According to Forbes, zero-knowledge proofs were invented in 1985 by MIT researchers Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff but dismissed as impractical for decades. The technology has since evolved from costing $80.21 per proof in December 2023 to under $0.01 today on networks like Scroll, representing an 8,000x cost reduction. Projects like Scroll are now launching consumer products including USX stablecoin offering 10-15% yield and Garden savings app, while infrastructure developments include the Feynman upgrade and Cloak privacy layer. Coinbase similarly evolved from exchange to launching Base L2 and integrating with Farcaster, while Revolut focuses purely on consumer experience without building infrastructure. The convergence shows infrastructure and consumer applications becoming equally important as ZK enables privacy and auditability by design.
The long road to adoption
Here’s the thing about breakthrough technologies – they often look completely impractical until suddenly they’re not. ZK proofs spent nearly 40 years in academic obscurity before blockchain created the perfect use case. The timeline is actually fascinating: 1985 was the original paper, the 1990s brought non-interactive conversions, the 2000s saw limited enterprise experiments, and then everything exploded around 2020 with rollup architectures. Basically, it took the perfect storm of blockchain scaling needs and engineering breakthroughs to make what was mathematically beautiful actually practical.
Privacy wasn’t the plan – until it was
For most of ZK’s recent history, everyone focused on scaling. Compress transactions, reduce costs, process more volume – that was the obvious application. But the real power move? Privacy. And now that proving costs have dropped thousands of times, we’re seeing projects like Scroll Cloak making auditable privacy practical. This isn’t some add-on feature – it’s core to what ZK was always capable of. Choosing exactly what to show and what to hide? That’s financial dignity that transparent blockchains simply can’t offer.
The infrastructure vs consumer dance
What’s really interesting is how this plays out across tech sectors. Look at AI – you have model builders like OpenAI and then app builders on top. Same dynamic in crypto. Some teams go deep on infrastructure while others focus on consumer apps. But here’s the critical insight: both layers matter equally. Infrastructure without users is an empty shell, and consumer apps without control of their foundation can’t scale sustainably. That’s why we’re seeing this convergence where infrastructure players are moving up the stack and consumer players are building more foundational control.
Where everything meets
Whether teams start with infrastructure and move upward like Coinbase with Base, or take a consumer-first route like Revolut, or combine both approaches like Scroll, the trajectory converges. As costs fall and usability improves, the market naturally gravitates toward systems that offer security, auditability, and privacy by design. And ZK sits right at the center of that shift. From mathematical curiosity to banking experiment to essential infrastructure – that’s the path from impossible to inevitable.
