Zora 2.0 is officially listed on Uniswap as of Nov. 30th 2020! We are proud at the reception of our “Upgradeable Token” and always strive for constant improvement.
Currently, the team is working on Zora 2.5, which will include a founding team vesting schedule, and as we did with the MINTING function, we intend to put the protocol completely in the hands of the community by subjecting any contract changes to our full governance process.
There are a few tradeoffs in decentralizing Zoracles Protocol this early in development that we want to bring to the attention of the community.
The main challenge is the removal of the development team’s ability to quickly respond to any necessary code updates. We don’t anticipate a need to modify the current contracts, but future updates will need at least 7 days to implement. This includes a 5 day voting period and a 2 day timelock.
We hope these tradeoffs are acceptable to the community and challenges well understood. If there isn’t any objection, we can have Zoracles Protocol completely decentralized and under governance by end of the month.
We anticipate Zora 2.5 will go live on the Ethereum Mainnet by December 31, 2020.
Zokrates
There has been some recent discussion in the community regarding our work with Zokrates. We have been championing and disclosing use of this excellent toolbox for rapid development of Snarks since our launch earlier in the year.
Similarly to decentralizing Zoracles Protocol, there are tradeoffs using Zokrates instead of developing custom arithmetic circuits and gates internally.
A big bonus is much more rapid Snark development leading to significantly lower operating costs. Our project has been bootstrapped since founding, and we intend to remain lean and heavily weighted towards product development.
Our lead developer performed a classic “build or buy enterprise software” assessment of Zk-Snarks, and determined short-term it is worth losing a bit of flexibility in design, to reduce the timeline of our software development lifecycle.
Until recently, we linked to the Zokrates whitepaper and encouraged the community to learn more about this excellent product while providing updates in Discord in the #development channel like the “Where’s Waldo” Zokrates CLI example we customized and published to github in mid-August:
As you can see in the description, we fully disclosed “Zokrates CLI examples” as the beginning point of this exercise. If interested, you can learn more about this fascinating ZKP:
If you followed our progress, you would see we tried many different ZoKrates functions before proceeding with our original design & implementation of Zoracles Protocol “price range proof:”
def main(private field price, field min, field max) -> bool:
assert(price>min)
assert(price<max)
return trueThis is a foundational element using the high-level and abstract language within the Zokrates framework to achieve applications ranging from the global derivatives market to confidential credit checks.
Long-term, as we work with strategic partners in our “Snarks as a Service” model, we will inevitably need a more flexible framework for development and will have the resources from partners to build on spec. This strategic direction was detailed in our position & whitepaper.
What’s Next
Our focus moving forward will simply be building Zoracles Procotol and shipping new product. Initially, we believe confidential credit checks presents an unexplored and substantial opportunity for our project to achieve penetration in a large market.
The development team will be extremely focused on releasing a beta product by end of year, but more likely in early Q1 2021. We also have a promising partnership opportunity with a crypto project in the blockchain credit space that hopefully will be announced in that timeframe.
Our team is always committed to your questions, comments or concerns. Feel free to reach us at any of the community links provided below and we look forward to executing on a product plan that will be detailed more thoroughly next week.
About Zoracles
Zoracles partners with DeFi projects using zero-knowledge proofs to provide confidential data to smart contracts. Their end-to-end solution entails VRFs to provide additional security measures for their “Snarks as a Service.”
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