One of the most intriguing aspects of crypto is its sense of anonymity. Bitcoin (BTC), for example, was created in 2008 by an unknown figure using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, and to this day, the true identity of its inventor remains unknown. The veil of anonymity has allowed users to create distinct identities through wallet addresses, adding an extra layer of privacy and discretion to transactions. 

This concept of openness and universal access is one of the core promises of digital currencies, allowing anyone with internet access to engage, regardless of their financial history or background. However, even though the ethos of crypto promotes inclusivity, the reality hasn’t always reflected this. 

The early days of crypto were defined by the archetype “crypto bros,” referring to a specific demographic of young, tech-savvy men who influenced the industry’s direction. Their influence extended to the design of projects, development of key protocols, and framing of the culture surrounding digital assets. 

However, as the industry matured and evolved, efforts were made to reflect and include more female voices. This shift helped address the imbalance between gender representation, bringing new perspectives into the industry. 

A 2024 study revealed that over 560 million cryptocurrency owners exist globally, with 61 percent identifying as male and 39 percent as female. This marks an increase from the previous year, when the global total was 420 million, with 37 percent of owners being female, signaling a positive shift. 

In response to this trend, organizations have emerged to address crypto’s gender imbalances. Conferences and events once primarily targeted toward the male-dominated demographic have changed to allow women to step into the space and take the lead.

The Association for Women in Cryptocurrency, or AWC, for example, was founded in 2022 as a platform for women looking to enhance their knowledge and education in crypto. Led by Amanda Wick, AWC hosts various events, like webinars and in-person meetups, where women can learn from industry experts and connect with mentors who can guide them and help them discover new career opportunities. 

Recently, Binance shared that it will offer global programs exclusively for women through its Binance Academy platform in honor of International Women’s Day. The events will be held across five continents at 11 venues to help women ease their way into the industry.

While women have made significant strides in the DeFi space, now accounting for 40 percent of Binance’s workforce, leadership positions have been predominantly held by men. Despite this, several women have established themselves as leaders in the space.

Perianne Boring, for instance, is the founder and CEO of the blockchain advocacy group The Digital Chamber, working alongside Congress and the government to promote and regulate blockchain technology. Her leadership role has made her an advocate for adopting blockchain technologies, as she has become a well-known voice in the space discussing the future of finance. In December, President Trump also considered Boring as a potential CFTC chair. 

Another established female leader in the space is Joanna Liang, the founding partner of Jsquare, a tech-focused investment firm specializing in blockchain and web3. With a previous background as CIO at Digital Finance Group (DFG), a global Venture Capital firm focusing on crypto projects, Liang recently launched Jsquare’s latest fund, the Pioneer Fund. The fund has successfully raised $50 million in capital, making its first investment in the startup MinionLabs. The fund will focus on emerging technologies in the crypto space, including PayFi, real-world assets (RWAs), and consumer apps. 

Laura Shin is also a prominent name in crypto and is recognized as one of the first mainstream media reporters to cover cryptocurrency full-time. She is the author of the book, ‘The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze,’ and the host of the podcast Unchained. Laura has shared her expertise at events such as TEDx San Francisco and the International Monetary Fund. 

Over the past 16 years, women have been instrumental in helping legitimize crypto assets throughout the financial landscape. Their contributions have spanned various sectors in the ecosystem, helping shift the narrative around crypto from a niche, speculative asset to a more widely recognized and accepted financial tool.

A new Solana proposal aims to change the frequency at which new tokens are generated on the prominent blockchain—and the suggested changes are generating serious debate ahead of the imminent vote.

The proposal, also known as SIMD-0228, looks to move from fixed-rate token emissions to a programmatic, “market-based emission” schedule that is based on staking participation rate. 

In other words, instead of decreasing Solana inflation based on a fixed, time-based schedule, SIMD-0228 proposes that Solana inflation dynamically changes based on network activity.

