A list of officially recognized zero-knowledge proof projects on the Solana network

Author: Solana

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

The ZK (zero knowledge) and verifiability space on Solana is a dark horse that you may not be aware of. Here is a brief overview of ZK, verifiability, and privacy projects on Solana.

Overall, Solana’s infrastructure helps:

Improve network performance

• Save 1000 times the cost for application developers
• Asynchronous Execution
• State Growth Solution

Improved safety

• Privacy and confidentiality of on-chain applications
• Verifiability
• Decentralized Prover Network

Even zk-rollups are implemented on Solana.

Let’s explore each one below:

• Privacy and Verifiability
• Anonymity
• ZK-based extensions and zkVMs
• Using ZK's network extension stack
• ZK Programs

Note: These categories are grouped for simplicity and may overlap.

Privacy and Verifiability:

Arcium: Helps bring confidentiality to on-chain applications by providing a trustless, verifiable, and efficient framework for running cryptographic computations.

For example: AI models can be trained on encrypted data, and DeFi can use it for confidential transactions.

Bonsol, built by Anagram, is a native verifiable computation system on Solana that enables developers to create: fully verifiable executables on private and public data → mathematically guarantee their validity → integrate the results into Solana smart contracts to prove them on-chain.

Anonymity

Darklake: Building a transaction-based crypto AMM that aims to be the first DEX on Solana to provide real-time, MEV-resistant order execution.

Dark Protocol: Building a market governance anonymity protocol powered by ZK-snarks.

ZKP-based extensions

ZK Compression: A new Solana account primitive with ZK proofs + state compression powered by Light Protocol and Helius, reducing rental costs for Solana application developers by 1000x (leveraging zero-knowledge proofs and compression to reduce the amount of data stored on-chain).

Teams have started building ZK compression from:

• Backpack Wallet — users hold tokens without paying rent
• Consumer social app Tribe.run — creators can send tokens at low cost
• Airship (launched by Helius)

ZKVMs

RISC Zero and Succinct help prove arbitrary computation on the chain, without being restricted by the chain computation. This can achieve:

• Solana light client powered by ZK
• Streamlined DePIN network
• Secure and seamless ZK login

Solana Network Scaling Stack

zkSVM is being applied:

1. Solforge Network: A network extension stack using ZKP methods and ZK compression for:

• Enable extension to stream state update proofs
• LightSVM, optimized for proof generation

2. Termina: A SVM network deployment platform that meets the needs of specific use cases by reducing latency, improving privacy, and lowering computational costs.

3. Sonic SVM: SVM stack for games and applications, also being extended with ZK and Hypergrid.

4. Bullet is an ultra-low latency rollup launched by Zeta Markets that can be scaled to extremely high throughput, and all state transitions are provable.

Additionally, teams like Aerius Labs are experimenting with ZK proofs.

ZK Programs

Other initiatives include the ZK Token Proof initiative launched by Anza, which enables encrypted transfers – encrypting SPL token balances and transaction amounts to preserve privacy for use cases such as accounts payable.

From the recently released ZK compression to the various system calls that are coming online, Solana is becoming a powerful engine for ZK

Related reading: Solana Co-founder: What is the solution to Solana state growth?