Succinct: Every Rollup Will Be a ZK Rollup! - Uma Roy. Ep. 577

Transcript

my hot take is that all ZK rollup teams are actually just rollup teams and they should think of themselves as rollup teams not ZK team with the technology we put out there in sp1 ZK has become a commodity it is accessible to every single rollup team out there and actually recently we did an integration with OP stack which is traditionally an optimistic rollup stack and we made op stack into a ZK rollup the integration is called op C sync and it's like live and running and people can use it so so if you want to prove some computation you just write it in Rust and then you can generate proofs with sp1 welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain

revolution I'm kri ANS and today I'm speaking with Umar Roy the co-founder and CEO of succinct succinct are building a decentralized ckvm and Prov Network um and before we talk uh with um let me tell you about our sponsors this week this episode isoud ly brought to by nosis a collective dedicated to advancing and decentralized future nosis leads Innovation with circles nosis pay and metry reshaping open Banking and money with Hashi and nosis VPN they're building a more resilient privacy focused internet if you're looking for an L1 to launch your project nosis chain offers the same development environment as ethereum with lower transaction fees

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they support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos ensuring your stake is responsibly managed thanks to the advanced meev research you can also enjoy the highest staking rewards you can stake directly from your preferred wallet set up a white label note restake your assets on IGA or symbiotic or use the SDK for multichain staking in your app learn more at chorus. one and start sing today Uma thank you so much for coming on thanks for robing me cool um can you tell us a bit about your professional and educational background before starting Su so I've always done a lot of math um in high school and college I did a lot

of math research and after school um well during school I I studied math and computer science at MIT um and I also got my masters there actually in machine learning and after school I was working in machine learning research at Google brain and then after was at a small startup doing machine learning stuff uh but my interest in math um is what originally hooked me into ZK uh because obviously has a lot of math and it's a very math heavy field and I found ZK through a friend who I met at MIT and uh yeah that's kind of like how my background ties into ZK you foray into kind of like um blockchain

was mostly uh prompted by your interest in zero knowledge stuff yeah that's that's roughly correct I I'd always been interested in kind of like the ideas and concepts of blockchain broadly not just ZK um but when I finally like learned about ZK I kind of it that got my interest enough that I realized I wanted to like build in the space what was it about the zero knowledge technology that kind of draw you in specifically uh probably like a lot of other people I was just really fascinated by the actual technology I think ZK is a very magical concept like

you can prove to someone else that a certain computation is true without revealing what the inputs are um that seems almost like it should be imp possible um and so it was just a puzzle to me of like how to figuring out like how that's possible understanding the maap understand the cryptography um and yeah that's like what really drew me in cool so you came for you came for the tech um tell us about how that kind of transformed into a vision for succinct yeah so we were building in the ZK space um for a while uh so I met my co-founder at this summer residency hosted by ZX Park which is this I guess

sister organization to the EF the ethereum foundation um and they were hosting this like kind of co-working over the summer together so I met my cound there we were working on a ZK project actually it was related to nosis um and I think maybe that's one of the first times we interacted was through that um but we are building a ZK Bridge from ethereum to nosis chain and in particular building a ethereum ZK like clients so that was like our first war to the ZK world was building this project how did the product offering the Vol over time so cinct was started out of that project um so originally when we started cinct we were building a ZK bridge and kind of with this endgame

thesis that the future of bridging was all going to be ZK like clients and I still think that's actually true um so we were really focused on building this bridge um and making all bridges ZK uh we worked on that for maybe like six months and actually shipped an ethereum ZK like client and it got integrated into the noos validator set as a ZK validator um we shipped a few other ZK like clients but then after some point we realized that uh you know ZK was too hard like building each of those like clients took you know several months and many Engineers I it it's very very complicated and we realized that you know ZK has a lot of potential but if it

was always going to be so hard to use it wasn't it wasn't going to go anywhere and that's what inspired us to build our ZK VM sp1 which makes ZK really easy so instead of spending months you know making a like client and writing these like things called circuits you just write normal code and rust and you still can use ZK and yeah that was Evolution from our early days in ZK as like ZK Builders to like building underlying ZK info that makes ZK accessible to everyone quick before we kind of um dive into the zkm because I have so many questions as to this um let's kind of briefly clarify kind of what a CK like client does so kind of like it it's basically it's um it's a client that can

