Episode 267: ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 2

In this two-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo. Throughout these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical techniques in ZKPs that can be optimized for and the tricks and strategies that ZPrize competitors used to achieve these optimizations.

In Part 2 of the series, Anna and Alex first interview Hamid Salehi and Swati Gupta from Xilinx AMD who contribute insights from the perspective of an FPGA manufacturer. Alex and Anna then interview competitor Niall Emmart, previously from NVIDIA. They discuss his previous work and what went into winning both the MSM for GPUs and MSM for Wasm competitions in ZPrize.


Here is some additional information for this episode:

Hardware/Board options:

  • Varium C1100 board (targeted at accelerating blockchain applications).
    This board has been used to accelerate the following:
  • Poseidon hash (used in the storage sealing process for Filecoin)
  • NTT acceleration at ZPrize
  • Startups are using this to explore NTT and MSM acceleration
  • Other boards
    The U55C in particular has been shown to provide a competitive and more power efficient alternative to GPUs for MSM acceleration in this study by Ingonyama called PipeMSM. There has been interest in U55C for NTT acceleration as well due to the high HBM capacity it provides (16GB).

Research and documents on using FPGAs for ZK related implementation:

Projects using the C1100 board (These can be a good starting point for getting familiar with the hardware and tools):

Documentation on tools and boards:

GitHub Repositories:


Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs.


Ingonyama’s mission is to improve the performance of Zero-Knowledge Provers by designing hardware optimized for ZK computation. They are proud to introduce their latest project, ICICLE.

For ideas and discussion around the code, visit the ICICLE channel in the Ingonyama discord server, where team members and fellow developers await.


If you like what we do:

Previous Episodes

Episode 269: Auctions with Kshitij Kulkarni, Matheus V. X. Ferreira and Tarun

In this week’s episode Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra explore the topic of auctions with guests Kshitij Kulkarni, PHD student at Berkeley’s EECS department and Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

They discuss the history of auctions, both in the real world and in blockchain, and go on to cover more recent blockchain uses, such as MEV and NFT auctions. They review the incentives of both auction holders and the participants as well as how this incentive design can influence the effectiveness of the auctions themselves.

Episode 268: A Rollup-Centric Future & Sovereign Chains with Mustafa Al-Bassam

In this week’s episode Anna Rose interviews Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia. They cover where Celestia as an idea emerged from, how its rollup-centric data availability (DA) network works and what can be expected from their upcoming launch. They also chat about how Celestia aims to empower Sovereign chains – independent rollup chains that use Celestia as the DA and consensus layer – and how this Sovereign chain model compares with the Ethereum rollup architecture.

Episode 266: ZK Hardware Sessions with Zprize Pt. 1

In this 2-part series exploring ZK Hardware, Anna Rose interviews various participants from the ZPrize competition, alongside the creator of ZPrize and co-host of this episode Alex Pruden from Aleo. Through these interviews, they dig into the different types of hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, that can be used to accelerate ZKP computation. They also discuss the underlying mathematical techniques in ZKPs that can be optimized for and the tricks and strategies that ZPrize competitors used to achieve these optimizations.

Episode 265: Where ZK and ML intersect with Yi Sun and Daniel Kang

This week, Anna Rose and Tarun Chitra dive back into the topic of ZK ML with guests Yi Sun, co-founder of Axiom, and Daniel Kang, Assistant Professor of computer science at UIUC. They discuss Yi and Daniel’s previous academic work and what led them to get interested in ZK topics and specifically ZK ML. They then dive into a discussion about 2 recent papers which examine the use of ZK within Machine Learning architectures.

Episode 264: On-Chain Reputation & Identity Building with Sismo

In this episode, Anna chats with Hadrien Charlanes from Sismo. They discuss his early experiences in blockchain development and DeFi, and how this led him to build Sismo, a decentralized identity product with privacy preserving properties. They also cover the ZK badge concept: how they’re minted and what is happening under the hood as well as interesting emerging use cases using these zk-based on-chain instruments.

Episode 263: Cosmos, Sommelier and Emerging Assets with Zaki Manian

This week, Anna catches up with Zaki Manian, co-founder of Iqlusion and Sommelier. They embark on a comprehensive recap of the history of Cosmos to-date, covering what has happened since their last interview 2 years ago. They also dive into topics such as the IBC launch, Osmosis, how the ecosystem grew and accelerated up until the Luna crash and how it continues to recover in its next phase. They then chat about Sommelier and how it has evolved, as well as the concepts of emerging asset types, such as real world assets, and how ZKPs for privacy may finally find a product market fit that could build up real market adoption. You won’t want to miss this one!

Episode 262: Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony with Trent & Carl

In this week’s episode, Anna Rose and Kobi Gurkan chat with Carl and Trent from the Ethereum Foundation, covering many topics such as their work on the KZG Ceremony and how this is different from the previous trusted setups we have covered. The group takes a deep dive into trusted setups, discussing what they are for, how they have been run and how the setup is going so far. They also discuss Proto-Danksharding and EIP-4844 – a novel way to organize data logistics for Ethereum.

Zk white

Subscribe

Subscribe to Zero Knowledge podcast on these links:

Join the conversation:

Newsletters:

Support: