Spotlight On: Electron Labs
Welcome to Kadena Eco’s Project Spotlight Series, where we highlight the groundbreaking work of organizations currently building on Kadena!
Today, we’re shining the spotlight on Electron Labs, a zero-knowledge (ZK) technology company working to make ZK infrastructure ready for mass adoption. Last week, Electron announced that it will provide its cloud-based ZK infrastructure to power the rollups technology on the Kadena blockchain.
We recently spoke with Garvit Goel, Electron Labs founder, about why ZK proofs are the key to making blockchains the backbone of the web.
1. How do you explain Electron Labs in simple terms? Give us your elevator pitch.
Electron Labs is working on bringing two key infrastructure components to blockchains — horizontal scaling and on-chain privacy. The solution to both these problems resides in ZK technology. However, so far, ZK-tech has been very hard to work on and demands very high skill sets from the engineers. Electron aims to build an open-source SDK that abstracts away all the underlying maths and cryptography to make product-building as easy as writing smart contracts.
2. Share with us your background on how you got started in this space.
Personally, I was initially attracted by the idea of self-sovereign money. As a company, however, we were initially working on making blockchains interconnected via use of on-chain light clients. We very quickly realized this was quite infeasible due to limited computational resources available to blockchains. That’s when we got introduced to ZK technology due to its computation compression properties.
3. Electron Labs views horizontal scaling and on-chain privacy as the two key infrastructure components for bringing blockchains to the masses. Why is that, and how does ZK technology solve for these challenges?
Zero-Knowledge Proofs have two magical properties. First, they allow you to generate proofs for computations without revealing the inputs to those computations. This is where the privacy use cases come from. Secondly, you can verify these proofs using very little computational power compared to the computation you are proving. And this leads to the scalability use cases.
4. What attracted you to build on Kadena?
As a builder, we are always looking for scalable blockchains to deploy our products on. Kadena’s multi-chain model brings us the scalability we need. Furthermore, the core team is committed to ZK technology and has a clear roadmap ahead of them in the coming months to improve scalability, introduce on-chain Privacy, and improve bridge technology using ZK technology.
5. What is one project you are currently working on that excites you the most?
We are currently working on bringing parallelization in our zk-infrastructure. This is done via the use of recursive snarks, and it will reduce transaction latency and scale the throughput significantly.
6. What can we expect from Electron Labs in the next 6 months? Where will you be in 3 years?
In the coming months, we are launching two products. First, Electron P2P which is basically a privacy preserving transactions network. And second, Electron SDK, which is an open source toolkit for developers to build zk powered dApps. We aim to find initial traction for these products in the next 6 months. Within 3 years, we aim to lower the learning curve for zk-developers from 6 months to 1 week.
7. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs looking to innovate in blockchain?
Crypto is a massively evolving space, and the future infrastructure is going to look significantly different. Entrepreneurs should pay attention to ecosystems that are strongly focussed on Zk-tech since in the future, everything is going to be inside a zk-rollup.
Many thanks to Garvit for sharing his vision for the future of ZK tech! Be sure to check out this space in the coming weeks for more Project Spotlights, as we’ll continue to profile innovative organizations that are currently building on Kadena with support from Kadena Eco, our innovation network that supports startups at every phase of their development journey.