“The [current] mechanism is not aware of network activity, nor does it incorporate that to determine the emission rate. Simply put, it’s ‘dumb emissions,’” reads the proposal. “Given Solana’s thriving economic activity, it makes sense to evolve the network’s monetary policy with ‘smart emissions.’”

The proposal’s authors—Multicoin Capital’s Tushar Jain and Vishal Kankani, and Max Resnick, lead economist at Solana-focused R&D firm Anza—believe that so-called smart emissions would benefit the network and stakers by reducing inflation, spurring DeFi usage, reducing sell pressure, and improving the narrative around its existing inflation.

Notable Solana builders and personalities, including Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, have signaled support for the proposal as well.

“The counter arguments to 228 are pretty bad because the cost of inflation is something on the order of […] $1-2 billion per year,” Yakovenko posted on X (formerly Twitter).

Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz added that the “strongest argument for 228 is that it incentivizes and speeds up the timeline towards a network centered on real economic value.” That line of thinking was echoed by Placeholder VC partner Chris Burniske as well. 

“I’m in favor of SIMD-228,” Burniske said on X. “In the long run, real yield comes from what the demand-side leaks to the supply-side, and inflation is just a bootstrapping mechanism to get to that place.” 

But not all of the Solana community is ready to accept the proposal, which has been modified in the last two months based on feedback. As the proposal inches closer to a vote, some builders have taken aim at elements they believe will negatively impact the ecosystem.

One such dissenting opinion comes from SolBlaze.org, a Solana network validator that will have the option to vote on the proposal.

The validator added that the goal of lowering inflation “sounds good in theory,” but is a “terrible idea,” citing that SIMD-0228 will “drastically decrease” the amount of Solana tokens staked. Given that view, they believe it will threaten decentralization and the security of the network while impacting Solana’s DeFi protocols, which rely on staking rewards. 

“DeFi is what powers Solana adoption, and regular users should care about that if they want Solana to succeed,” a SolBlaze representative told Decrypt when asked why the average Solana participant should care about SIMD-0228. 

Others, including Solana Foundation President Lily Liu, have spoken out against the proposal. 

“[SIMD-0228] is too, too half-baked,” posted Liu. She signaled support for fixed rates, which she called “not dumb and arbitrary,” citing that predictability is valuable in capital markets.

“No on the proposal before us,” she said, instead suggesting an extension so the proposal can be adjusted to incorporate other features. 

Voting on SIMD-0228 is expected to start Friday evening during Solana Epoch 753, which is estimated to arrive around 8:30pm ET according to timetracking from Solscan. SolBlaze expects a “close vote” and is using the remaining hours to whip up support against the bill.

“Since it needs two-thirds of the vote to pass,” they told Decrypt, “there’s still a chance that enough people can come together to stop the proposal.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward

When people talk about zero-knowledge cryptography in 2024, they’re often referring to a privacy-focused use case that relies on a combination of blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, digital wallets, and users with some degree of web3 knowledge. 

Zero-knowledge proofs have existed since the 1980s, long before the advent of web3. So why limit their potential to blockchain applications? Traditional companies can—and should—adopt ZK technology without fully embracing web3 infrastructure.

At a basic level, ZKPs unlock the ability to prove something is true without revealing the underlying data behind that statement. Ideally, a prover creates the proof, a verifier verifies it, and these two parties are completely isolated from each other in order to ensure fairness. That’s really it. There’s no reason this concept has to be trapped behind the learning curve of web3. 

Most organizations that could benefit from ZK technology aren’t using blockchains or are not even aware of web3. The industry is still young, with many just now familiarizing themselves with Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), not to mention Layer 2s and 3s.

Despite all that, ZKPs can already be applied to a variety of real-world use cases, and they don’t need to integrate fully web3 rails to do so.

Do you trust your slot machine payout?

With zero-knowledge proofs, you don’t have to trust a gaming operator. You can just enjoy playing and have peace of mind knowing that the game is designed fairly. Every digital gambling machine in the world should be designed with ZKPs; it just makes sense for the operators and the players. The best part is that players can enjoy the benefits without the words “web3” or “crypto” even entering their minds. 

