
Inductive Consensus Tree Protocol: A Scalable Blockchain [pdf] - kalix_systems
https://ictp.io/ictp-whitepaper.pdf
======
kalix_systems
Authors here:

We originally started on this project because it was surprising and a bit
frustrating that no one else had done it, but there ended up being a lot of
fun technical and algorithmic problems to work out along the way.

Happy to answer questions about the system.

~~~
_nhynes
Incredibly cool system! I'm glad to see zkSNARKS finally being used as a smart
contract primitive.

Two questions for you:

1\. How does performance look for private ERC20-type contracts? zkSNARKS can
be rather heavy to compute, so would that affect scalability?

2\. Is it possible to do cross-contract calls without knowing the recipient's
private state? How does one construct a proof for a new state without knowing
the original state?

~~~
kalix_systems
> How does performance look for private ERC20-type contracts? zkSNARKS can be
> rather heavy to compute, so would that affect scalability?

For private contracts, the performance is not going to be good, so we
recommend keeping private logic as minimal as possible. We looked into several
different private computation models and SNARKs had the best performance
characteristics, but they're still not great.

> Is it possible to do cross-contract calls without knowing the recipient's
> private state? How does one construct a proof for a new state without
> knowing the original state?

This isn't possible for private contracts, the use case here would be for
"contract law" style contracts between bounded, known collections of
individuals.

