QURAS held a Trusted Setup Ceremony on December 9, 2020

qurasofficial
3 min readDec 22, 2020

As we have already reported at the “QURAS blockchain: Mainnet Ignition” launch event, QURAS has conducted the Trusted Setup Ceremony (hereafter referred to as the ceremony). Originally, the ceremony was planned to be held in the 2nd quarter of 2021, but it has been moved up significantly. As a result, anonymous transactions with zk-SNARKs will be available from the mainnet launch of the QURAS blockchain!

Significance of Trusted Setup Ceremony

The ceremony is conducted to ensure the credibility of zk-SNARKs.

One of the most important things in integrating zk-SNARKs into the QURAS mainnet is, “Are transactions using zk-SNARKs really invisible to third parties?” The key (vk, pk) for zk-SNARKs is generated by the following formula:

f(lamda) = (vk, pk)

In the case that lambda is generated by a single person, it means that the generator knows the private key of (vk, pk). That means that the generator can view the contents of other people’s anonymous transactions. To prevent this, in the ceremony, (vk, pk) is generated by having multiple people generate the lambda, so that none of the participants can know the private key.

Background of the Trusted Setup Ceremony

At the initial planning stage, the ceremony was scheduled to be held in April 2020. However, on the advice of the auditing company at the time, it was determined that (vk, pk) could not be generated safely. Therefore we decided to postpone the ceremony.

Since then, we have been preparing for the ceremony in parallel with the TECHFUND audit period. Thanks to the efforts of our engineers, we were able to pass the TECHFUND audit of the ceremony before the mainnet launch.

Therefore, we decided to generate zk-SNARKs (vk, pk) in advance and implement zk-SNARKs in the mainnet launch on December 19.

Conduct a Trusted Setup Ceremony

The ceremony was conducted on December 9, 2020. The members who participated in the ceremony were QURAS members and our partners from Japan, China, Thailand, and India.

The following 11 members participated. For privacy reasons, only first names or company names will be published.

From China:

1. Yan

2. Krozy

3. Wang

4. Yuan

5. Alex

From Japan:

6. Marco

7. Katoh

8. Shigeo

9. Shigeki

From Thailand:

10. RIWIGO

From India:

11. TECHFUND

The ceremony was conducted using a special client tool. You can download the tool from the ceremony page and check it out. And a video recording of the ceremony was also released.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7DhIfOF0F0&feature=youtu.be

For other information about the ceremony, please see the Ceremony page: ceremony.quras.io.

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