In this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun talk with Simon Peffers and Kelly Olson from Supranational, a startup focused on building specialised software and hardware for advanced cryptographic computation. Simon and Kelly talk about their recent work helping out the Ethereum Foundation with VDFs, as well as building a better SNARK algorithm for Protocol Labs’ Filecoin.

They cover how specialised chips can push the boundaries of computation in a post-Moore’s law world, how hardware specialised for zero knowledge is optimised, and the challenges of building ASIC chips today.

Here are a few links to set the stage about what they discussed:

Zero Knowledge episode 103, Exploring VDFs with Joseph Bonneau
Supranational’s website

Supranational’s Medium blog
Simon's talk on hardware acceleration approach at SBC
The 20 year old puzzle by Ron Rivest, which the Supranational folks solved just a few days late.
Nvidia’s nerf of the RTX 3060 for Ethereum mining
How more specialized chips may be the solution to the end of Moore’s law

Thank you to this week’s sponsor, Aave.

Aave is an open source, decentralised non-custodial liquidity protocol on Ethereum.

With Aave, users can participate as depositors meaning they provide liquidity to earn a passive income. or they can also act as borrowers to borrow in an overcollateralized way or undercollateralized way (think: one-block liquidity Flash Loan).

A new feature is Credit Delegation, where users can delegate their credit to another person who can borrow against it

Aave has an ecosystem grants program for anyone building anything that contributes to the Aave ecosystem. Check out the Aave developers portal to learn more: https://docs.aave.com/portal/

To learn more Visit aave.com to learn more

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