Exploring Privacy in Blockchain through ZoKrates: Fundamentals, Applications and Future Directions

Zero-knowledge proof is a special cryptographic technique that allows a prover to convince a verifier about the correctness of a claim without explicitly disclosing the claim itself. With the advancements of blockchain technologies, zero-knowledge proof has been successfully integrated into many decentralized applications over the years. ZoKrates, with its ease-of-use and direct integration to blockchain platforms, has emerged as a leading framework for developing, generating and verifying zero-knowledge proofs. This survey compiles a corpus of 347 documents that cite the original research work of ZoKrates by considering the period ranging from 2018 to 2025. Out of this corpus, this survey systematically selects and analyzes a total of 87 different documents including only peer-reviewed publications and excluding the gray literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey in the literature to follow a systematic approach to analyze the privacy- preserving applications in blockchain from the perspective of ZoKrates. This survey presents three different classifications over the documents with respect to (i) the applications they develop, (ii) the challenges they frequently encounter and (iii) the metrics they often use to measure performance of their techniques. Based on the challenges identified, this survey finally discusses numerous future research directions to promote potential advancements in the field and attract the attention of scientific and industrial communities. Feedback from readers regarding any inaccuracies or misinformation in this survey is welcome.