succinct argument dates back to a paper of Joe Kilian from 1992. After that, a paper of Silvio Micali in 1994 showed how to make the proof non-interactive via cryptographic hash functions. While Micali did not study zero knowledge in his paper, the community views his construction, in hindsight, as the first "zk-SNARK”. However modern constructions of zk-SNARKs did not arise until 20 years later. In a paper with co-authors and I in 2012, we coined the term "SNARK" and "zk-SNARK" and showed various alternative constructions to the classical constructions (our motivations mostly had to do with the cryptographic assumptions inherent to constructing SNARKs). Research on SNARKs since 2012 has boomed, with works studying either theoretical aspects (existence, asymptotics) or practical ones (efficient implementations, reducing high-level program representations to low-level representations "understood" by these proof systems). If I had two name two landmark papers that are direct precursors of most of today's practical SNARKs would be a paper with co-authors and I in 2013 that built a system for proving executions of arbitrary programs, and a paper of other colleagues that introduced many useful techniques still used today. But that was 4 years ago, and since then much has happened and zk-SNARK history is still being written, as every year we see new approaches and techniques that improve both our theoretical and practical understanding of them.