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04 — Trusted setup · Ceremony approach

Sequencer-mediated large public ceremony

Ceremony design pattern

In one paragraph

Sequencer-mediated large public ceremony: Ceremony design pattern. The architecture behind the largest ceremony run to date: a published specification plus a sequencer that authenticates participants, serves state over an API, verifies contributions and appends them. Maturity: Completed and published; not maintained. Maintained by: Ethereum Foundation (KZG ceremony specification and sequencer). Choose it when: Organisations designing a large, public, browser-based ceremony who want a battle-tested reference architecture and verification-client model.

By MarketComp Updated v1.3 About the authors Changelog

What it is

The architecture behind the largest ceremony run to date: a published specification plus a sequencer that authenticates participants, serves state over an API, verifies contributions and appends them. More than ten independent client implementations were produced against the specification.

Strengths and tradeoffs

Strengths
  • Demonstrated at a scale no other setup has reached
  • Independent client implementations directly mitigate correlated implementation bugs
  • Two independent audits before the run — of the specification and of the sequencer
  • The specification is openly licensed, so the design can be reused without friction
Tradeoffs
  • Heavy: a sequencer, anti-sybil authentication, a frontend and months of coordination
  • The sequencer is a central coordinator with censorship and liveness power
  • The published spec is tailored to one SRS shape, not a general-purpose framework
  • Frozen reference rather than maintained software

Choose it whenOrganisations designing a large, public, browser-based ceremony who want a battle-tested reference architecture and verification-client model.

Maintained implementations

Ethereum Foundation (KZG ceremony specification and sequencer)

Maturity: Completed and published; not maintained · License: CC0-1.0 (specification) · github.com ↗

How to decide
Other ceremony approaches in §04
Avoid the setup entirely: transparent proof systemssnarkjs (powersoftau + zkey)gnark mpcsetupCoordinated phase-2 ceremony platformsCoordinatorless and on-chain ceremonies

Sources cited on this page · 1

  1. ethereum/kzg-ceremony — transcript, FAQ, audits, independent verifierstranscript

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

Cite this page 
MarketComp (2026). Sequencer-mediated large public ceremony. The ZK Field Manual (Version 1.3). MarketComp. https://zkpick.com/ceremony/sequencer-ceremony/
@misc{zkfieldmanual-sequencer-mediated-large-public-ceremony,
  title        = {Sequencer-mediated large public ceremony — The ZK Field Manual},
  author       = {MarketComp},
  year         = {2026},
  version      = {1.3},
  howpublished = {\url{https://zkpick.com/ceremony/sequencer-ceremony/}},
  note         = {Accessed: YYYY-MM-DD}
}