Finally, what is Pulsar made for?

Pulsar is the world's first succinct BFT consensus, living on several blockchains all at once. The design is strong, but what does it aim for actually?

Pulsar has two very important value propositions, the first being succinctness as a service, and the second on-chain zk-SNARK verification.

The succinctness as a service approach was slightly described in the previous chapters, where we made the observation that AtomOne also becomes succinct with Pulsar. The situation is similar for other IBC chains, including Ethereum, and Pulsar enables a trustless succinct RPC service for these chains.

This has numerous applications on the Cosmos stack: For instance, any Cosmos chain using Pulsar’s succinctness service can decrease validator joining latency to increase decentralization, or even decrease their hardware requirements (if the chain is not focused on very high performance of course). Or, as a more exotic example, you can consider a data availability or storage layer on Cosmos, where the sampling process requires the verification of the active set. With a clever design, Pulsar can actually improve this sampling process to be more secure and faster.

However, even if it is only possible with Pulsar, succinctness is a narrow use case, and this is not for what we have designed Pulsar to achieve.

Pulsar’s main aim is zk-SNARK verification on the IBC ecosystem. By strategically positioning in the middle of a bridge network, Pulsar brings ZKProof verification to all chains connected to IBC: 180 birds with a single stone, really :)

However, our approach is not just enabling all proof systems verification and Pulsar and then just forget about our work. Our main ideal is actually implementing the most important core protocols on our own, the first and most important being zkLogin.

zkLogin is the usage of ZK email verification to allow opening up wallets with email addresses. It is a known concept in some ecosystems, but not very used in Cosmos yet. This is a perfect usage of ZK: With almost no increase in the trust assumptions, this makes applications get rid of the private / public key UX while onboarding their first users. Of course, in the long run a wallet is always better than trusting in your email provider, but this is a nice solution for the current situation.

Another interesting idea is zkKYC and zkPassport, where identity related data of users is proved with ZKProofs. This can be used in various ways, such as age or residency / location verification. Nevertheless, these technologies already exist in the blockchain ecosystem, and our goal is not reimplementing the wheel. Since Pulsar will enable all crucial ZKProof systems all at once, we will just enable all these products on Pulsar with a single integration.

Finally, voting is also an important problem that should not be underestimated. With ZK, anonymous voting can be integrated as a default part of Cosmos networks using Pulsar for proof verification.