kind of verify the state of another blockchain on chain right so kind of c c can you talk about this a little bit and why why you think um ZK like cim bridges are kind of the end game of bridges yeah so a like client is just um a protocol to verify the consensus of a particular chain uh and so when you verify the consensus of a particular chain you can then you know understand if someone has like burned a token on that chain and then you can mint them a token on the other side so kind of like classical bridging um so a ZK like client is just implementing that like client in a zero

doch proof and then verifying that proof uh on chain instead of verifying like the whole like client functionality and the reason you'd want to do this is if you want to run a like client on ethereum it'll be really really expensive um because you'll have to verify a bunch of signatures you'll have to do a bunch of computation whereas if you have a ZK like client you just verify a proof of that computation and uh that is just a lot more gas efficient so basically tldr is a ZK like client is a way to generated zero knowledge proof of a light CL that makes it really gas efficient to use in onchain contexts for bridging I think that's that's that's a fantastic summary so kind of let's move on to the kind of ZK VM part so you said

that um kind of like building the Sackets was really hard H how can we kind of like as someone who's never actually rich in this circuit before um how do I go about it so kind of I know what kind of the logic is I kind of want in that circuit um what do I do yeah so to take a computation that you want to generate a ZK proof for you have to write it in a form that like you can actually do a ZK proof in and historically that meant taking your computation and breaking it down into additions and multiplication so it's

very primitive you'd basically use a special language or DSL there's a bunch of other of options out there including um tools like circom which maybe people have heard of um where you would make a computational graph out of ads and multiplies that express your computation um obviously that's you know very comp it's not very fun because you're working with these very basic Primitives and very basic building blocks and it's similar to like writing assembly or writing a very very lowlevel language instead of writing something like python why is it that um in order for it to kind of be incorporated into a into a ZK second why can you only use additions

and multiplications yeah that's a good question um so the way ZK protocols generally work is you take your computation and then you encode it into polinomial and then you prove relationships between the polinomial and that's kind of where the additions and multiplications come from like in polinomial world you can do additions and multiplications and you can prove that polinomial are related to each other by like those operations I guess um and so it has to do with like all the underlying math and cryptography of how ZK actually works um and kind of turning your computation into something as polinomial friendly uh is the reason

you have to break it down into these very like primitive um relationships if that makes sense um I mean you obviously there's a lot more math there that I could dive into but maybe that's like a simplified explanation I I think that's that's fair maybe we'll link to some resources in the show notes um so the zkm is my understanding correct that kind of um I can put whatever Russ code or python code or whatever into it and it'll kind of automatically turn it into a ZK second so it is correct that you can put any rust code into it so now if you want

to prove some computation you just write it in Rust and then you can generate proofs with sp1 um you can't do python because like we you know Python's like interpreted language but yeah you can do Rust which is like I guess the most one of the most common languages used in blockchain um it doesn't quite turn the code into a circuit um what it does is it uh compiles the code to an instruction set called risk five so that's like similar to evm you know you have a bunch of op codes and then we prove the execution of that risk five of all those risk five instructions so we basically prove that like when you execute the program and

all the instructions in the program correctly um that it gives like a certain output and a certain result so we have a risk five circuit that is responsible for approving the execution of this RIS five bik code and then your program gets run through that circuit um if that makes sense so that's we're not turning your computation into a circuit we're instead going through this risk five layer what's risk five layer uh risk five is like an instruction set so your program gets compiled to a bunch of instructions in a row so it might be like do an add do a multiply do a subtract you know then do a jump or do a branch or whatever um so that's like the underlying

instructions of your program and then we prove that like uh the instructions of your program are executed correctly like in the correct order um and you know end up touching memory correctly and stuff like that and having this final output um for those of that are familiar with the evm it's very similar like you take solidity it gets compiled to evm by code which is a bunch of like EV M op codes and then when you run a smart contract you're just executing a bunch of evm op codes in a row um so it's it's pretty simil mental model when you say we proof who is we in this uh in this situation uh yeah like our ZK BM sp1 is

proving the execution of the risk 5 code Okay cool so it's it's a it's a fully trustless setup right kind of not you guys proving that okay why hasn't this been done before so kind of like it seems like um kind of turning um it seems like it's pretty well understood what kind of operations you can kind of feed into um uh a into a ZK proof um so why um and I assume there's pretty good cookbooks how to kind of turn whatever you have into that why didn't what kind of your build exist

before yeah it's a good question um so I think for a long time people were really fixated on proving the evm so there was a lot of ZK evm teams and I mean that makes sense because validity and all the ethereum stuff uh runs an evm so people are really fixated on that particular objective and then I think also it wasn't super clear that proving risk five would be performance or doable like people thought it would be really slow it's not an instruction set that's really designed for ZK um it's actually a very common instruction set that's used by you know in many other contexts so people just didn't think it'd be

