The sharp rise in cryptocurrency prices over the past year has led to an influx of players in the space and the emergence of several new trends. The most popular of these trends is the minting and trading of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
NFTs represent a paradigm shift in how people understand value. This is the first time blockchain technology has been used to secure digital scarcity, enabling a new form of appreciation for media content.
From CryptoPunks and Bored Apes to NBA TopShot and fromKings of LeonExclusive releases, NFTs make complex and elusive cryptocurrencies fun and digestible, providing the industry with the long-awaited catalyst to achieve mainstream adoption.
While observing how NFTs can be used to prove the uniqueness of creative content, many companies are starting to useIn real world use casesUsing NFTs, such as authenticating patents on distributed ledgers, creates unique digital identifiers for items such as invoices or storage machinery. Track items as they move through the supply chain, or tokenize real estate to facilitate liquidity.
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What is the missing link between NFTs and businesses?
It seems like every major company in the world is getting ready to enter the blockchain world and start using NFTs. However, there is another serious problem that may hinder enterprises from using blockchain technology on a large scale, and that problem is privacy.
Blockchain technology has long been criticized for the pseudo-anonymous nature of transactions recorded on a distributed ledger. While the transparency of public blockchains is great for detecting fraud and reducing the cost of trust between middlemen, it comes with the downside of ensuring everyone (including your competitors) can see what you're exchanging and be reasonably accurate accurately identify who you are transacting with.
a studya study, the second most common reason why enterprise blockchain projects are terminated is due to confidentiality and privacy concerns:
While private blockchains offer a better alternative for maintaining privacy, the cost of launching and maintaining a private blockchain, coupled with the security risks exposed by private blockchains due to over-centralization and the need for industry stakeholders to access the network constraints, it is difficult to justify this approach.
One hundred million U.S. dollarsOne hundred million U.S. dollars. Furthermore, by 2028, the global cloud computing market size is expected to reach$1.25 trillion. With the globalization of supply chains and digital networks, these massive numbers represent the value of data hosted and shared by large multinational corporations.
With 38% of enterprise blockchain projects terminated due to privacy concerns, this is a huge missed opportunity for the blockchain industry if not corrected.
What is a zero-knowledge proof?
What is a zero-knowledge proof?
Zero-knowledge proof is a form of cryptography that enables one party in a transaction (the prover) to prove a statement about a piece of information to another party (the verifier) without revealing what that information is.
An example is a collaboration between an investment broker and a client, where the client (prover) needs to prove to the broker (verifier) that they have a certain amount of funds in their account in order to purchase an investment product without revealing how much they actually have.
In this case, the client needs to prove that he owns at least USD 100,000.
The bank does not need to know the details of the customer's financials, they only need to verify that a calculation was run on the blockchain in which the customer correctly confirmed the truth of the statement by solving a series of challenges issued by the simulator Sexuality (eg bank value > $100,000).
The verifier then takes this verification as evidence that the customer has sufficient funds in their bank account to purchase the investment product.
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Horizen - a blockchain network supporting zero-knowledge proofs
ZKPs were originally adopted by cryptocurrencies such as Zcash to enable transactions to be verified without revealing the details of each transaction to outside observers viewing the Zcash blockchain. they have now beenHorizenAnd other blockchains are used as a key function, which uses ZKP cryptography to enable private blockchain transactions to be confirmed on the public blockchain, while also hiding the details of each transaction.
Horizen also created a specialAudit Solutions, through zk-audit, the audit of private companies can be conducted in a completely decentralized, transparent and privacy-preserving manner. Horizen's zkAudit Solution Has Helped Leading Crypto LendersCelsius networkFirms such as Proof of Reserve can be securely verified in near real-time without revealing identifiable information or relying on costly traditional third-party auditing firms. Although Celsius provides a centralized service, the zk-audit audit system makes Celsius a trusted partner for defi projects and public blockchains.
ZKP privacy technology is at the heart of the mass adoption of enterprise-grade blockchains and the missing piece of the puzzle needed to mint and trade NFTs on public blockchains like Ethereum.
We can imagine many situations where private companies or governments need to outsource projects to external suppliers or conduct research that requires public input, where transparency and data integrity are essential, but without the ability to protect privacy, making those Their blockchain case studies are more limited by the application scenarios that could have leveraged blockchain as a solution.
Examples of enterprise-scale blockchain-based applications abound: including conducting clinical trials using geographically dispersed patient samples, recruiting and tracking job applications for high-profile or sensitive roles, outsourcing military projects to private sector suppliers and tracking progress, Conduct consumer research and test products, and more.
In each case, we can envision companies minting NFTs on public blockchains to represent unique data sets (people, projects, outcomes, etc.), which would help maintain data integrity and allow for wider sampling Human participation at scale, while using ZKPs to protect the privacy of sensitive data and ensure transaction details are hidden while verifying essential information about public participants.
Taken together, NFTs and ZKPs represent two major catalysts for mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.
If you just thought Bitcoin was worth $65,000/piece, or Cryptopunk was sold as$7 millionIt is only a (social experiment) verification, then you are not ready for trillions of enterprise-level capital flows to flow into the blockchain field. Once the world's large companies enter the blockchain world and use the privacy protection technology ZKP as a solution to create NFT, the huge impact is immeasurable.
