Yi Sun - Axiom, Coprocessors, and Commercializing Zero-Knowledge Tech
Sep 7, 2023
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Yi Sun, founder of Axiom, discusses Axiom's solutions for Ethereum applications and their go-to-market strategy. They explore the zero-knowledge landscape and building commercial products. Topics include: historic data access, Merkle proofs, team dynamics, DYDX transition, educating the community about DK, rise of roll ups, advancements and challenges in zero-knowledge proofs.
Axiom provides trustless access to historical data through zero knowledge proofs, expanding the capabilities of Ethereum smart contract applications.
Axiom's zero knowledge proofs offer a secure and cost-effective solution for developers to access past data on-chain.
Axiom aims to inspire diverse applications and make the user flow as easy as possible for developers by enhancing the developer experience and educating the community about the capabilities of ZK technology.
Deep dives
The Fundamental Problem that Axiom Solves
Axiom addresses the problem of smart contracts not being able to access historical information on the blockchain and limits in accessing on-chain information like transactions and event logs. Axiom provides trustless access to historical data through zero knowledge proofs, allowing developers to interact with past states of Ethereum and expand the capabilities of their smart contract applications.
How Axiom Enables Trustless Access to Past Data
Developers currently face trade-offs in accessing historic on-chain assets. They can either pay more on-chain to cache information in their smart contracts, imposing extra costs on users, or manually put the information on-chain, requiring trust that the data is accurate. Axiom's zero knowledge proofs offer a trustless solution by providing proofs that validate historical data off-chain and then verifying them on-chain. This allows developers to access past data in a secure and cost-effective manner.
Use Cases and Impact of Axiom
Axiom has various use cases, including governance and identity. In governance, Axiom allows smart contracts to access users' voting power based on their token ownership history, enabling trustless voting. For identity, Axiom can prove a user's historic on-chain actions, such as holding an NFT or making trades, allowing protocols to gate specific actions based on a user's history. Axiom aims to be a new way to scale Ethereum by providing modular and scalable trustless computation, enabling developers to build on-chain applications for a wide range of industries.
Expansion of Use Cases with Axiom
Axiom aims to respond to limitations of self-serve products and encourage new idea generation by allowing users to build full-featured applications on top of their platform. They have already witnessed interesting use cases, such as the creation of a new style pool that is gated only for old accounts. This has sparked thoughts on potential criteria for gating and how it could make markets more efficient. Axiom is focused on inspiring diverse applications across various verticals, including DeFi protocols, governance space, and cross-chain bridge space, aiming to make the user flow as easy as possible for developers.
Developer Experience and Education
Axiom is devoted to enhancing the developer experience and educating the community about the capabilities of ZK. They have conducted workshops and hacker houses to gather feedback on pain points and refine their software development toolkit (SDK). They strive to make ZK more accessible and user-friendly, offering a free learning program and a validity application developer program. Their goal is to not only improve the developer experience but also empower ordinary developers to fully grasp and leverage ZK technology, ultimately enabling them to build highly secure and efficient applications.
In this episode, we chat with Yi Sun, founder of Axiom. We begin with an overview of what Axiom does and the core problems it's solving for Ethereum applications. Then, we dig into Axiom's go-to-market strategy, some of the use cases they're supporting, and some of the capabilities they're building for in the future. We also explore the broader zero-knowledge landscape, and the dynamics of building commercial products in a space that evolves so rapidly.
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