zk-Oracle: trusted off-chain compute and storage for decentralized applications

Abstract

Blockchain and Decentralized Applications (DApps) are increasingly important for creating trust and transparency in data storage and computation. However, on-chain transactions are often costly and slow. To overcome this challenge, off-chain nodes can be used to store and compute data. Unfortunately, this introduces the risk of untrusted nodes. To address this, authenticated data structures have been proposed, however, this ignores the compute of data from the raw data. We tackle this challenge by introducing zk-Oracle, which provides an efficient and trusted compute and storage off-chain. There is a challenge in using zero-knowledge proofs (zk-proof for short), which is the large proof generation time. We aim to overcome it with novel designs in zk-Oracle. zk-Oracle builds on zk-proofs technologies to achieve two goals. First, the computation of data structures from raw data and the corresponding proof generation is improved in terms of performance. Second, the verification on-chain is inexpensive and fast. Our experiments show that we can speed up zk-proof generation by up to $550\times$ faster than the baseline method.