Recently, DraftKings and White Hat Gaming were fined $22,500 by the state of Connecticut for their online slot machine game, which failed to pay any winners over one week in August 2023—even though there were more than 20,600 spins that week. The game advertised that nearly 95 cents would be paid out for every $1 wagered, so the algorithm should have returned $19,570 to the players who wagered $20,600 in spins. Instead, players lost $20,600—all of which went to DraftKings. 

This is where zero-knowledge proofs can make a big difference. A ZKP could prove that a game paid out a certain amount of money over a given period and at a specific hit rate without revealing individual spins or player identities. 

This is great, but there is still the problem of verifying the proof. Someone needs to ensure that DraftKings, or any gaming operator, constructed the proofs correctly based on all the required data. It could be DraftKings themselves, but we shouldn’t trust them to handle their own verification. A regulator or auditor could do it, but this would likely cost DraftKings a lot of money, which would then be passed on to the customer.

In this situation, the best option is a public and decentralized network built specifically to verify proofs in a quick and cost-effective manner. Instead of the user being asked to trust a centralized entity, they can trust a decentralized protocol that ensures nefarious actors (i.e., those who may try to verify an incorrect proof) are punished if they misbehave.

AI output and trustworthiness 

AI’s potential for deception is well-established. However, there are ways we can harness AI’s creativity while still trusting its output. As artificial intelligence pervades every aspect of our lives, it becomes increasingly important that we know the models training the AIs we rely on are legitimate because if they aren’t, we could literally be changing history and not even realize it. With ZKML, or zero-knowledge machine learning, we avoid those potential pitfalls, and the benefits can still be harnessed by web2 projects that have zero interest in going onchain. 

Recently, the University of Southern California partnered with the Shoah Foundation to create something called IWitness, where users are able to speak or type directly to holograms of Holocaust survivors. 

This is an undeniably powerful use of machine learning. There’s something so strangely moving about interacting with a hologram of a Holocaust survivor and feeling like you’re having a real conversation. But with a subject this sensitive, it’s even more crucial that the algorithm underlying the hologram is generating factual information. 

Enter zero-knowledge proofs. If we were to reimagine this project, we might consider adding a “proof of algorithm output” where the user is able to see evidence that the responses they are seeing are based on a Natural Language Processing algorithm that was correctly trained on troves of historical transcripts and interviews with Holocaust survivors, ensuring that the information presented is accurate. 

ZKPs make it possible to get proof of this input data and AI training without revealing the underlying information. Fact-checking the Holocaust information would also require perusing vast amounts of data, potentially requiring the end user to download or access large data sets and then spend hours reading or watching interviews. ZKPs allow the user to forgo this tedious and resource-intensive process.  

In this case, we might trust USC to verify proofs for this particular project, but there are certainly more use cases with AI where the end user may not want to trust a centralized entity to both create and verify proof. When incentives to construct “fake” proofs and have them verified align, decentralized proof verification makes the most sense.

ZK is a trustless, decentralized system for all

We don’t need to trust companies or robots to tell us the truth because we have ZK. Many industries can level up with zero-knowledge blockchain solutions, even if they know nothing about the web3 space. 

By tapping into ZK proof verification, companies and institutions can essentially keep doing everything they have been infrastructure-wise. They just need to create a simple system for proof creation and then use a decentralized system like zkVerify to handle the proof verification. Even though a blockchain is used, the users don’t need to worry about that. 

The future of ZK will be massive, and organizations won’t have to change much to reap the benefits. They can just plug and play. 

John Camardo

John Camardo is the head of product management at Horizen Labs, where he focuses on applying zero-knowledge cryptography to solve real-world problems. He currently leads the product side of zkVerify, a chain-agnostic modular blockchain dedicated to efficiently verifying ZK proofs.