[betterunix2]

That is an impressive list of cryptographers working on blockchains, but at major cryptography conferences there is less and less blockchain work being presented, to the point where CRYPTO'21 didn't have any blockchain sessions at all, while EUROCRYPT'21 had a single session where blockchain work was combined with work on privacy and law enforcement. To be fair, three sessions at CCS'21 were dedicated to blockchain research, but CCS is structured to allow more topics, it is not a conference specific to cryptography, and they had two sessions dedicated to MPC and a third on federated learning which touched on MPC. It is a small sample but representative of a larger trend of cryptographers becoming less interested in blockchain research.

I have not seen ZKP innovation outstrip MPC innovations at all. In the past decade I have seen a rapid expansion of research in MPC following both a strong push by DARPA and growing interest among large tech companies and banks. There has been a revival of interest in set-intersection protocols and related functionalities, a lot of impressive work in garbled circuits and other generic protocols that have greatly reduced their resource requirements, machine learning applications, and various other ongoing lines of work. At worst I would say that ZKP and MPC research have been roughly equal in terms of the pace of innovation, which should surprise no one as the two topics have strong connections.

Moreover, while there is certainly a lot of ZK research being published year after year, most of it has nothing to do with blockchains and is not coming from anything related to blockchains. There are plenty of academic researchers publishing ZK work, and I still see lots of industry ZK research that has nothing to do with blockchain. The same is true of all the other topics you mentioned -- some blockchain-inspired work here and there, but a lot more research from elsewhere.

Sorry to hear that your MPC work has not made it into production, but maybe that is because it is not as practical as you claim. Personally I like to say that the only test of "practicality" that matters is whether or not it is useful in a real-world application. Obviously your SNARK work cleared that bar, which is great but does not really say much about the pace of innovation. I can say that most of my published research at this point has been put into production -- an equally meaningless statement since I have been working for a big tech company for a long time, and the research I have published in that time has all been the result of work I did to address various privacy and security problems that company faces. My judgement of where the innovation is happening is based on the research I am seeing people present at various conferences. Maybe I am looking in the wrong places, and there is actually a whole world of cryptography conferences where people are excited about blockchain work?