ZK Coprocessors Are Underrated

ZK coprocessors might be the most underrated infrastructure primitive right now. The concept is simple. Do expensive computation off-chain, generate a proof, verify cheaply on-chain.

Smart contracts have always been limited by gas costs. Complex calculations are prohibitively expensive. Storage is precious. This forces designs that are simpler than they should be.

ZK coprocessors remove those limits. Need to compute something complex? Do it off-chain in a ZK circuit. The contract just verifies the proof. Suddenly you can do machine learning inference, complex financial modeling, anything really.

Historical data access is another killer use case. Contracts normally can't see old state. ZK coprocessors can prove properties about historical blocks. Your contract can now reason about what happened months ago.

Consider using coprocessors for backtesting trading strategies. Prove that a strategy would have performed a certain way historically. Use that proof on-chain for decision making.

The tooling is getting accessible too. No PhD required anymore. High level languages compile to circuits. The abstraction layers are maturing. This will be standard infrastructure within a year.