zk-STARK

A zk-STARK (Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge) is a cryptographic proof system allowing a prover to convince a verifier of a computation's correctness without trusted setup or revealing computational details. Introduced by Ben-Sasson and colleagues in 2018, zk-STARKs address a key limitation of zk-SNARKs: they require no preprocessing phase vulnerable to corruption. Instead, STARKs rely only on cryptographic hash functions, making them simpler, more transparent, and believed to be post-quantum secure.