What about building a Censorship-resistant global proving network using Nostr ?

I built a small Proof of Concept using Nostr for the coordination layer and STWO for the generation of validity proofs.

Typical flow:

1. User submits a proving request to the network using a Nostr client.

2. A prover agent picks the request and generate a STARK proof using STWO prover.

3. The proof is published to the Nostr network.

4. The user can verify the proof using the STWO verifier agent.

The POC for now is only able to generate a Circle STARK proof for a Fibonacci computation, using STWO and a custom AIR.

Open questions:

- Fee mechanism (could leverage NIP-57 with Lightning Zaps).

- Spam protection (could be cool to use NIP-13 Proof of Work and try to reuse the grinding part of the STARK protocol,

Weikeng Chen

has started to draft idea on how to potentially do this).

- Standardisation and serialisation of proofs.

- Generalisation to arbitrary programs using Cairo.

- Batching & aggregation of proofs.

I am big fan of Nostr and it's potential. You can imagine a lof of different applications and use cases that can leverage the simplicity and censorship resistance of Nostr. I am pretty sure that ZK will play a big role in this, both for scaling of computation and also for privacy.