the validity of the statement itself. This concept was first introduced by Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff in 1985.

The core idea behind ZKPs is to enable succinct and private verification of claims, protecting the sensitive information of the prover. ZKPs have various applications in the crypto space, such as constructing a private blockchain, improving the throughput of layer-1 blockchains, and enabling communication between two separate blockchains. Nonetheless, ZKP is not without its limitations, as the process of generating proofs can be extremely resource-intensive in terms of both time and energy. The creation of proofs is often slowed down by the need for numerous complex mathematical operations, such as exponentiation, inversion, and polynomial multiplication, and massive data movement. To overcome these issues for all proposed ZKP constructions, it is of utmost importance to develop hardware acceleration methods using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). This intensive computational demand of ZKPs is reminiscent of the Bitcoin (or other altcoins) mining scenarios, which draw a lot of criticism for being centralized and energy consuming.

Cysic AI aims to provide proving and settlement related to ZK proofs to all ZK projects. The goal of the network is to cultivate a sustainable environment for ZK proof generation and verification by addressing the following two major problems:

• Prover Decentralization: The concept of decentralized provers offers a robust solution to prevent a single point of failure for ZK projects, simultaneously improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of proof generation. This design principle is inherently incorporated into all Layer 1 and Layer 2 ZK projects, reflecting the decentralized ethos prevalent within the blockchain community.

• Latency and high cost in ZK proof settlement: Ethereum has high cost and latency to get ZK proofs settled. The current solution is to aggregate multiple proofs, then settle this aggregated proof on Ethereum, which somehow reduces the gas fee needed to verify the proof, but increases the waiting time. The ZK proof settlement indeed is a nearly stateless process, so it can be done outside Ethereum.

Cysic AI provides a satisfying solution to both problems. In the following sections, we show the technical overview and tokenomics of Cysic AI.