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ZkVault: A Privacy-Preserving Smart Contract Framework for Confidential Transactions and Data Feeds
| International Journal of Computer Applications |
| Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
| Volume 187 - Number 44 |
| Year of Publication: 2025 |
| Authors: Jitendra Sharma, Jigyasu Dubey |
10.5120/ijca2025925766
|
Jitendra Sharma, Jigyasu Dubey . ZkVault: A Privacy-Preserving Smart Contract Framework for Confidential Transactions and Data Feeds. International Journal of Computer Applications. 187, 44 ( Sep 2025), 55-64. DOI=10.5120/ijca2025925766
Abstract
Smart contracts are gradually replacing traditional text-based contracts, as they clearly demonstrate the power of blockchain technology in developing digital contracting that promises decentralized and contract execution without third-party intervention. The open nature of the public blockchains, however, reveals transactional information and smart contract logic, which can present a sizable privacy threat in some highly regulated industries, like healthcare, finance, and identity management. In order to alleviate these constraints, we propose a modular privacy-preserving framework called ZkVault that separates the computation problem, proof generation, and verification into three separate components, to be more flexible and extendable. ZkVault can easily replace secure oracle modules in order to read privacy-preserving off-chain data feeds that allow dynamic contract interaction with external data. Constructed out of zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) and Pedersen commitments, ZkVault ensures: (1) data confidentiality hiding the inputs and intermediate computations; (2) verifiable computation which can be proven to third parties that no contract stages have been corrupted, without revealing any private data; and (3) scalability which off-loads most of the computation off-chain to reduce blockchain overhead. According to experiments that demonstrate that ZkVault can achieve a 40-60 % gas savings over legacy on-chain mechanisms, proof generation imposes a relatively small overhead of ~4s per transaction, which in practice is reasonable. These findings show that ZkVault can provide very robust privacy guarantees and implementation efficiency without sacrificing auditability, and as such, is a strong candidate for next-generation privacy-preserving dApps.
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