Midnight and Halo2: ZK Rollups for Secure Scalability

Galois recently wrapped up a project supporting a new data protection blockchain, known as “Midnight,” developed by IOG. As part of this effort, Galois collaborated with Midnight and Intersect to implement recursive zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs in an open-source ZK library called Halo2.

“Integrating recursive ZK proofs into Halo2 will help enable users to automatically move funds between different chains,” explained Galois Research Engineer James Parker. “So you not only get big efficiency gains, you have interoperability between different coins on different chains.”

By leveraging zero-knowledge proofs, Midnight efficiently verifies that transactions are correct and secure. Implementing recursion enables a technique known as a “ZK Rollups,” which allow transaction proofs to be nested within each other. In other words, verifying the correctness of a proof on one block also verifies the correctness of proofs on all previous blocks in the blockchain. Instead of checking block by block and transaction by transaction to ensure correctness across the chain, users need only check the proof of the latest statement, thus improving efficiency and scalability while maintaining privacy and security.

Learn more at Midnight.Network.