zk-Agreements: A Privacy-Preserving Way to Establish Deterministic Trust in Confidential Agreements
To-Wen Liu, Matthew Green

TL;DR
zk-agreements enable confidential, automated, and verifiable digital legal contracts by combining zero-knowledge proofs, secure computation, and smart contracts to ensure privacy and enforceability on blockchains.
Contribution
The paper introduces zk-agreements, a novel protocol that preserves privacy while enabling automated enforcement and verification of legal agreements using advanced cryptographic techniques.
Findings
Achieves privacy-preserving enforcement of legal agreements.
Enables confidential compliance verification.
Maintains blockchain-based automation and enforceability.
Abstract
Digital transactions currently exceed trillions of dollars annually, yet traditional paper-based agreements remain a bottleneck for automation, enforceability, and dispute resolution. Natural language contracts introduce ambiguity, require manual processing, and lack computational verifiability, all of which hinder efficient digital commerce. Computable legal contracts, expressed in machine-readable formats, offer a potential solution by enabling automated execution and verification. Blockchain-based smart contracts further strengthen enforceability and accelerate dispute resolution; however, current implementations risk exposing sensitive agreement terms on public ledgers, raising serious privacy and competitive intelligence concerns that limit enterprise adoption. We introduce zk-agreements, a protocol designed to transition from paper-based trust to cryptographic trust while…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBlockchain Technology Applications and Security · Cryptography and Data Security · Advanced Authentication Protocols Security
