---
title: "Coordinatorless and on-chain ceremonies"
description: "Coordinatorless and on-chain ceremonies: Ceremony design (research). Protocols that remove the central coordinator by running contribution and verification…"
type: "option"
url: "https://zkpick.com/ceremony/coordinatorless-ceremonies/"
section: "04 Running or reusing a trusted setup"
authors:
  - "MarketComp"
publisher: "MarketComp"
version: "1.3"
updated: "2026-09-12"
license: "CC-BY-4.0"
json: "https://zkpick.com/data/ceremony/coordinatorless-ceremonies.json"
---

*By MarketComp. Updated 2026-09-12. Version 1.3. CC BY 4.0.*

# Coordinatorless and on-chain ceremonies — *Ceremony design (research)*

> 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.

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**

- 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 when:** Projects where censorship-resistance of the ceremony itself is a stated requirement, or teams assessing where the field is heading.

Maintained by: Academic authors (Powers-of-Tau to the People; a16z crypto research on-chain ceremony prototype) · Maturity: Research with prototypes · License: Academic; see reference implementations · Source: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1592