← → Print all
04 — Trusted setup · Ceremony approach

Coordinatorless and on-chain ceremonies

Ceremony design (research)

In one paragraph

Coordinatorless and on-chain ceremonies: Ceremony design (research). Protocols that remove the central coordinator by running contribution and verification through a smart contract or consensus layer, making eligibility and ordering publicly auditable by construction. Maturity: Research with prototypes. Maintained by: Academic authors (Powers-of-Tau to the People; a16z crypto research on-chain ceremony prototype). Choose it when: Projects where censorship-resistance of the ceremony itself is a stated requirement, or teams assessing where the field is heading.

By MarketComp Updated v1.3 About the authors Changelog

What it is

Protocols that remove the central coordinator by running contribution and verification through a smart contract or consensus layer, making eligibility and ordering publicly auditable by construction.

Strengths and tradeoffs

Strengths
  • Removes coordinator censorship and single-point liveness failure — a property no surveyed production ceremony satisfies
  • Contribution eligibility and ordering become publicly auditable
  • Opens the door to explicit incentives for honest participation
Tradeoffs
  • Gas and data-availability costs scale with SRS size; large SRSs remain impractical fully on-chain
  • Still synchronous and round-robin; fully asynchronous ceremonies remain an open problem
  • Limited deployment track record — treat as research-grade for now

Choose it whenProjects where censorship-resistance of the ceremony itself is a stated requirement, or teams assessing where the field is heading.

Maintained implementations

Academic authors (Powers-of-Tau to the People; a16z crypto research on-chain ceremony prototype)

Maturity: Research with prototypes · License: Academic; see reference implementations · eprint.iacr.org ↗

How to decide
Other ceremony approaches in §04
Avoid the setup entirely: transparent proof systemssnarkjs (powersoftau + zkey)gnark mpcsetupCoordinated phase-2 ceremony platformsSequencer-mediated large public ceremony

Sources cited on this page · 1

  1. Powers-of-Tau to the People: decentralising setup ceremoniespaper

All 42 sources for §04 are listed on the section page →

Cite this page 
MarketComp (2026). Coordinatorless and on-chain ceremonies. The ZK Field Manual (Version 1.3). MarketComp. https://zkpick.com/ceremony/coordinatorless-ceremonies/
@misc{zkfieldmanual-coordinatorless-and-on-chain-ceremonies,
  title        = {Coordinatorless and on-chain ceremonies — The ZK Field Manual},
  author       = {MarketComp},
  year         = {2026},
  version      = {1.3},
  howpublished = {\url{https://zkpick.com/ceremony/coordinatorless-ceremonies/}},
  note         = {Accessed: YYYY-MM-DD}
}