A Review of zk-SNARKs

Understand

A zk-SNARK is a protocol that lets one party, the prover, prove to another party, the verifier, that a statement about some privately-held information is true without revealing the information itself.

• This paper describes technical foundations, current applications, and some novel applications of zk-SNARKs.
• Regarding technical foundations, we go over the Quadratic Arithmetic Program reduction and the Pinocchio protocol.
• We then go over financial security applications like Zcash and Tornado Cash, and zk-Rollup applications like zkEVM and Darkforest.