Use cases

Applying zero knowledge cryptography inside blockchain smart contracts has been one of the most widely praised uses of this new technology. In the Ethereum ecosystem, there are many applications using zero-knowledge proofs to ensure data privacy and computational efficiency in a permissionless blockchain context.

Developing this kind of applications became accessible to a normal (read not a cryptography expert) developer with libraries such as snarky.js and circom, which simplify the construction of algorithms by abstracting away all cryptography implementation and allowing developers to only focus on business logic. This tooling, however, is only compatible with EVM based blockchains. For developers looking to build zk-based applications on the NEAR protocol the tool was not enough.

With this in mind, we developed this library as a generic proof verifier utilizing the groth16 algorithm. This can be utilized together with snarky.js and circom to generate a full fledged application running zk proofs.

You can use this library as a substitute for the Verifying from a Smart Contract section in the circom tutorial.

How to use it

To implement this Verifier in your Smart Contract you must first have setup your logical circuit and produced a trusted setup using snarky.js. This library will allow you to verify if a proof is valid or not inside the Smart Contract. To do so you must:

1. Initialize the Verifier in the Smart Contract's state by passing the setup values generated by snarky.js to it
2. Submit proofs generated by the prover binary (created by snarky.js) to the smart contract

The verifier can be implemented with a simple import:

use near_sdk::borsh::{self, BorshDeserialize, BorshSerialize};
use near_sdk::json_types::U128;
use near_sdk::{env, near_bindgen, PanicOnDefault, AccountId, BorshStorageKey};
use near_sdk::collections::{LookupSet};
use near_groth16_verifier::{self, Verifier};

#[near_bindgen]
#[derive(PanicOnDefault, BorshDeserialize, BorshSerialize)]
pub struct Contract {
  pub verifier: Verifier,
}

impl Contract {
  #[init]
  pub fn new(
    verifier: Verifier
  ) -> Self {
    assert!(!env::state_exists(), "Already initialized");
    
    Self {
      verifier
    }
  }
}

The Verifier struct can be represented as a series of elliptic curve points:

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, BorshSerialize, BorshDeserialize, Clone, Debug)]
#[serde(crate = "near_sdk::serde")]
pub struct G1Point {
    pub x: U256,
    pub y: U256,
}

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, BorshSerialize, BorshDeserialize, Clone)]
#[serde(crate = "near_sdk::serde")]
pub struct G2Point {
    pub x: [U256; 2],
    pub y: [U256; 2],
}

#[derive(BorshSerialize, BorshDeserialize, Serialize, Deserialize)]
#[serde(crate = "near_sdk::serde")]
pub struct Verifier {
    pub alfa1: G1Point,
    pub beta2: G2Point,
    pub gamma2: G2Point,
    pub delta2: G2Point,
    pub ic: Vec<G1Point>,
    pub snark_scalar_field: U256,
}

To fill out this values, refer to the verification_key.json file generated by snarky.js, it will provide all the parameters to initialize the Verifier, except for snark_scalar_field.

snark_scalar_field is the size of the scalar field used in the construction of your circuit. The standard value for this variable in snarky.js is 21888242871839275222246405745257275088548364400416034343698204186575808495617. To better understand this parameter, please refer to the circom documentation.

After initializing the verifier, it can be used to evaluate any proof in your circuit and check whether it is valid or not with the verify method.

pub fn verify(&self, input: Vec<U256>, proof: Proof) -> bool

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
#[serde(crate = "near_sdk::serde")]
pub struct Proof {
    pub a: G1Point,
    pub b: G2Point,
    pub c: G1Point,
}

Proofs always follow the same structure and are generated by snarky.js when running the prover algorithm.

the input parameter refers to the public inputs provided to the circuit. Those must be provided as a Vec of big integers.

Snarky.js generates 2 files whenever it creates a proof:

1. public -> contains an array of values that should be passed to input
2. proof -> contains the Proof struct in json format

Supported near-sdk versions

near-groth16-verifier is built on top of near-sdk 4.0.0 and will be updated periodically to reflect updates on near-sdk. Previous near-sdk versions are not compatible with this library.