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# System prepended metadata

title: 'Anounamous- Private Governance for NounsDao: Optimistic Zero Knowledge'

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# Anounamous- Private Governance for NounsDao: Optimistic Zero Knowledge

Zero Knowledge and Optimism are not mutually exclusive. With Aztec Noir’s UltraPlonk proofs coming in at the cost of 400,000 gas per proof, using Zero Knowledge alone will result in Nouns’ gas usage skyrocketing. Nounsdao’s governance has little need for instant finality for individual votes or proposal actions. Therefore, instead of verifying zero-knowledge proofs on-chain, we only post the proofs on-chain. If a fraudulent ZK proof is posted, anyone with access to Ethereum can pay the gas fee to verify the invalidity of the proof in the EVM. Financial stake or bans can be used to punish adversarial behavior.

There are multiple places where optimistic zero knowledge can be integrated:

* Snapshot proof - account storage root caching when proposing
* Vote proof - ZK proof of nouns voting correctness
In this proposal, we only use optimism for the snapshot proof. This is not even a ZK proof verification, rather, it is a critical input to our vote proofs. The calculation of this root can be made optimistic since there is already a long voting period where the validity of the cached root can be challenged.

Credit to the [NounsVortex](https://prop.house/nouns/private-voting-research-sprint) proposal, which proposes a “[Nounism](https://mizu-dao.github.io/vortex/chapter_4_2.html)” which uses an optimistic proving layer instead of verifying every proof. On that subject, we believe that this is the most powerful L1 scalability feature possible. The scope of our work will not cover integrating “Nounism” for vote proving; however, future iterations of our proposal use `@curryrasul`’s and `@levs57`’s novel ZK scalability technique.