Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, introduced the GKR protocol, a cryptographic mechanism that will significantly improve blockchain verification.
GKR enables computers to verify that complex computations are correct by merely checking inputs and outputs, avoiding the costly verification of each step in between. This speeds up verification by approximately 10 to 15 times compared to traditional approaches. The new process involves about 100 times as much work as the initial calculation.
The discovery enables the verification of two million calculations per second on consumer laptops. It also allows full Ethereum transactions, with only fifty consumer-grade GPUs. The GKR design is appropriate for processes that involve a large number of repetitive jobs, such as hashing and neural network computations.Though GKR is not zero-knowledge, it can be paired with zero-knowledge proofs like as zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs to improve privacy. This is a fundamental goal of Ethereum's recent Privacy Cluster initiative: to make privacy the network's default attribute.
This protocol offers cheaper, faster, and more private transactions, which are critical to Ethereum's scalability and long-term viability. Experts argue that blockchain without strong privacy protections is analogous to the unencrypted early internet, and that privacy is important for mass adoption and institutional trust.
