The Integrated ZK Stack: From Hardware to API w/ Omer Shlomovits (Ingonyama)

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you for tuning in if you've been a part of this industry for the last couple years you have heard the word ZK every other sentence or tweet or whatever now there's so much that can be said about zero knowledge cryptography but let me try to sum it up into a couple Big Ideas before ZK most of the energy in cryptography was about using math to encrypt information making it private to everyone except for those with the

correct cryptographic keys and then in 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto handed down a white paper and made a world changing assertion he said that cryptography can be used for so much more than encryption it can also be used to create trustless computation now the journey from 2008 to today is long and complicated and full of drama but I personally think it's fair to understand the story of our industry as the process of understanding the power of cryptography and how to build tangible products with this new tool set but here's the problem the cryptography we are talking about is so

Advanced so abstract and so brand freaking new that almost no one knows how to work with it yet the lift of explaining how a kzg commitment works is so large that it's near impossible to get to the actually interesting question what can you do with it the problem is actually worse than that that because even if you can explain how a kzg commitment can hide secret data behind an elliptic curve the reality is it's really hard to get this math Running efficiently enough that it's actually useful but every day it becomes more and more clear these problems will be

solved very soon today's guest is Omar shlomovitz co-founder and CEO of inoyama now if you go to their website you'll think this is a ZK hardware company and you're partially correct but inuyama is so much more they are not just creating specialized Hardware they are creating integrated tools sdks and apis that abstract away all the moon maath and Cutting Edge silicone the goal to abstract away the intense mathematical implementation and systemic risk of ZK cryptography so that developers can focus on building

applications and importantly providing implementations that are actually performant enough to build Enterprises on top of this is a fantastic conversation at the bleeding edge of cryptography open source entrepreneurship and just general building if you have any interest in understanding how ZK is actually going to work make sure you pay attention one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then all right let's start the

show Omar thank you so much for joining us on the strange waterer podcast oh thank you for having me of course of course so um before we get started into like the real interesting part of what you're building with inoyama like I am just a huge believer that um the most important part of any human Venture is the humans involved with it so my first question to you is like who who are you um and how did you find yourself in such a like the bleeding edge of where mathematic touches computation touches degeneracy so I'm based in Israel I guess that's the first fact that we need uh that's relevant here and um at least in Israel you have this like mandatory

service right so you have to at list into into the army I was part of this um uh program where I'm actually committed to spend quite a lot of time uh in uh and I was like in intelligence in different doing their different roles and also got my academic background at least like um uh the early years uh and and degrees uh as part of this uh in this context okay so I was tuned into more of like this uh defense industry um and intelligence right so I was uh studying physics and electrical engineering um and then completed the master in electrical engineering all all while like doing my uh mandatory and

then voluntary uh service wearing multiple heads uh you know playing multiple roles uh research development managerial roles and I think that um uh ever since you know my my my first experience um professional experience it was always around people and Innovation uh that's kind of like the two things that at least for me um maybe also creativity like this these are kind of like the leading uh thing or at least for me what's what I think is is you know what guides me uh the way that I pick what what makes me I don't know what uh I I find the most fun and and why kind of like I guess um makes

the most uh contributions uh and it's also it means that even like in the context of the army I was kind of entrepreneur but it was uh I mean in in that context it's less about getting money from you know others um and Building Products it's more about you get resources can be like human resources can be other other stuff uh but yeah like there there are SAR similar Concepts now when I um left eventually um U the Army I've done something which is I guess at least in Israel like this is like probably like very traditional way in which entrepreneurs are being born so yeah I

mean I've kind of like just paired with uh a couple of friends from my service and we started uh my first company it was mostly a learning experience in um very far by the way from from the space it was Healthcare brain Technologies a lot of technologies that had nothing to do with what I've done so far but excited me um like virtual reality machine learning Ai and so on um yeah I mean 10 10 months one year something like this into the Venture um actually we closed uh but yeah uh many important life lessons that I took from from that phase now another important thing to

note is that um at some point I started uh my PhD in cryptography in computer science well so sorry just Drilling in on that specifically like what um what was exciting about cryptography specifically to you right so I mean this is something it's it's hard to explain because it's a passion I mean it's something that just attract me from very little age so the beginning you read about it like when you see a book um I don't applied cryptography by by Bruce new you just like read through it and and you find some joy in in in by way of like understanding this how these things work and the magic of cryptography like definitely I still think till today that

like part of cryptography is pure magic um and at some point I just wanted to more like have you know formal education in cryptography um it it was in a sense a bit of a shift from like you know more of engineering uh uh like more academic background in in physics and and electrical engineering to computer science but it went kind of smooth because of my um professional experience um till that point in time so my uh in my PhD I I worked by the way supervised by Professor UD lindel and um I was looking into Technologies like you know Advanced or or ultramodern cryptography multi party computation which is obviously is using zero knowledge proofs

in a sense um and also got attracted to this amazing world of um blockchains and basically at the same time ethereum kind of like um just started and the concept of smart contract basically blew my mind right it was like I don't know it was crazy so I try to think what you can do with smart contracts and cryptography combined so from the very early days of ethereum that's kind of like what I had in mind and um at some point I um I met with the co-founder uh of my previous company company named Zeno and uh in this compy in Zeno basically Zeno is is

