Our existing digital infrastructure requires trust in a small number of centralized entities. The poor fault-tolerance and auditability of this architecture has motivated interest in systems like Ethereum that *decentralize trust across many nodes* by having every node re-execute computations to check their correctness. However, this strategy leads to poor *privacy* and *scalability* guarantees.

In this talk, I will show how to obtain decentralized trust systems that achieve strong privacy and scalability properties by relying on *efficient cryptographic proofs* (zkSNARKs). In particular, I will present ZEXE, a system for *decentralized private computation* where all transactions are indistinguishable from one another, irrespective of the underlying computation. I will then briefly describe a new paradigm for constructing concretely efficient and easy-to-deploy zkSNARKs.