Anna chats with Omer Shlomovits and Yuval Domb from Ingonyama about ZK Hardware, including ASIC development, hardware product cycles, latest research, and challenges in hardware creation. They discuss the evolution of ZK Hardware, the costly world of chip design, potential solutions for hardware development, and exploring client-side proving with zero-knowledge proofs.
Ingonyama aims to accelerate ZK hardware, emphasizing hardware-friendly provers and GPU acceleration beyond traditional ASICs.
Transition from Zengo to Ingonyama showcases a deliberate shift to specialize in hardware design to address privacy challenges.
Future trends point towards decentralized marketplaces for ZK proving, leveraging specialized hardware to enhance scalability and reduce costs.
Deep dives
Ingonyama's Approach to ZK Hardware Space
Ingonyama aims to tackle the ZK hardware space by focusing on developing hardware products that accelerate zero-knowledge technologies. The company's foundation involves breaking down ZK components for acceleration in hardware design, emphasizing end-to-end hardware solutions. By considering hardware-friendly ZK provers and leveraging GPUs for acceleration, they explore options beyond traditional ASICs for real-world problem-solving.
Evolution from Consumer Company to Hardware Focus
Omar's transition from Zengo to Ingonyama reflects a progression from consumer-focused roles to specialized hardware expertise. This shift was driven by a strategic alignment with ZK technology's core principles and the opportunity to innovate in the hardware space. The journey towards ZK hardware development showcased a deliberate shift towards optimizing hardware design, open-source software commitment, and addressing emerging privacy and security challenges through hardware acceleration.
Centralization in Roll-Up Operations and Future of Decentralization
Current ZK roll-up operations are centralized, typically managed by leading companies handling all aspects like the sequencer, prover, and essential features. Users interact indirectly with roll-ups through applications that settle transactions in a batch on Ethereum, incurring substantial on-chain fees. Provers operate on cloud-based or on-premise servers, utilizing CPUs and GPUs for efficiency. Future trends point towards decentralized marketplaces for ZK proving, leveraging specialized hardware to enhance scalability, reduce costs, and facilitate decentralized operations.
Development of a Decentralized Marketplace
The podcast delves into the creation of a decentralized marketplace, emphasizing the challenges and players involved in its development. It discusses the need for various participants, such as software designers and hardware providers, to collaborate to ensure the marketplace's functionality. There is a focus on the importance of incentivizing contributions, whether through providing algorithms or specialized hardware, to foster competition and innovation.
Advanced Techniques in ZK Proving and Hardware Compatibility
The episode explores advancements in zero-knowledge proving protocols, particularly focusing on techniques to enhance parallel processing and reduce memory constraints when implementing sound checks. The discussion highlights the collaboration between academia and industry in developing open-source tools like icicle and considerations for hardware-friendly protocol implementations. Additionally, the conversation touches on the intersection of cryptography, hardware architecture, and emerging technologies like client-side proving for improved privacy and efficiency.
In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Omer Shlomovits and Yuval Domb from Ingonyama. They go back to the start of the project, exploring Ingonyama’s initial vision for what ZK Hardware could be, how the field has evolved and how they are accelerating ZK Hardware today. The group discuss hardware product cycles, the hardware and algorithmic components, how a ZK ASIC is developed, they review some of the latest research from Ingonyama and more.
