Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a Silicon Valley venture-capital giant, released two open-source software projects on Thursday to speed up the core technology behind crypto projects using zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. This marks a notable milestone for the venture firm, which has taken a more active role in developing the core tech powering the companies it backs.
The two ZK research projects from a16z are Lasso, a method for speeding up ZK systems, and Jolt, a type of zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). Both projects are open-source, meaning third parties can use them in their own products.
You can get a guarantee that this work was done correctly, but not have all the blockchain nodes in the world doing all the work, said Justin Thaler, an a16z researcher and associate professor at Georgetown University who co-authored the Lasso and Jolt research.
Lasso is a ZK “lookup argument” presented by a16z as an improvement to one of the under-the-hood components powering ZK-SNARKs. According to a16z, Lasso “provides roughly a 10x speedup over the lookup argument in the popular, well-engineered halo2 toolchain; we expect improvements of around 40x when optimizations are complete.”
Jolt is an open-source code for a new approach for building zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs). Jolt provides a general-purpose framework for building certain types of zkVMs that are easier to debug. “Relative to existing SNARK VMs, we expect Jolt to achieve similar or better performance – and importantly, a more streamlined and accessible developer experience,” a16z said in its statement.
ZK proofs are cryptographic tools that have applications outside of blockchain but have seen a surge of interest due to their applicability to blockchain scaling. They have recently become the go-to method for helping blockchains reduce fees, increase speeds, and preserve transaction privacy.