At the end of every year we come together and discuss some of the biggest changes we’re expecting in the year ahead. For the first time, we’re publishing these ideas. Please feel free to reach out to any of us to discuss these ideas further.

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.

ZetaChain was introduced on December 15, 2021, by an anonymous project team with experience at Coinbase and Basic Attention Token (BAT). Several former Coinbase employees also served as advisors to the project, including the company’s initial Head of People, Nathalie McGrath, and Juan Suarez, who held an internal counsel role at Coinbase for a decade.On March 9, 2022, the team released ZetaChain’s whitepaper and DevNet and closed its initial Seed Round that raised an unspecified amount of capital. Investors in this round consisted of Dan Romero, Sam Rosenblum, John Yi, JD Kanani, and HwiSang Kim. ZetaChain completed its second funding round in August 2023, raising $27 million from participants such as Blockchain.com, Human Capital, Vy Capital, Sky9 Capital, Jane Street Capital, VistaLabs, CMT Digital, Foundation Capital, Lingfeng Capital, GSR, among others.

To empower the BTC and ETH ecosystems, the ZKSpace team has rebranded and upgraded to ZKBase. As an infrastructure protocol based on ZK (Zero Knowledge) proof technology, ZKBase is dedicated to providing scalability solutions for mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, and building decentralized cross-chain and Layer2 ecosystems. Our new official website, zkbase.org, is now live.

Last month, the o1Labs team gathered in Istanbul, a city steeped in history and vibrant culture. The days were filled with productive sessions of product planning and team building at our company offsite on Büyükada. The momentum continued in the meeting point of the world with a flurry of DevConnect’s Web3 and ZK events.

In our last post, we presented the vision of Fairblock, a core component of which is providing a slate of different cryptographic tools to developers. These include threshold identity-based encryption, threshold fully homomorphic encryption, and witness encryption, each of which enables unique functionality in decentralized applications. Here we’ll be taking a deeper look into all three schemes, their unique properties, and what benefits they offer.