Space and Time (SxT), a company that provides a verifiable computational layer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, launched its new open source ZK prover on the GitHub platform on June 12. In an interview with Cointelegraph, SxT co-founder and head of research Jay White explained the benchmarks used to measure sub-second performance:

“We ran benchmark tests with a variety of queries, such as filters, GROUP BY, totals, and other standard SQL operations, against large data tables containing more than 100,000 rows. The latest benchmark tests showed Proof of SQL running in under a second for 100,000 rows, and under a second for a million rows.” “It shows that it can provide proofs in 1.2 seconds and for 100 million rows in about a minute.”

Proof of SQL was released as an alpha release to a select group of SxT customers in August 2023 and is currently publicly available on GitHub. This public cryptographic tool will allow community members to run trustless queries on SxT. Developers will be able to download the code repository directly from GitHub.

“Our team has pioneered sub-second ToM-proofs so that smart contracts and AI agents can ask questions about activity on a chain and off-chain data and retrieve untrusted SQL query results on-chain without having to wait 30-minute proof times during a transaction.” The new ToM-proof is part of SxT’s strategy to improve the security and performance of decentralized applications (DApps) and encourage community collaboration.

White adds: “User experience is very important to us, so we chose to focus on SQL to make the integration process as easy and seamless as possible for developers. We are currently working on integrating Proof of SQL into the Chainlink network and using the zkSync ecosystem and developer smart contracts.” “We are working on a solution that allows them to run SQL queries directly with Proof of SQL.”

The latency issue hinders the scalability and performance of DApps that rely on real-time data verification. According to a press release shared exclusively with Cointelegraph, Proof of SQL “allows developers to plug analytics directly into smart contracts, paving the way for powerful new use cases in blockchain technology.” White explained how Proof of SQL will scale with increased data volume, more complex queries, and improvements aimed at removing future bottlenecks:

“Proof of SQL scales linearly. Cluster-scale proofs are in the near future, meaning even faster proofs on larger tables. Other upcoming improvements include expanded SQL support, especially multi-table queries (like JOIN) and subqueries, and “There is a new commitment scheme.”

The integration of ToM proofs into the crypto industry could have significant consequences. White explained what kind of usage scenarios this development in the field of ToM could lead to:

“Our team believes that in the next few years, AI agents will predominantly perform transactions on-chain. Accurate, uncorrupted, and provably accurate data thanks to Proof of SQL will lead this on-chain agent revolution. Every application in the world uses a database, and we expect that in the future too.” We envision a world where every database uses Proof of SQL.”

The momentum for ZK technology is increasing. This is further evidenced by StarkWare’s recent announcement of $1 million in research funding to introduce ZK scaling for Bitcoin. This initiative aims to simultaneously scale both Ethereum and Bitcoin through ZK technology.