a consumer it's consumer product we buil we've built um still ongoing by the way it's I think it's a successful company um and we've been building their um this digital wallet right for cryptocurrency and the reason why uh I found it compelling was first obviously the product and the notion of and the the vision of um getting you know the next billion uh people on crypto and you know this ease of use and and um Peace of Mind the other thing was the security the cryptography and that's also was my part of the company kind of like a CTO basically in charge of Open Source infrastructure and cryptography so it's

not very far from what I'm doing today in the company although today we are taking it I guess one step further and we do the full stack includ the hardware um yeah but back then it was mostly focused around uh NPC which is uh kind of like um you know the the killer uh like the killer application for for one of the killer applications for NPC is definitely in Key Management for um stuff like blockchain so yeah I mean uh I had a chance to uh see the technology kind of like go all the way from Academia and then today it's like almost a stand out in in the industry um during that time by we also uh co-founded a nonprofit around pushing this technology

like to do this kind of like transition uh called the MPC Alliance which now is I don't know uh 50 50 plus companies some of them are very big and work together around this like Market education angle so uh I guess you know four years into Zeno into this uh company I realized that the amount of innovation uh that I can bring and how much I can stay in the focus of the company which remember it's like a consumer company is very much limited and I basically looked on how I can optimize um my you know just take what I already know and and uh the skills that I acquired and and what can I do that would have a larger impact so um then I started this phase of ideation

and I have to say I cannot take credit for the ID of you know marrying cryptography and and Hardware cuz it was like the signal was there I mean I know now that it was a very very good timing uh but um you know everywhere I went people just and I can mention here like Justin Drake for example who is you know is in sitting in our board and kind of like considered the Godfather of the company so he and and he and many others basically told me this is the opportunity like this is obvious that Hardware is going to be needed like any technology like any successful technology requires software algorithms and Hardware here it's clear that it's missing and the opportunity might be now so that's kind of like when I started to

explore it no okay before I let you kind of go on with um basically the start of inuyama and like what is being built today let's just uh hover over over your background a little bit because like especially in 20123 um you know I think a lot of us have lost sight that cryptocurrency is not just about currency and Defi and money but like the the actual base science at the the bottom of of this is cryptography and I think that's like why I'm I'm so um interested in like the perspectives of people that come at this from a academic like formalized academic background first really understand the power of the

technology and then are looking for ways to either build applications or build infrastructure so that um developers can focus on applications and so I think uh something I want to ask you is at this time and and even today when you're when inuyama is this just nent kind of vibe that's transforming into an idea um and this is a big question so let me know if you need me to refine it but like what are you starting to understand the purpose of ZK cryptography is for and the power of ZK cryptography um above and beyond just like cryptography um yeah that's uh inde a big question and um also you know just

to refer to the first part of the um of your statement indeed I mean uh back when you know I started to look into the space which was as I mentioned um uh short time before ethereum started it was it was intriguing there was uh not so many academic papers so it was kind of easy to stay on top today obviously it's impossible it's it's clearly impossible um and uh you you can see this kind of like transition I mean it's also another um phenomena that that we can highlight is that when you look at the know the professors like this um uh uh the people that are leading in in in Academia in in various fields that

are related to blockchain basically like this this entire lay of you know academics moved to lead or to be part of research group or you know blockchain companies and basic and what we see is that it pushes kind of like the space forward it's very interesting to be in this point where research which is like almost like academic research and and Industry and products are racing so they are like pretty much at the same point okay in a way um ZK is a good example right so ZK um I think by now um actually it's being led by the industry uh in in in a sense we've been used to Academia kind of like laying some Theory

right even think about zero knowledge like been around for like I don't know for decades or something and at some point you kind of like see the materialize and some products are becoming real and usable and and scale but nowadays you see the Innovation coming even from like the industry and the Cycles are like extremely fast so also for us as a hardware company ZK and and such Technologies are moving targets like we need to build our products our Solutions in a way that would uh be able to um sustain this environment that is like high pay B of innovation and always changing um and it means also something I guess on the application like we can

inject some some some of that into the application there I mean it's it's moving that fast so fast um at the infrastructure at this point in time uh and I assume that when you look at the application it's it's it's kind of like you know the ideas can just like keep coming and we've going to see some iterations on IDs some of them would be massive it from the get-go some of them would take uh quite a lot of time to mature and this is like some kind of like a challenge like you know in the last um we had like a whole ends meeting I think today um where we try to think about examples like let's let's tell the

story let's actually tell and we we took um decentralized kyc KYB as an example right um and kind of like try to connect the dots how you take this kind of application and go all the way to the infrastructure and how eventually it's going to it will mean that you're going to need let's say ZK at scale by using some kind of like ZK Bridges and ZK co-processors so that you'll be able to um kind of like uh make proofs across chains on the history um of ethereum all right so this this is just like you know toy example if you like we also been doing this exercise of even looking outside of web 3 um because you know

zero knowledge is about removing trust from from any system so in a way it's like pushing the boundaries of what is web 3 like it it it allows for decentralization you can take any Web Two company you want and one once you introduce zero knowledge you basically again remove trust making it more decentralized allow it to work with blockchains and um and so on so it's very interesting to to observe what other Industries might um be impacted from from this kind of like technology and um again like it's it's very blue like the line of what is um how they going to be leveraging like something like ethereum and you need to tell you you always need to look at this

like so maybe I'm kind of like laying out this on one one side it's like vertical right so let's take an application and vertically kind of like look how it works from you know the top maybe top down bottom up whatever the other side is horizontal like how can I look on different Industries different like um uh use cases applications and and and and try to apply the technology uh onto them right and that's yeah we can I can give some I don't know if it's interesting I can give some examples because right now I mean we see ourselves as kind of like leading the effort is building their full stack like the hardware and software we can basically deploy zero knowledge um on any hardware for for anyone I you can be an AI company working at at some kind of

like Cloud centralized service uh you can be I don't know like there's the the edtech and and health and finance gaming um defense industry like like we've been talking with with with different ones on different IDs and yeah I mean so to your question it's very hard for me to pinpoint like what what kind of applications are going to emerge and going to grow and at what point in time I can also say that this is um this is something that for me right as a Founder should it's it's one of the things that bothers me the most like I do want to see applications it's important like we try to aim our effort to where there are actual users right um and that's

something which is very challenging and I think that as a space we are kind of like um sometimes you know often neglecting the at least the infrastructure part right so we're not really considering what's the application here and we always need to keep to make sure we actually answer for if there is a pain we need to answer it I don't need to make like Innovation or build infrastructure for some I don't know um very fancy computation I need to solve real world problems yeah for sure for sure I think so I uh brief anecdote I was at Stanford uh SBC last week and I was very fortunate I was able to pull Professor Dan Bon and Professor David C aside for 30 minutes each and we talked

just a lot about um crypto right and like what both of them said to me which I think is exactly what you just said is that they've both been very important professors for decades and with crypto it was the first time in their career where they would write a research paper and then within like three months literally 3 months it would already be becoming an application that like either a company was formed around it or like mattered in real people's lives and I think like they both said I did this happened once and I just thought it was like cool cool but didn't you know just like a weird thing that happened it was the second time this happened where I realized like oh my God there's something magical happening in the

crypto industry and so like I think you're right like something special we have here is like this like total Fusion of the academic level with the you know company Builder level that you know maybe we'll mature out of maybe we won't but like it's clearly something incredibly special right and I think um you know I think kind of like to sum up what most of us in the ZK space are like kind of understanding the purpose of ZK to be and I think you you put it very aptly right is it's removing trust right but like more specifically it's about creating computation um that can be trustless right and so the idea is like with ZK knowledge you can run or sorry with ZK

proofs you can run computation anywhere centralized dark computers whatever but like with the ZK proof you can um you know recreate this idea of trustless that we found so critical in blockchain and so you know I think we're super early I think you're right to point out that it's like important to think about applications and not just build technology for technology sake but at the same time like because it's so early and like because ZK is it's it's literal moon maath right like especially you listen to the starkware guys talk it's it's actual magic literal Magic magic and um a huge part of what needs to be done today is just help people

understand what is this technology what are the possible use cases and then building it so instead of implementing graduate level math you're just implementing apis and sdks and like things that over the last 50 years we've developed into like developer toolkits uh so first comment is um about your encounter with Dan boness I was part of this Mo movement I mean we are part of this movement I remember like you know my previous company um it's not only that you know when when someone like d is releasing a paper it's it's about like infiltrating the you know Academia in a way like you want to influence what kind of paper is being written like you want to um uh to guide the research

questions CU from where we stand we actually um you know we work on problems that matters that actually can can you know can change lives um can move things and people in Academia not always have this um uh this point of view so when you can share with them these ideas often it leads to Joint research right um so I mean also in our companies it was like from day one we always been trying to be as you know curious as possible kind of like say ask the open questions um try to walk with other researchers like be very open that's part of our atos like be extremely open in what we do because we know that it can encourage like more research that

can lead into more exciting results um and so on the second thing is about education so we actually devote quite a lot of resources to do basic education and I think it's it's in our case again building also the hardware it's it's super important so when you think about a a team that has a product with zero knowledge and today zero knowledge is actually being run on the wrong hard on CPU and that's a limitation right so at some point you hit this battl neck like that's the best you can do and and often it's just not enough in terms of user experience now what we say in the company is because we can actually work on different Hardware on the right Hardware it's a matter of you know I mean depends on how much money you want

to invest what's your setup but basically um if you can Define some kind of like specification that you want to to meet we can actually make it happen like we can find the right Hardware um and and and make it work so for us education here is is basically ZK is here I mean it's not you try to say I'm not sure I you know I agree 100% with the statement that we are so early the way that we see it is that it it is do like today you can take um there's enough you know software engineering um already and and there's there are enough tools uh and we don't have enough users but if you actually need this kind of like tool in in your product if you need

zero knowledge and um you're willing to you know take a big bet on that which this is kind of like how far we are it's actually possible and it's it's important for us to bring this to the awareness of people and eventually developers should be aware that this is like part of their toolbox right this something they can use and of course it will improve over time right but I think we hit this uh uh this sweet spot of you know software Hardware algorithms where things are walking together um and I hope that soon we'll start to see even more kind of like how they click and actually um produce amazing products that that's what we aim at least but it it it boils down I mean education is is

important uh leg in all of that uh Story I mean we try to do basic things like we try to provide resources um to make them accessible to give talks about like the most basic things because it's it's it's a it's a tough topic I mean it's it's tough like there's it's hard to learn it's hard to understand so definitely there should be kind of like a lot of education for sure for sure sure yeah and and I take your point that like from a capability standpoint you're totally right like we're not early like kzg commitments are well understood like bulletproof pet like Peterson like there's so much that is like ready to be operationalized today but and yet I'd still say that we'd were early in like a very specific uh sense right which is

like today almost no developers have any understanding of like how UDP Works how TCP Works how IP Works how like I can how any of these systems work but every developer can trivially deploy a website that is accessible over https right and I think and and not only can they do it but like it is well understood like what what how to do it and then like what capabilities that provides to the application and I think the once we're at the https level for like individual commitment schemes like that's when I'll start to feel like we're not early we're in a developed

ecosystem so I don't know if you take issue with that but that's kind of no it's Point yeah F Point completely agree cool all right so I cut you off um while you were like giving us the the the how inuyama came to being so um why don't you just like you know real briefly or as briefly as you want like let us know like how you went from like understanding that um ZK is so incredibly powerful it's so limited by the the specific machines that we're running on and so like there's a huge opportunity to take academic um Concepts put them into sdks and into apis and then accelerate the out of them with Hardware yeah so I think that

initially the premise was um or the blue ocean that I saw in front of me was just this uh taking these two different things one is cryptography and specifically what they call like ultramodern cryptography or or privacy enhancing Technologies zero knowledge it can also by the way trickle to um postquantum cryptography and even NPC which is going in the direction of becoming more compute bounded um so take this on one hand on the other end take hardware and uh put them together now eventually we need to or what we it was very obvious that we need also to pick um like a specific technology to focus on um and Zer knowledge is the most advanced and also where you know

already we have companies um and there's a market so it it in a way also made us pick uh the most natural market for us which is uh web 3 and uh there are companies building on this technology they have like pain points already that can be solved and um it's it's it's the the you know the fact that zero knowledge is not a good fit for CPU it's very easy to you know uh to explain right like CPU is uh more for like general purpose Computing and um you know it everything from the number of bits to the type of like um uh computations that the arithmetic that is

being run on the CPU the memory everything is just like not a good fit for zero knowledge the best analogy we have is like with AI gpus and and compared to CPUs okay so like imagine today um writing a paper or deploying some kind of product and using CPUs for AI instead of um a GPU and and this is also where we need to be in in when it when it comes to zero knowledge right we also need to use like specialized Hardware that is more suitable to zero knowledge um so yeah I mean it was very clear from the GetGo that we need to bring the world of specialized Hardware into zero knowledge like we need to

basically grow as an ecosystem and move from this phase where people are implementing on CPU CU that's what they have that's what like you know that's the tools that they've got to basically um be able to seamlessly run it on GPU right like when you walk today with AI you don't kind of like try to understand oh this is um GPU that's fpga that I'm using it's an Asic you don't care about that like you say to py torch I'm going to run on GPU today and that's it like you're good to go so we need to be at that at that level and um we've done this I mean since since Inception which which was uh um you know early 2022 uh let's say uh we've been dealing with trying you know we've been trying to um

basically be part of the ecosystem and uh help companies um that uh would that are that get to this point that of a battl neck in the infrastructure right and uh it was a very interesting path that we took so we had many learnings along the way and and I would say this kind of like I wouldn't call it like pivots or like even mini pivots but you basically take some learning from you know you have some experience like you try to implement something on a given Hardware you see if it works if it makes sense if it can actually be deployed if it can be usable for someone then you make some like conclusions around that and you you you make the the next logical step which

is you know based on these conclusions you kind of like refine um what you're trying to do right so just to to give an example uh it was um I can know again let's take the analogy of AI so with AI you have matrix multiplication that's like the walking uh you know the Walking Horse the one that like uh the base the basis uh of all the math computation now if I have an accelerator for matrix multiplication if I solved AI acceleration not at all right today AI acceleration is handled like if you look even at like Nvidia and and and and broadcom like there are so many things that are not just the compute and you need to look at the problem kind of like end to endend right it's it's also

Network for example which many times becomes the main battle neck right nothing to do even with compute so that's another that's one lesson that we've learned right we also started from I mean like we realized as I said the beginning we need to build a Semiconductor Company that's kind of like the where we need to be but then we understood that okay like we need to wait first we need to develop some IP it's very clear in ZK what are the metrix multiplication of ZK like stuff like um like NTT MSM some kind of like you know Mer tree it depends Stark snark but you have this kind of like big problems that can be paralyzed that can be accelerated and we've noticed that just by accelerating those you are not getting to the actual acceleration that

you can achieve like it gives you something is it good enough not likely you need to look at the problem end to end and accelerate everything right um so this is kind of like where we uh that's like one conclusion that we had and then we we we understood what we what need to be done next right so yeah I mean our journey so far has been um full of these kind of like discoveries and then basically refine uh our um Direction in a way that would be more appropriate to actually serve the market yeah for sure first of all like the iter iterative approach is the only one that's successful in the long term so good for figuring that out but you're season entrepreneur so you know I think like the more first of all just uh for

those that are not deep deep into this world just to recap what you said um basically like so I in all of this stuff is just extremely extremely advanced in heavy mathematics right and so the naive approach to Hardware acceleration is to find the mathematical uh operation that is the most compute intensive then build specialized hardware for that and then the idea is if you find you know the space that's taking up 80% of your computation and you're able to improve that by you know 10x then that should like be a massive increase on the efficiency of your protocol and O what om just said is you would think that

that is correct but it turns out that the bottlenecks are so wide and spread over the whole stack of ZK proving that it turns out that there's much more than just building this specialized Hardware um so first of all was that a good summary um almost I mean I can give maybe another quick example just to you know make this point so one of the things we've done recently is an integration into a framework called Gnar so this is a go language um uh prover framework and the easiest thing to do or you know the the things that you can immediately do is just do a drop in replacement of this like big math problems right so you just replace them from being running on on the CPU to r on

a GPU so then we've done that then we've tried to Benchmark and see where it gets us right maybe it's good enough and we've noticed that we are actually losing quite a lot of time on the back and forth between the host and the GPU device it was like on GPU um so then you need to um drill and and like do a bit of like a deep dive into understanding why is that right so the next um thing we've done was for example we've noticed that between two big math problems there's some kind of like polinomial arithmetic or some vectorized arithmetic that's happening so it's a very it's a very simple computation it's a very uh small fast computation but the fact that you needed to take the output from the

device to the host do this polinomial arithmetic then send it back to the device this is what killed us right so we've just stayed in the device right so the change we've done was just let's stay in the device let's do the polinomial arithmetic on the GPU which surprisingly or not so surprisingly it's also very paralyzable so it was done like even best but then because we need we we were able to let go of this back and forth of communication but neck basically it kind of like took the whole computation to become much more acceler like the acceleration become like I don't know some fuor better so that's kind of like what I'm trying to say that it's it's you know you have these kind of like problems that are not just the math computation um but also how you kind of like connect everything together no man

that was super clear thank you super clear and so I think the important takeaway from this this is one um you know creating these like order of magnitudes improvement is so much more than just taking the computation and putting on Specialized Hardware right it's about building Integrated Systems but the the other important thing to realize is that when you make order of magnitude improvements like you're opening up entire new use cases and so I'm hoping that you have uh a good example in the ZK world but off the top of my head like the the example in just Tech techology world is right like back when the internet started when we had dial up and bandwidth was so bad like I

mean everything that we do on the internet but I'll just take one example recording this podcast just like wasn't possible Right like the bandwidth was too small we couldn't do video we couldn't even really do voice and so like in the next 20 years as we evolved like our you know from uh dialup to DSL to broadband and then like like like those order of magnitude increases like create brand new classifications of um of applications and so like making ZK more performant is not only like a business problem that only matters to huge corporations that have massive Cloud compute bills it's also about like creating space for this industry to um

like actually use the like mathematical magic that's being written at places like uh well worldclass universities um yeah that's true I can give you know many more examples just take one from the gaming industry um so today like multiplayer games um I mean you can equate it B basically also to how GPU um and and image rendering kind of like you know made a difference at some point but you know with gpus and image rendering like only what you once you got to like some threshold of performance you are actually able to feel it like you know see it in your like let's say subse kind of like Improvement and here we are kind of like

at this phase right so with multiple games in in uh today you have this like centralized server that um and it's more than one server but but it creates this like huge overhead because think about every player needs to communicate with the server kind of like um mention or or like talk to the server tell tell them what they need to do in the game and then there is like quite a lot of heavy logic around anti-cheating for example right so to make sure you're not cheating obviously you can replace anti-cheating with a proof right so it kind of like it simplifies like the communication and I I would even say more like you can remove the server I can be the server like you can become like full peer-to-peer games you can take whatever like game that um like fortnite and and make it PTO pill you

can scale the game right like in instead of like fortnite Battle Royale like you know Max 100 players now you can have 1,000 you can have 10,000 players same overhead more or less um you can also Now integrate it with the blockchain right cuz now it's decentralized I don't need to trust whatever like um epic blizzard to give me uh whatever to to some token or something like that they control it's you can do trade you can do all of this kind all of this stuff like I can you know keep there are many other examples also in gaming and in other field like AI can be completely disrupted so yeah I agree that once you go this kind of like threshold um it definitely opens up new possibilities and yeah I think again like in this

example from gaming you have to get and it must be done throughout and you have to get to like a certain point uh in terms of like the performance right you need to if you want to play a game um which is like you know real time in a sense you obviously want to aggregate some proofs like you don't want to send proof every like MC but still there is some like you know you want to bch a proof let's say of like one second of a movement in a game which is can be quite a lot when you think about the physical engine but then you want to send this proof over right which is very small again on the wire takes really little like in terms of like the the size but still like it means you need to have some performance even on the client side

in that in that regard um so yeah that's maybe just another example to to add some more color yeah awesome no man that incredible um okay so so going back to um what the Insight that you just brought to us is super interesting that you would think you can get like all the uh Improvement that you want at least in the short term just on the hardware side but what you've realized is that so much more than the hardware side it's about like the integrated system of you know everything from receiving the data to spitting out the proof and um I my question is like when you're building these products um are you able to build them like in modularized pieces so that

like you can focus on the hardware and then slott it into uh you know like the software stack based on on the customized needs of each application or because performance Is So based on the full stack like do you really need to start like with okay this is a use case now let's build a text stack around it and then then make that text stack public um so there are maybe two different approaches that you're describing here so maybe one is you know being Guided by a certain use case right so let's say you know like you have Bitcoin mining right so let's say this kind of like ZK mining which is like very there's like specified algorithm it's not going to change and here you can take it all the

way through ASC and you know in terms of the software stack I mean there should be some kind of like software stack here um but it's going to be relatively minimal right like should be enough to operate it um and that's it I mean you can probably think about more complex kind of like examples but that's one approach and when we get something like that right like there's a spec this is like the proof that needs to be accelerated um again like some kind of like proof of work um is is I guess the canonical example uh and you need to optimize for throughput um so here the approach is is basically going straight to the hardware and then start iterating right so you want to have something you measure performance you can you have

very good tools today obviously to check correctness but then to kind of like see what what is it that gets you uh still to become slow and and how to improve it right so it can be by moving to uh newer technology it can be by having better algorithms it can be by having like you know better engineering it can be many things and and it's like an amazing problem space on its own and a fascinating one right and we've been we've been uh working on that front as well uh on on you know several occasions and yeah I mean that's that's kind of like a very straightforward kind of like how will play I think that uh then the other approach is connect to what I mentioned before is the this is like a

moving Target like the space is evolving and like you cannot really point at like you know a point in time and say here we are going to start to see some convergence I don't think we're going to get to this point similar like what we see in AI so that's why also for us the approach is very modular and very kind of like generic the way that what we try to build so we just try to get everyone you know it's kind of like tide or like All Ships bools are kind of like Rising that's what we try to do in that sense so it goes it starts from like our ID for an Asic which we call zpu and it's just like you know a GPU but more suitable for ZK and and cryptography right that's kind of like one one ID but

I think the even more important part is in that case it's not in the hardware it's in the software like you want to be able to build something which um is going to uh help developers or get them or like you know um get them to use the hardware in a way that they don't don't need to think about it and we already mention it in this conversation right so for us for example the equation right now is that API is is bigger than performance like we care I don't really care today if it's 10x or 11x I would rather have like you know a cleaner better API uh for the developer to be able to utilize or take advantage of this 10x to begin with right and that open up kind of like a lot of challenges right so for us for example we are

putting a lot of resources onto you know this API right this this kind of like how do I allow developers writing in Rust in go language C++ and other kind of like forms to accelerate right so the one thing I already mentioned is that the drop in replacement is you know the most immediate thing but I already give and what I give in the example is that you also want in a z problem you want to take it end to end so you also want to support polinomial arithmetic which opens up like interesting question what does it mean I mean what kind of like API I expose like do I call it like Pol a polinomial do I allow to do multiplication of polinomial do I do something which is like lower level so for example in our case we decided on two levels of API one is more of kind of

like engineering one is more for let's say developers so one is more for the ones that are like actually trying to work on the on like developing ZK protocols from zero and one is for like you know developers that just want to integrate ZK inside of their project or product um and they want to kind of like keep it more at the high level or there's a polinomial now I know that I can call a GPU for that right so that's like the second approach which again it's another problem it's another kind of like uh interesting problem space uh with a bit of different challenges yeah I mean again it's we're just at a time right now when it's just so important to put the tools out there um and and create them then uh like it's still yeah

it's just so important to like be able to work with developers who understand like you know for examp like to understand that computation really is just math and then because it's math you can manipulate it using math is definitely like a a hurdle that that a developer needs to reach over and I think it's so important to both service the cryptographers and the ones who have made that leap but also like we need just application developers who like don't even care they just need capabilities and so it sounds like while you're building and going on it's super important that you are working with and actively cultivating relationships with

both yeah I mean I I I complet the the your second point about you know having application developers simply don't care and be able to steal leverage Hardware um and get this performance I think it's critical I think this is where we are at this point I mean this is what we're trying to do like kind of like building the pie torch but for zero knowledge in a sense like you should be able to just like write your algorithm uh or just take like your ZK from somewhere it should work on GPU or it should work on like whatever device specialized Hardware like it should just like walk out out of the box you don't need to think about it yeah so let's um let's pivot a little bit more to talking about inuyama and like how do you build

a business around this so my first question to you is that like in the long term like when you think five or 10 or 25 years ahead um what is inoyama look like to you is this like an does this look like Nvidia does this look like AWS does this look like twio like how do you understand what um You're Building at least today okay so that's a good question um first we are trying to build a Semiconductor Company silicon company it's clear that this is the way to go with this type of cryptography and this is where we want to be eventually now it's not like we try to Define ourselves

like you know before even talking about business model and so on you should also talk about vision and the vision is that ZK should be accessible it should be accessible for us on phones on on on my Mac Everywhere like on data centers hypers scolars ZK should be just you know something we use just like we use today GPU right uh you have it everywhere you have it in in like in my Mac I have one with CPU and GPU there should also be a zpu inside of that right so that's kind of like the vision and once that's going to be uh possible then I'm sure we'll see like many many use cases as we mentioned before decentralized identity right like

critical part of I think um like the modern whatever stack that we'll see in the future anyway um so that's in terms of division the question is like let's kind of like try to sketch how we get to that point to that point from where we are today um and I think that for us like uh what's important is indeed to focus at the cheap level right so once you have you know the best technology um and the best engineering put into a chip then you can you know put it in different form factors for IP to uh servers and data centers and hypers scolars you can package it in in in different shapes and and and so on now it's um this is what I think we

should eventually um focus but right now we are very far from that point right now as I mentioned uh we are still and you also told us uh that we are still in the early days and today it's basically transitioning or enabling the usage of this uh specialized Hardware to run ZK and the best what we have today is we have gpus we have fpgas today um gpus and specifically Nvidia gpus um um I think provide like the best um uh the best performance the best trade-off that you can find it doesn't mean that it's going to stay like this forever uh but right now this is kind of like the

easiest also in terms of like programming them and use gpus uh and they you know they're very accessible we think that's kind of like the next um The Next Step the next or the first 10 e should come for gpus right so here let's start to uh to connect the dots right so again building a Semiconductor Company means certain things it means something about what investors how much capital what's the IP that you want to build what's the kind of network you want the supply chain I mean even you know if I'm going to build an ASC at some point and I just want to clarify that as I'm trying to uh sketch we work by removing battl necks and it might be that the first battle neck is not going to be a

computational um batt neck like like zpu GPU it might be the it's going to be in memory or in like Network right so we just going to take it one step at a time uh removing button X and kind of like grow with uh the industry right we want to keep at the same Pace because if I'm going to give you an Asic today you will have zero like you can you don't need it like you're fine with GPU you don't really need an Asic but at some point GPU will not be able to catch up right because um either because of availability or just simply because of you know the Cycles so so there are going to be new Nvidia gpus let's say 2025 Maybe by that time the demand for ZK uh markets is going to be too big

right you just cannot catch up so it kind of like gives you a very clear signal now you need to move to the next 10x now I need to move to the next 100 De um so that's kind of like how we try to uh uh to see ourselves grow over the next 5 10 years and year we do kind of like long-term planning that's also part of being a Semiconductor Company uh and when it comes to bus business model so um it's it's easiest it's the easiest is to talk about you know at the end and it's going to look more like Nvidia that's like what I imagine at least which means that again focusing on the chip focusing on uh having this um amazing technology of zpu and and Zer knowledge uh um as6 and that's what you

try to sell eventually that's what you want to have in phones as I mentioned so it means you need to work with like apples and and and Samsung and the likes and you want them in in yeah in different kind of like um appliances so that's I would say kind of like what would be um you know looking far into the future but when you try to project it into today so today as I mentioned it's all about education it's all about taking the developers the developers community and bring them to um the future uh and and the next kind of like generation of um ZK systems should be run on gpus as like first class citizen

right so the business model for us here is going to be something similar to um an open- Source business model like a freemum if you want right so we want to and I mean I I've been working on open source software like I don't know for how many years now I cannot see in a different way we try to do things differently also in Hardware right like we try to actually like you know break take uh all of the stigmas around you know being like very kind of like isolated and and modes and all of that we try to do things in the way that we believe should be done so today it's about getting these tools at the hands of the developers allowing them access to um gpus in the short to medium-term Future when more l2s like Z rollups um

and other kind of like products are going to scale there's going to be some economies around them right these economies probably attract some big operators that would like to participate in these networks might be that this is going to be the only the only way to actually participate in in in in I don't know in some way in in part in some of these networks we want to provide them tools and here you can also talk about how you take our open source tools and libraries and add to them like to give an example right so what we developed or or what you can find today in open source with ingonyama is this Library call it called icycle but sure if you have a GPU you can now run ZK and you can get whatever 10x in your application

but if you are an operator you have a data center right you you are a cloud operator I don't know and you actually want to participate in one of these networks first you want to be very competitive and second you want to be able to deploy in in in such scale right you want to be able to have like a data center type of support so for example nowadays we are doing this kind of like experimentation uh with uh with few Partners on how to scale how how do I handle multiple gpus multiple users and multiple applications at the same time right that's a question and this something that we can actually use as as an AP right I think it's kind of like very legitimate way to kind of like um uh capitalize on on this technology but yeah the idea is that today developers

like you me um anyone that wants to build on ZK people in Academia should be able to just you know do it like seamlessly um and and just enjoy the benefits of the performance yeah for sure man so uh well I there's a lot to say there but I think the most important thing is um for me like the reason I am like so willing and excited about dedicating my like life and career and like interest and reputation to crypto and like specifically to ethereum is like for me like ethereum is like the final promise and the deliver like the Deliverance of open- source software and

like what's special about ethereum is that we're sharing in the same way that open source has always been amazing but for the first time the the way ethereum works with the burn and all this stuff is that like as we build together we all benefit like in a very concrete Financial way together and you know for me open source software has changed from like this like kind of like libertarian like weird internet culture thing that started with just like Linux and and even way before that Unix all that stuff but um to like today I see that like that that what crypto is is like the perfect meeting of cryptography and advanced math and advanced computation

and like open- Source ethos so I just like you spent 3 minutes on the inoyama site like I you can tell like you guys get it and like really believe in that that and like that that the ethos that you guys are putting out there is the most important thing is that other people have access to the same knowledge and tools that we do and like we're always just going to believe that it's better that more people are contributing than like that we dig a mode around ourselves so I just want to um say thank you and like you're totally right and like keep doing it in that specifically I mean thanks but uh it's I would say even more than that like you know we're

dealing with cryptography and cryptography I mean it's my opinion and and the way that we're building this company part of the culture by no way you cannot have cryptography as close Source like that's wrong on so many levels like this should be you know public goods in in in in in a sense um and yeah I've been you know I've been enjoying working on cryptography open source it's it's a win-win I mean you know it's um it's a bit scary once you realize that your cryptograph and your code like used like to pass billions of dollars you know between Banks and and whatever um but it also very it's very rewarding and the only way that you can actually achieve it is by having this kind of like scrutiny of Open Source and the collaboration environment that you

get from open source and this is how you actually achieve the level of trust um that you want in in in cryptographic system like like no patents um and no close Source like this should kind of like be open so ethereum very much like aligns with that as as you pointed out um it's part of the itos and then like we are like happy to be part of this um you know ecosystem and contribute out about no for sure and you're you're totally right like the what is the point of like um of private cryptography like at that point it's just trust again so like why bother and so um yeah man great point so uh man I we could keep going on

for forever I think like honestly like I really want to just like drill in with you and figure out like are you guys inh house going to build the ZK data center or is that an opportunity for someone to go build twillo ZK U man like there's a billion things to talk about here but um you know unfortunately we're wrapping out of time so with our last few minutes here Omar I just I guess like what would be your call to um developers out there who are like really starting to get that ZK is like transformational and really can add capabilities to their products but like don't really know um what what to do other than yeah just read crypto Twitter like how would you uh encourage

people to get more involved and start thinking about how to build with ZK so first of all crypto Twitter um is there's a lot of positive sides like to that um that's fine to you know to read uh from some of the people there and and you know it also links into stuff that you can kind of like going into to the rabbit hols and that's completely fine like you know to get lost inside of you know this ocean of information sometimes that's that's the way to go um until you pick you pick up something that picks your interest um I think that and and you know one point I want to make is that in this entire conversation you can first you can replace zero knowledge with f morphic encryption and most of it would stay true and that's also what we

try to that's the the the view that we also try to take kind of like support um you know if it's cryptography that can become useful in the context of you know decentralized Computing then we want to enable this cryptography to run at scale in a decentralized fashion uh by anyone um so for for for those developers that are um just starting first there are great resources to learn um it's not necessarily easy um the the own ramp to you know to get familiar with that but we are getting there like we're keep we're improving so it really depends on you know what the developer I'm saying it kind of like you know wearing a hat

of like if I were a developer now what would they do so first I think there's kind of like at this point the space is very um it's very bold so one like maybe first question I would ask myself is how to F like where to focus and for some for some folks it would be around the application Level right maybe zero knowledge machine learning is what uh um most exciting for them and that's that's cool like there are a lot of work a lot of work to be done on zkl um for others the math might be you know where the magic happens and this would guide you to kind of like take a very different path into understanding that and and

there there's I mean and then you need to kind of like you know there's the Imposter syndrome that you need to kind of like shake off of um because this is you know as I said at the beginning Academia industry we are walking now you know hand in hand it's like we are moving forward at a very fast pace you can just you know find your sweet spot and and start to contribute start small but I I can assure you that like quickly you're going to get to a point where you are actually can you know just push the font right um which is amazing it's like it's amazing opportunity and it happens all course so it's yeah I mean just just focus find where to focus try to learn

crypto Twitter is one good resource there are many others um and then try to contribute right so try to find like uh some open source try to build some app go into an event there are like amazing events happening like all all around the year so yeah I mean uh that's kind of like my my tip awesome man thank you so much and yeah I I think the most important thing you said right there is we all experence experience imposter syndrome every day but um the ZK space is can be a Minefield right because like you are dealing with like people that are inventing new math and people that are building billion dooll companies and it's just like so crazy and out there and changes every day but like all I can

say is that every other person in this space also feels like the dumbest guy in the room so uh join us everybody feels like the dumbest guy in the room that's what you need to real guys like like everybody feels the same that's true for sure man okay so uh before I let you go can you please tell the people um where can they find you where can they find inuyama and yeah just um if they want to learn more where should they go um so yeah the company is as I mentioned trying to walk pretty much in the open so our guub is obviously extremely active uh I'm proud to say that we have like power users and contributors

and there are also great resources to learn there's the inedia which I think is by now the number one like uh place from where people are coming to our website uh so it's very popular kind of like resource to learn the website in gon.com um is another confle venue where you can read you can get links to the videos that we that we post to the blogs we try to release blogs quite often so that's I think the best um best way to uh to learn more about where we are in our journey and obviously we're very accessible we have a Discord where the engineers are hanging uh you can get their attention like quite easily just you know reach out ask a question one of

the channels one of them would answer uh I'm less important I mean I'm always available on telegram I have my own kind of like website email whatever I try to be available for anyone that uh think that I can help but yeah I mean I think that engineers in the company like this is probably where you want to hand is what the cool stuff is happening my friend much too humble and you're doing the the CEO thing right where it's your job to get your people the resources and the information and the connections that they need so um all I can say is that I'm so impressed and so excited for to to see what you do and how inoyama like does become the uh does grow to become the next Nvidia and um

I'm just so excited for what you're doing for this space so my friend thank you so much for for the podcast for the time and um man I I hope I talk to you soon thank you thank you for inviting me again was a real pleasure to uh to speak today