04 - Network State Conference 2026 - Eli Ben-Sasson on Zero Knowledge

Hello, good morning network state. So I want to tell you a little bit about my story. Long ago there was a time when humans could actually contribute to frontier math and I was lucky to be a member of the last generation of people who could do that. So back in the day I was one of seven authors who wrote the white paper on which Zcash is founded and I was one of the founding scientists alongside these six illustrious academics. Then I worked on some post-quantum secure cryptography. So in 2018 published the white paper about ZK Starks uh which is hashbased and pretty safe. Now, I didn't know back then that we'll be in a state where quantum threat is on everyone's mind. So, I want to spend like a few minutes just to give you some mental image of what it's about and also what is the safe ground for cryptography if a quantum computer or actually even AI breakthroughs come forward. So cracking uh a cryptographic system is usually done by trying a lot of different things like you know guessing your password. So it's like a sequence of choices you have to make walking in a maze. Now, quantum phenomena allows mysteriously the universe to sort of clone um a person or a cat, if it's Shreddinger's cat, to be sort of in several different places at the same time for some period of time, but then it collapses to just one single state. Now, it so happens that certain mazes, certain cryptographic problems like ones related to elliptic curves and to factoring are very nice in the following sense. When you sort of use quantum phenomena to sort of clone and you know check a whole bunch of paths and then collapse the universe to one state, that one state just happens to be an exit of the maze. So that sort of algorithm, this quantum phenomenon of spreading around and then just picking one thing leads you to the ex exit and then breaks cryptography. There are other kinds of mazes where they're not as nice and structured like the ones on the your left. And then when you sort of do this trick of sending someone all around and collapsing the universe, that person just ends at a random point. And there are several different classes of quantum resistance stuff. Some based on lises, some based on uh error correcting codes, but the safest is based on hashes because hashes have very little structure. So they look very messy. Now what I want to say is that depending on how much can be broken either by quantum computers or by uh uh you know super intelligence this may have effects that go way beyond blockchain uh the worldwide web banking every time you send your credit card over secure channel that may be affected by that. But the good news is that you can have digital commerce. You can have um uh safe sending of of uh payments and stuff like that on blockchains as long as you use something that is completely hashbased. And I think that all roads lead to ZK Starks, which is this technology that uses zero knowledge for privacy and scale. and it is based only on the existence of some hash function and it's unlikely that hash functions all of them are going to be broken. So there is a safe ground. Um I heard from Zuko that there's already work looking into this uh at Zcash certainly at Starknet. Uh we have been doing that for a very long time and Ethereum and other projects are doing that as well. Uh if you want to hear more, I wrote a book about my story moving from academics to uh um basically blockchain entrepreneurship. You can download it at this uh uh link. Next time I see you, bring a copy. I'll be happy to sign it. Thank you very much. >> [applause]