zk-STARK

Acronym for “Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge.” A larger type of cryptographic proof technology that, as opposed to its counterpart zk-SNARKS, is about one order of magnitude faster to create, does not require a trusted setup, and makes less cryptographic assumptions, thus being more difficult to break. As opposed to zk-SNARKS, zk-STARKS are quantum secure because they rely solely on collision-resistant hash functions such as SHA-256, Keccak256, and SHA3, among others, but are more computationally intensive to verify.