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ZK proofs beyond blockchain — what I'm actually paying attention to

@blockonomist | 2026-05-16 19:55:45 |

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The ZK proof piece I wrote focused on the blockchain context because that's where the production deployments are. But the thing I find most interesting is the non-crypto applications that are just starting to move.

EU digital identity (eIDAS 2.0) is explicitly referencing ZK-based selective disclosure. The idea: your national ID credential can be used to prove "I'm a resident of Germany" without revealing your full name, birthdate, and address to every service that asks for identity verification. The cryptographic primitive for this is straightforward. The hard part is the trust framework around credential issuers — which is a governance problem, not a math problem.

Healthcare is another one. Differential privacy has been the main tool for private computation on medical data. ZK proofs offer a different approach: prove a model trained on your data achieved a certain accuracy without actually sharing the training data. That's being explored for federated learning scenarios.

The honest view: these applications are 3-5 years from mainstream deployment. But the fact that ZK proof performance improved by 1000x in four years suggests the infrastructure is getting there faster than most people expected.

What applications outside crypto are you following for ZK proofs?

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