Bison Trails Now Powering ZKValidator Nodes Across Cosmos, Polkadot, Kusama, and Near

Through its enterprise-grade platform, Bison Trails enables ZKValidator to run a community-focused Staking as a Service to promote privacy research and participate in governance on emerging PoS networks

Bison Trails the premier blockchain infrastructure-as-a-service company announced it is powering ZKValidator, which works to support privacy and zero-knowledge research by running community-focused public validators on innovative PoS-protocols Polkadot, Cosmos, NEAR, and Kusama.

ZKValidator, founded by Anna Rose, the host of the Zero Knowledge podcast, and DeversiFi CEO, Will Harborne, helps facilitate privacy-focused standards development and acts as a bridge between the zero-knowledge research community and the engineers designing network protocols. The idea to run public validators so that anyone can support ZKValidator’s mission by staking their digital assets, arose serendipitously when Joe Lallouz, Bison Trails’ CEO, was a guest on the Zero Knowledge Podcast. Now, ZKValidator is running in the active set on multiple protocols and is powered by the Bison Trails platform. With the recent publication of ZKValidator’s first Polkadot/Kusama report, the organization is also leading conversations on protocol governance.

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“ZKValidator is a very real use case of how we can help a team of a few people become as powerful as a team of 50 people,” said Joe Lallouz, CEO of Bison Trails. “Bison Trails is proud to support ZKValidator across multiple networks with our infrastructure platform, removing all of the technical barriers of running their own community-funded validators. It’s very cool to see people with the economic and political knowhow of governing protocols serve on the Kusama Council and the NEAR Validator Advisory board while we run the infrastructure. This fits perfectly with our mission of democratizing access to blockchains.”

Zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs)  are a cryptographic means to prove that a secret is true or is valid without revealing any other information about it. One of its most well-understood uses in blockchain is validating that a transaction has occurred without revealing where it was sent, or how much was sent, thus keeping everything about a transaction private.

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ZKValidator currently operates nodes across Cosmos, Polkadot, Kusama, and NEAR, where a community of token-holders delegate their digital assets and earn rewards for helping to secure the network. The ZKValidator’s goal is to see the latest zero knowledge research and emerging standards be included in development at the protocol level as well as within the DApps and L2 solutions that will be built on top of these networks. Those who delegate to ZKValidator are signalling their support for zkp research and related privacy technology with their participation in the network – in a way voting with their tokens. In addition to their role in protocol governance, the rewards from validator fees helps create a sustainable funding source to support the ZKValidator’s research and advocacy activities.

“Bison Trails makes it easy for anyone to run secure infrastructure across multiple blockchains,” said Anna Rose, co-founder of ZKValidator. “As they roll out support for new PoS networks, we have discovered opportunities for the ZKValidator to branch out in different directions. Because Bison Trails is doing the technical due diligence, we can work to promote privacy and the use of zero-knowledge systems on the networks we work on.”

ZKValidator’s funds assist in mapping the privacy in each network, connecting teams and research projects, and the crafting of governance proposals to support and protect the privacy of participants who are active on the networks.

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