We all know blockchains are decentralized, no central authority, no real-world names attached. But that doesn’t mean your actions are private. In fact, every transaction is public, and anyone can trace your wallet and figure out what you’re doing with your money. Honestly, I started to feel like my privacy was being watched
The other day I was dreaming I had $1M in my wallet address and wanted to invest in a project. I sent the money, although in reality, the amount isn’t that high. After that, someone posted using my address saying this address invested in the project with XX amount, and I realized that’s not what I wanted. Now my address is public, and I can’t do transactions easily because many people are watching it. I started thinking, what if there was a way to prevent this?
So I searched, and found there is a way, it’s called a zkProof.
What is a zkProof? zkProof is a cryptographic method that lets you send any information to the receiver without revealing it to the public. That means I could send an amount of money, and only the receiver would know that I sent something and how much I sent, while the public would see that a transaction happened but nothing else.
For example, I am transferring some some money to my client normally you can search my wallet address on explorer and chk how much i am sending and to which address but if i use zkProof then you will see that i have made a transaction ****but what was on that transaction you wont find out.
Only I and my client will know. In this process, I am called the prover, who needs to prove something that I know or own, and the verifier checks if it’s true without revealing the data to the public or even the receiver in some cases.
Another example let’s say I want to log in to a website but don’t want to reveal my password to the website owner. Using zkProofs, I can prove that I know the correct password, and the verifier can confirm it, but no one (not even the verifier) learns the password. This way, the verifier becomes my key to unlock the site securely and privately.
Now my data or what I am trying to prove must meet certain requirements for the proof to be valid. These are:
Completeness – if I’m telling the truth, the verifier will accept the proof.
Soundness – if I’m lying, I won’t be able to convince the verifier.
Zero-Knowledge – the verifier learns nothing about the actual data, only that the statement is true.
There is few varients of zkProof: