Justin Thaler

Justin Thaler is a research partner at a16z crypto and an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he studies verifiable computing, complexity theory, and algorithms for massive data sets. He is a central figure in modern SNARK design: he co-created the Lasso lookup argument and Jolt, the SNARK based virtual machine released by a16z crypto in 2024, which set new performance benchmarks for zkVMs. He is the author of Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge, the standard survey of the field, and a co-creator of Apache DataSketches, an open source library of streaming algorithms. Earlier in his career he produced the first implementation of a general purpose interactive proof system, and he was a research scientist at Yahoo Labs after completing his PhD in computer science at Harvard.

20 talks by Justin Thaler