Proof Parties - zero knowledge proofs with friends.
Today we’re introducing Proof Parties — an interactive way to use zero-knowledge proofs from your browser and beyond. Get together with your friends to use cutting-edge tech, compete, and earn points. Proof Parties also doubles as a decentralized science suite, where the underlying “win” conditions are determined fairly — based on math. Cryptographic or computer science researcher? We have a game for you!
So why am I doing this?
I was at ETH Denver this year, where I talked to hundreds of people. Very few were ZKP experts! Most were marketers, crypto bros, VCs, university students — the usual wide mix. I explained that NovaNet is the first peer-to-peer network where you can spin up collaborative, game-theoretic provers to solve two classes of problems:
- Really big problems that need multiple provers to solve quickly — think artificial intelligence.
- Lots of small problems that get aggregated into one succinct proof to verify on-chain — think zkGames, DePIN, web apps.
And almost everyone had the same reply: SHOW ME.
I had the zkEngine open in my terminal and was showing various tasks. This must have seemed like a hacker movie to many.. "Why does the cursor blink? What is going on!!"
From those reactions, I decided to spend a few weeks thinking and building an example app with my team — something that could cover a broad range of ZKP use cases in a simple and intuitive way. It also had to be useful for real use-case and demonstrate the real cutting edge of ZKP.
Other than scaling blockchain, what can ZKP do?
Privacy.
The first few games in Proof Party are simple examples that showcase in-browser and local proving. The goal is to reawaken people to the reality that local ZKPs are practical today for a wide range of real-world problems.
Examples:
- Prove an IP address isn’t on a blacklist.
- Play a simple game and prove you didn’t use cheat codes.
- Run an arbitrary WASM program locally and prove its result.
These kinds of proofs run fast on-device and are super relevant because local verifiable compute is the most direct path to privacy-preserving computation.
The first three games highlight speed and usability. We'll be soon adding another game that showcases a state-of-the-art fast zkECDSA implementation. Why does that matter? Read more about zkECDSA here. TL;DR: it unlocks use cases like membership proofs, mixers, gated content, private voting, and more.
Tackling big problems — with continuations.
Some problems are simply too big for ZKP schemes today. But that’s okay — we can break them up into continuations that multiple people can tackle together.
An upcoming proof party challenge will ask players to predict the price of a cryptocurrency using machine learning, and then prove that their model made the prediction — without revealing their data or inputs. The team with the most accurate model wins.
We expect that models like gradient boosting and other smaller architectures will work well for this task. This game won’t just be a technical challenge — it will require a real team with real compute, with real-world implications for data science.
Many more ideas are in the pipeline for Proof Party games!
Dear cryptographers,
We make cool and novel advances every year — and sometimes we even implement them in code. 😅
Proof Parties is a platform where specialized prover schemes to show off, gain contributors, and maybe even win a few fans. Hopefully, this helps push the science forward and gives normal people a better sense of where ZK is today.
Most people don’t care about constraint systems. They care about speed, UX, and whether it works on their devices.
Proof Parties is a space to translate your breakthroughs into things people can see, click, and play with. It’s not just about performance — it’s about vibes.
If we want ZK to go mainstream, the frontend matters too.
Wyatt
Technical Founder, NovaNet.