ZK Verifier Strategy

This document defines the current verifier posture for PrivateDAO and the next decisions required before zk_enforced becomes the stronger production-grade path.

Current Strategy

PrivateDAO does not yet claim a fully dominant on-chain verifier boundary.

The current model is:

• off-chain witness generation
• off-chain proof generation
• off-chain verification workflow
• on-chain proof anchors
• on-chain parallel verification receipts
• on-chain receipt upgrades into zk_enforced mode
• proposal-level zk_enforced policy once the required receipts exist

This is already stronger than a pure proof-of-concept and gives the product a usable cryptographic path today, while leaving room for a stricter production-grade verifier architecture.

Why This Exists

The current approach keeps the live governance product stable while allowing:

• proposal-bound proof material
• proposal-bound verification receipts
• operator-visible enforcement upgrades
• frontend and CLI support for the stronger path

without rewriting the entire commit-reveal lifecycle in one step.

Next Verifier Decisions

Verifier Boundary

Before promoting zk_enforced as the stronger default path, the project must finalize:

• whether receipt-based verification remains the production trust boundary
• or whether a stricter verifier-program model will be required

Public Inputs

The project must freeze the exact public inputs for:

• vote proof path
• delegation proof path
• tally proof path

so the enforcement contract and the reviewer expectations match.

Compute Budget

The stronger path must be costed explicitly for:

• instruction count
• account footprint
• transaction size
• compute-unit pressure
• confirmation behavior under Devnet and mainnet load

Operator Flow

The canonical operator path must remain proposal-bound:

1. record proposal-bound proof anchors
2. record proposal-bound verification receipts
3. enable zk_enforced
4. finalize only through the matching policy path

Current Production Rule

Until the verifier boundary is frozen and reviewed:

• zk_enforced is available
• zk_enforced is useful
• zk_enforced is not yet the dominant production recommendation

Ecosystem Value

This work matters beyond one product surface because it helps the ecosystem:

• understand how advanced verifier choices can be exposed through a usable governance product
• reuse proof-anchor and receipt patterns instead of rebuilding them from scratch
• move privacy-oriented governance closer to a repeatable production path on Solana

Decision References

For the actual freeze decision, read:

• docs/canonical-verifier-boundary-decision.md
• docs/zk-external-audit-scope.md