When Bitcoin first came into the world, it offered something revolutionary: making payments fully verifiable and secure without any central authority. It was the first practical application of blockchains, enabled by its breakthrough innovation of the Proof of Work consensus mechanism.
More than 14 years and a trillion-dollar industry later, we’re finding that the same concept can be applied to many more aspects of life in a more secure and less wasteful way than the original PoW-based mechanism.
Zero-knowledge proofs, in particular, are some of the most promising fundamental achievements of modern cryptography. While not strictly a blockchain “thing,” they’ve been spearheaded and developed on by countless teams looking to use them to build the next generation of Web3 infrastructure.
For the first time, we can conceive of a future where the correctness of every single piece of data and computation is verified at low cost and with no ambiguity.
But the potential of zero-knowledge proofs can go far beyond the usual DeFi and NFT playgrounds we’ve been used to so far. The concept, generalized, becomes Verifiable Compute, and it’s being spearheaded by projects like Space and Time.
The Verifiable Data Warehouse
The technology underpinning Space and Time, and Verifiable Compute in general, is the verifiable data warehouse. The gist is to take a database, make it fully verifiable with zk proofs, and scale it up to be efficiently retrieved even within the relatively cumbersome and expensive smart contract environment.
Any kind of verifiable web application must easily access and verify large troves of data. Until now, data was the Achilles heel for smart contracts, as these programs are practically unable to query anything but the current state of things onchain, and need external integrations to do anything else. Within the framework of Verifiable Compute, Space and Time’s infrastructure provides a critical piece of the puzzle: a reliable source of data for smart contracts to query.
The importance of data is only growing over time, especially with the unfolding AI revolution. The strength of an AI model relies on its training data, as its output will ultimately be a unique rehashing of its inputs. Ensuring this data is verified is critical for the safe use of AI, potentially giving us a better insight into the outputs the AI models may produce. If the data being fed into the AI models is tampered or manipulated, it could have disastrous consequences for the protocols using the AI models on manipulated data.
According to Space and Time’s CTO, Scott Dykstra, tackling data safety is one of the most pressing issues for the AI space, where the company has significantly focused. The project is backed by M12, the venture arm of Microsoft, who are also heavy backers of OpenAI.
How does Verifiable Compute look in practice?
Verifiable Compute can be thought of as a multi-layer ecosystem. When smart contracts “ask questions” about the world around them, this would be akin to a database query, which is where Space and Time comes in with its verifiable data warehouse.
Space and Time delivers the queries backed by its enterprise-scale and ZK-proven data warehouse. The system can supplement smart contracts with external memory and external computing power, which can be fed safely into the blockchain thanks to its architecture’s additional zero-knowledge guarantees.
Oracles provide the “transport layer” for the Verifiable Compute. For example, a recent partnership with Chainlink allows Space and Time data to be natively verified by the Chainlink oracle network, giving an additional layer of decentralization for data consumers. Chainlink has also selected Space and Time as its preferred data warehouse solution.
Finally, the execution layer of Verifiable Compute needs to provide the infrastructure to make use of and interpret the data. Here, several implementations of zkVMs and execution engines can take this role, including projects like Risc Zero, Axiom and many others.
Combining all three layers in one enables the next generation of decentralized and verifiable web. It’s difficult to imagine just how much it could change our lives — having the scale to apply the basic principles of blockchain to everything around us could make the world a safer, freer and ultimately better place.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.