Zero-History Confidential Chains with Zero-Knowledge Contracts: A New Normal for Decentralized Ledgers?

Popular public blockchains face many problems due to their catastrophic blockchain sizes and verification time, e.g., lack of peer scalability, high computational fees, and impractical overheads for syncing. The origin of these problems is preserving everything that comes with the architecture of “append-only” blockchains, e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, etc. Zero-history blockchains like Origami address the root of these problems by removing the history. We propose two Origami confidential chains, classical and quantum-safe, with zero-knowledge contracts. This paper demonstrates that zero-history blockchains should be the new normal blockchain structure due to their high scalability even with post-quantum settings and zero-knowledge contracts.