performant they'd be like sure you could do this but it would just be really slow um and I think one of spun's major Innovations was that we actually showed that it could be fast for workloads like like clients or rollups that people care about um and now there's I mean there's a lot of people trying to prove this risk five um instruction set these days and um yeah so these days there are more people trying to do that uh I think it's worth mentioning two teams one is the starkware team uh they didn't try to prove risk five but they wrote a zkv for Cairo which is like their instruction

thought um and it's like a yeah it say instruction set that's optimized for ZK or like designed for ZK so they kind of like pioneered in many ways ZK VMS way back you know five five years ago and then the risk zero team um was working on proving risk five um execution um and then I think our major contribution was kind of taking risk 5 ZK BMS and making them really really performant for R and showing that it's actually like practical to use um for a lot of workloads people care about cool so um I think kind of we've

covered the basics of sp1 the other key part of your offering is the Prova Network right so tell us about that and kind of like how these two in yeah so sp1 is you know an open source project you can run sp1 and generate proofs on your laptop but I like to tell people that's not really a fun time because proof generation is very intensive and so to actually make it very performant and really cheap we have a GPU implementation of sp1 where if you generate proofs on a GPU it's much faster much cheaper but obviously I think most people don't want to like set up that infrastructure themselves

and so our Prov network is a way for you know anyone to Outsource proof generation to the proof Pro Network so instead of generating proofs on your laptop you generate them uh through the pro Network so you send it like hey I have a program um here's my input I want you to generate a proof and then the Prov Network provides a protocol for anyone in the world to plug in their GPU and contribute capacity so uh it's kind of similar to mining where like in the past anyone in the world could you know mine Bitcoin blocks uh through the proof of work mechanism we have a similar kind of concept or architecture where anyone in the world can generate

proofs um and like earn transaction fees from the pro Network how does the consensus mechanism for the Prov Network work um yeah that's like work that's coming out soon so um we're right now the pro network doesn't exist it's just like a concept we've put out there um but it it it's not actually like live or running yet there's no consensus mechanism for the Prov Network there's more like an allocation mechanism for like if there's a bunch of proofs coming in who gets the right to generate the proof and earn the fees for that proof so the allocation mechanism that we have

is this like auction style u mechanism that we're going to publish some more material on soon um and that's responsible for deciding like you know who gets to generate the proof and at what clearing price um the fees get paid what do you envisage as the use cases um for sp1 and kind of the proofs generated by the pro Network I think I'm really excited about ZK rollups in general I think right now there's a lot of talk about the ethereum fragmentation and all these problems that the rollups can't interoperate and talk to each other and I think the biggest flaw of the optimistic rollup

design is that withdrawals and bridging takes seven days and fundamentally I think that leads to a lot of this fragmentation and interoperability issues so I think ZK is the best way we're actually going to solve that in the etherum ecosystem uh every rollup I think will be a ZK rollup and they will all be able to talk to each other via you know verifying ZK proofs of each other's date um and then there will be like seamless bridging and interrup so in the near term I'm most excited about ZK rollups using sp1 um and turning every rollup into a ZK rollup in the longer term I think there's a lot of other really exciting applications even outside of blockchains so for example there's teams that are

doing ZK email or ZK passport where they basically prove um you know pass for attestation information or email information in a zero knowledge proof and then you can use that to bridge offchain data onchain or you can kind of even use it in non-blockchain context to prove that like you have certain credentials or your certain nationality um and I think that's really interesting like basically ZK attestation ZK identity is pretty exciting um and then there's a bunch of other types of software broadly that can be proven ZK that could benefit from verifiability um that I'm also excited about so um talking about um ZK rollups

um I mean one of the core tenants of kind of their existence is that they kind of produce these CK proofs kind of I earlier kind of got the impression a little bit that this is infrastructure for customers of what whatever feather um that kind of are not specialized in ZK or kind of don't want to kind of put in the effort to kind of build their own ZK infrastructure this can't be set for ZK rollups right so kind of like if you look at the ZK rollups that are currently out there are they interested in kind of um using a Comm commoditized version of um uh um of a ZK uh proof generator surprisingly yes I think um my

hot take is that all ZK rollup teams are actually just rollup teams and they should think of themselves as rollup teams not ZK teams um I think with the technology we put out there in sp1 ZK has become a commodity it is accessible to every single rollup team out there and actually recently we did an integration with OP stack which is traditionally an optimistic rollup stack and we integrated um we took their state transition function we stuck it in sp1 and we made op stack into a ZK rollup uh it's called the integration is called op C synct and it's like live and running and people can use it so already we've kind of Taken existing stocks that are

non ZK and integrated ZK into them and so it's just inevitable that every single rollup will be ZK so if you're a ZK rollup team I think um there's a lot to building a Rob up that is very very difficult and very important that's not on the technology side you know it's like bed you know exchange Integrations making your ecosystem great making your app developers lives great um you know attracting liquidity and stuff like that attracting users um and I think now that all the rollups have ZK I think all the rollups should like focus on basically like that more user facing layer of this stack and just use whatever the easiest best tool

is for ZK which in this case like sticking you know your rooll up state transition function and sp1 seems like a pretty good option if you look at the proofs that um ZK rollups use are they in any way um geared towards the use case because kind of sp1 is very general purpose right so kind of I would have assumed that kind of like if I were to build the ZK rollup I would actually build it in such a way that it's here exactly towards my purpose and that would make it more performing than kind of a general purpose machine that's also yeah a really great question and observation so I think historically that is what ZK rollup

teams have done they like hand coded this specialized custom circuit for the evm and for their rollup um there's two interesting things though one is actually sp1 is very very performant so we've actually seen it be sometimes even more performant than custom Solutions that teams have created and that's because a lot of these ZK rollup teams started a few years ago and the ZK Tech has improved a lot in the meantime and also sp1 is really fast and we have a GPU implementation and we have this system of like pre-compile that make it very very efficient so one surprising fact is that actually some S1 can be more performant

than a custom stack for the evm and I think this was even surprising to us and surprising to other people so um that's like one interesting thing the other thing is um even if sp1 is a bit slower say it's even like you know 50% or 25% you know more expensive or slower because you can just take normal code and run it in sp1 life in all other dimensions gets a lot better so um you're because you can just reuse existing rust tooling like ref and revm and ethereum node software um because your developers can update their state transition function whenever

ethereum upgrades um because you kind of have like all this flexibility and you have really great tooling and it's so easy to build I think the cost basically or sorry the benefits basically vastly outweigh the costs um and so I think all teams are basically moving towards a ZK VM based model okay let's talk about the um prover Network in a little bit more detail so kind of like in order to kind of become aover I kind of need specialized Hardware I get that because kind of like you you're gearing this towards gpus um what else do I need to fulfill to kind of become part of the Prov Network and how do you make sure

that um the Prov Network remains decentralized and incentivized effectively yeah it's um so for the prover Network as you mentioned today people need like gpus to join and run proofs and again this our Pro Network like we've written up a design for it and we're going to be publishing that soon and we'll probably have like a test net in the upcoming months for it um and so we'll be able to like test out a lot of these ideas and make sure that they actually work the mechanism we designed for the prer network in terms of allocating who gets what proof and stuff like that um was specially designed to keep decentralization in mind so normally you could just to decide who

gets approved you could allocate it to you know the person who offers to prove it the cheapest or you could have some mechanism like this that's kind of a straw man our mechanism is specially designed so that um it's still maintains decentralization and prevents like Prov or concentration so more concretely there's kind of this parameter that you can tune up or down and depending on what the value of that parameter is um Pro sometimes with some probabil people who are a little more expensive than the cheapest will still get selected to generate a proof um and that's like important for making sure that a lot of people can participate and it just doesn't concentrate towards like one really big large dominant Pro um so yeah we kept that pretty explicitly in

mind when designing the mechanism for the Prov Network um yeah that's probably the biggest important thing um for it this is a very Noob question but is the output of um the ZK VM deterministic so kind of like if I put in some sort of rust code will I always get the same outcut yes um or people should only prove programs that are deterministic so yes that's true okay so um I can easily verify that kind of the um the

quote that I'm getting back from the Prova network is sufficient and corrup right yeah um the whole uh kind of point of ZK is that you can verify that the proof and the computation was done correctly um in much less time to redo the computation so I think that uniquely enables the prer network there's like no additional trust assumptions there's no um yeah there there's no additional like trust vectors uh you send it your request for proof someone generates a proof and then you can verify that the proof is valid uh and then the money gets like sent out to them after the proof gets verified so I assume suin

business model is also somewhere in this incentive layout right yeah um yeah that's exactly right um I think our thesis is that people will want to use the pro Network because it'll be much more cheap and much more ient and much more easy than you know them setting up their own infrastructure um I think in practice people that use sp1 today use our Cloud proving service instead of running it themselves we basically offer like a we like to call it our Prov Network beta but really is just us generating proofs and sending them back to people and most people use sp1 through that um because setting up your own infrastructure really sucks um so we imagine that you know people want to generate proofs and pay for that and um yeah that you know

