Is it true scientists are already working on SNARKs that require no trusted setup?

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Hello friends at Zcash, really great to see this project moving along. Zooko and the team at Zcash are world class. Saw a few interviews about Zcash on YouTube and I had a few questions:

  1. Is it true scientists are already working on SNARKs that require no trusted setup?

  2. Would it require a fork or an entirely new chain?

  3. What would happen to zcash token holders?

  • Thank you very much
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  1. Yes, I know Professor Eli Ben Sasson and others are working on them (part of the Zcash team), the biggest problem is the proof sizes are too large right now to be viable for Zcash.
  2. It would require a hard fork, similar to how the upcoming Sapling upgrade will require a hard fork.
  3. I don’t think it would affect token holders negatively because it wouldn’t invalidate coins already on the chain.

This blog has good info:

And you can see Professor Sasson talking about STARKs in this video: Towards Transparent and Scalable Computational Integrity and Privacy - YouTube

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This is quite interesting. Thank you very much for the info Shawn.

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