Many applications need to verify their user’s identity online, whether it is nationality, age, or simply uniqueness. Today, this is hard. They are stuck between shady heuristics like tracking IP addresses and technologies like Worldcoin that need to deploy their infrastructure widely.

Gevulot, a zero-knowledge proof blockchain project, completed a $6 million seed round of financing. Variant led the round, with participation from RockawayX, Volt Capital, Stake Facilities, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, and Manta Network founder Shumo Chu, among other individual investors. The funding will be used for the launch of its Layer 1 blockchain, which enables developers to utilize ZK proofs and delegate computation tasks to an advanced hardware operator network.

Zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography is rapidly improving, academically and commercially. As new ZK applications launch and scale, we’ll need new infrastructure to serve them.

ZKSpace is now ZKBase, a rebranding to focus on providing efficient expansion solutions for mainstream blockchains such as BTC and ETH through ZK zero-knowledge proof technology, and building a decentralized cross-chain and Layer2 ecosystem. The official website zkbase.org has been launched. ZKS tokens will be exchanged 1:1 for the new ZKB Token, becoming the core equity token of ZKBase. At the same time, the ZKSwap (Bitcoin) platform and ERC20-BRC20 cross-chain solution have been introduced. The team plans to destroy ZKS tokens on December 30th and open the ZKS to ZKB exchange channel on January 2nd, further deepening the construction of the Bitcoin network's Layer2 ecosystem.

Researchers including academician Pan Jianwei from the University of Science and Technology of China have successfully developed a set of quantum random number generators based on device-independent entropy sources, and applied them to zero-knowledge proof fields as random number beacons for quantum cryptography for identity authentication. This eliminates the security risks brought by the difficulty of implementing true random numbers in non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs, and improves the security of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are widely used in digital signatures, blockchain, and identity authentication, and because true random number generators are difficult to implement, deterministic pseudorandom number algorithms are usually used instead. It is understood that this research work has combined three different fields of quantum non-locality, quantum security algorithms, and zero-knowledge proofs for the first time, greatly improving the security of zero-knowledge proofs. The public-oriented random number service built has important application potential in cryptography, lottery industry, and social welfare.

Zircuit, a new zero-knowledge rollup supported by layer two research, has launched its public testnet. The platform is fully compatible with Ethereum and allows developers to deploy existing DApps with minimal changes. Zircuit uses a hybrid approach that combines zero-knowledge proofs with optimistic infrastructure to reduce fees and increase transaction speeds. The platform also offers a secure environment for developers to test their DApps before launching on Ethereum mainnet.

Aleo blockchain has integrated the zero-knowledge privacy (ZKP) network zPass, which is a protocol designed to use zero-knowledge encryption technology to verify identity, allowing users to upload identity documents offline to a privacy server and share anonymous "evidence" with organizations. Therefore, these companies do not need to store this data themselves. Users who generate their own proof can accurately determine with whom they are sharing information and how much personal data they wish to disclose.