Encoins Development Update: Progress on Groth16 and Proof of Innocence
As part of our ongoing commitment to advancing privacy and zero-knowledge tooling on Cardano, the ENCOINS team is pleased to share the latest updates on two technical initiatives funded through Project Catalyst: Groth16 Ceremony Infrastructure and Proof of Innocence (PoI).
These projects represent important milestones for privacy infrastructure in Cardano, helping not only to strengthen ENCOINS, but also to provide open tools and resources for other builders in the ecosystem.
Groth16 Ceremony Infrastructure
Our Groth16 initiative focuses on developing a secure and scalable trusted setup infrastructure, which is a critical component for enabling zk-SNARK-based applications in Cardano. This setup ensures that zk circuits can be verified without revealing sensitive data — supporting privacy-preserving features such as those used by ENCOINS and future zk protocols.
Progress Highlights:
- Advancement of the p0tion tool: We’ve made substantial progress on p0tion, an open-source toolkit that facilitates the multi-party computation (MPC) ceremonies needed for Groth16. This includes CLI utilities, documentation, and tooling to coordinate ceremony contributions.
- Ceremony Portal — Phase 2: We are actively working on the next phase of our Ceremony Portal, which will make it easier for projects to initiate and manage Groth16 ceremonies. This will include a user-friendly web interface, integration with the p0tion backend, and improved verification workflows.
Our goal is to make zk-SNARK setup ceremonies more accessible to Cardano developers, minimizing barriers to entry for new privacy-preserving dApps.
Proof of Innocence (PoI)
The second initiative under development is the Proof of Innocence (PoI) framework — a privacy enhancement mechanism that allows users to demonstrate their funds are not linked to known illicit sources, without compromising anonymity. This approach provides a path toward compliance without undermining the benefits of private transactions.
Progress Highlights:
- Milestone 1 completed: We’ve delivered a comprehensive research paper outlining the foundations of PoI, its design goals, and how it integrates with zero-knowledge proofs and oracles.
- Smart contract and circuit: A prototype version of the core smart contract and zero-knowledge circuit has been implemented. This version focuses on proving disassociation from a predefined set of blacklisted notes.
- Proof-of-concept oracle: We have built a basic oracle mechanism that can hold and provide the blacklist inputs necessary for the PoI proof generation, while preserving trust-minimized architecture.
- Testing phase: We are now entering a period of functional and security testing for all PoI components, before moving to an internal audit and potential testnet deployment.
This work aims to provide a practical balance between privacy and regulatory transparency, particularly valuable in institutional or regulated contexts where private transactions must still meet compliance criteria.
We deeply appreciate the support of the Cardano and ENCOINS communities, as well as the funding provided by Project Catalyst. These projects are not only strengthening ENCOINS as a privacy protocol but are laying the groundwork for broader adoption of zero-knowledge technologies on Cardano.
Stay tuned for more updates — and as always, we welcome feedback, questions, and contributions from developers and researchers aligned with our mission.
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