04 — Trusted setup · Failure mode

A participant set that cannot bear scrutiny

Contributors are all employees, investors or close partners of the project. The 1-of-N assumption is formally satisfied and practically worthless, because a single organisation could have controlled every contribution.

By MarketComp Updated 2026-09-12 v1.3 About the authors Changelog

Mitigation

Recruit adversarially: parties with no stake, competitors, independent researchers, other jurisdictions. Publish affiliations so readers can judge independence for themselves.

Cite this page

MarketComp (2026). A participant set that cannot bear scrutiny. The ZK Field Manual (Version 1.3). MarketComp. https://zkpick.com/ceremony/failure-modes/a-participant-set-that-cannot-bear-scrutiny/

@misc{zkfieldmanual-a-participant-set-that-cannot-bear-scrut,
  title        = {A participant set that cannot bear scrutiny — The ZK Field Manual},
  author       = {MarketComp},
  year         = {2026},
  version      = {1.3},
  howpublished = {\url{https://zkpick.com/ceremony/failure-modes/a-participant-set-that-cannot-bear-scrutiny/}},
  note         = {Accessed: YYYY-MM-DD}
}