A16z Crypto posted an infographic by Claire Kart detailing the history of Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs. She looked back to 2019, when everything was still small and with few resources. She is aware of 80 percent of the timeline in 2025, which underlines the personal and industrial development.
Six years ago, when I first started working in zk, it was a small community of cryptographers and I didn’t understand anything
Moreover, there were no resources for learning
Today I read this and understood 80% of it
look for the thing that literally melts your face and try to understand it pic.twitter.com/QrPr4boloK
— Claire Kart (@clairekart) October 23, 2025
Early Foundations: 1985-2007
GM85 was the first example of ZK proofs, and in this work GM proposed interactive zero-knowledge proofs. The sum-check protocol also enabled the verification of calculations at scale in 1990. In 2007, structured proofs of possession (PoPs) improved privacy and defined the emergence of practical applications.
In 2010, SNARKs were also based on KZG poly-commitment. In 2013, the first SNARKs were efficient and enabled the use of blockchain. In 2016, recursive SNARKs were introduced, allowing for the construction and scaling of proofs. Zcash (2017-2018) introduced zk-SNARKs, which use transaction information to hide the data, becoming the first real-world application.
Transparent proofs and rollups
Transparent poly-commitment was also presented in 2019 with FRI, Bulletproofs and Ligero. Halo Recursion (2019-2020) reduced startup costs and improved efficiency. Scaling solutions on Ethereum have also been developed as validity combinations (2019-2022), which have been adopted by StarkNet. Professional SNARKs such as Plonk, Marlin and zkDSLs such as Circom and Halo(2) made the development of ZKs more accessible to a wider audience.
Modern developments: 2023+
In 2023, ZK technology moved to SNARKs using sum checking based on zkVMs on standard instruction sets such as RISC-V. This improved better interoperability and enabled general purpose blockchain computations. There is increased access to educational resources such as 0xPARC guides and zk-learning.org by developers. The ZK rollups process billions of Ethereum transactions, improving scalability and reducing costs. Claire started in 2019 and had to maneuver in a small society with limited resources. In 2025, she is aware of 80 percent of ZK developments. She teaches people how to read difficult issues that literally melt you away, and emphasizes perseverance and curiosity.