that those fees will be directed to the approver network um I kind of imagine it actually similar to Da where today like if you're a rollup you pay ethereum for settlement you pay ethereum for da because you're posting your transactions there and I imagine in the future that you'll part of each transaction will pay for proving um and that will like go towards our appr your network when you say that that goes towards the Prov Network you you yourselves um are you a privileged party in that approval Network kind of do you get um kind of some basis points of all transactions that are kind of uh uh

settled on that Pro Network or are you just one of the provs yourselves oh like our our company yeah uh no no I don't think we'll be a privileged party like it's going to be a decentralized neutral protocol um and we will just participate in it um probably as like approver of Last Resort basically how does it work for you in business times though so kind of like if if you're only a proving participant in your network and you kind of you get the fees that everyone else who hasn't developed either sp1 or the Provo Network um also gets H how is that uh uh how is that work I provide for you

guys yeah well I think the network will also have some like Marketplace fee for you know facilitating kind of this interaction yeah okay so so that way kind of you are kind of your company somehow is a privilege Pary and that kind of like you're offering the marketplace and kind of like u i kind of if you if you're working under the assumption that kind of like these um uh these CK proofs will be um commoditized um completely then obviously kind of the fees will be kind of like erased to the bottom so kind of you need to be able to kind of participate in kind of like the entire volume and kind of make it worth your while

right yeah I think yeah exactly like I think it's like any other protocol for example Lio kind of facilitates this interaction between um people who want a stake and then also like the professional node operators and they have a 5% fee to the node operators 5% fee to their protocol I imag it being pretty similar okay and so what what blockchain applications are currently supported by your offering so you just talked about um the op succinct offering um is there is there anything else or anything you're particularly excited that that's launching soon yeah um so two Bridges actually run on sp1 um the Celestia bridge and the

Avail Bridge are like sp1 programs um and you know run through sp1 and you know our ZK like clients actually on ethereum that you know secure pretty big ecosystems our original Dream of every bridge being a ZK Bridge um came true uh but it is through sp1 instead of you know our original approach of handwriting every single uh program so that's pretty cool to see I'm very excited about the ZK rollups um and op succinct uh they're a very popular will up stock a lot of people use them like Bas uni chain um world world chain as well so it's kind of exciting to one day have a

path towards all those ecosystems becoming ZK rollups um there's also a lot of other people building very cool stuff some in the Bitcoin ecosystem they're building like Bitcoin rollups or Bitcoin l2s some Bitcoin bridging there's even some people in Salo that are building with ZK with their new network extensions um that's also quite interesting um there's all these application specific blockchains also for like trading um that I think are quite interesting basically like I have this thesis that in the long term for very very popular apps like trading it doesn't make sense to have the overhead

of a general purpose uh execution layer you're going to have these like special Iz rollups that are only Built For One application and are hyper hyper optimized for it and some people are building basically these like decentralized exchanges that are hyper optimized for trading with sp1 um so that's also another cool kind of category and then um there's stuff outside of blockchain like ZK email um someone made this uh proof of driver's license application with sp1 that was cool that you verify your driver's license and you can reveal information about that with the ZK proof um so the ZK identity stuff is also really interesting to me yeah super interesting what do you

see as kind of the the main bottlenecks um in ZK adoption I think um right now with sp1 ZK is actually finally really easy like in a lot of the protocols we talk to and work with um for them using SP sp1 is the simplest part it's really building up the rest of their protocol that's hard you know building the onchain smart contracts even designing your protocol logic building up the front end stuff like that so I think there's this new generation of like ZK native protocols that are building with ZK from day one and actually ZK is the easiest part and

getting their entire protocol to main net is kind of like the biggest blocker to them wanting a lot of proofs I also think there's some like kind of technical debt and emotional attachment to the old way of doing things in the ecosystems as well so for example you know I think tomorrow every rollup should be a ZK rollup and all the op stock chains should immediately use ZK because it's cheap it's really fast it works um but you know I think for a lot of people like they're used to the optimistic technology or in cases they don't even run fault proofs at all so they they're just using a multisig and you know that's kind of easy enough you know

while things are good obviously it's really bad when something breaks but that happens rarely so I think ZK is kind of like it's kind of similar to decentralization in a way it's like eating your vegetables like you kind of have to decentralization is really important when something goes wrong or there's you know some like breakdown and Trust of the centralized actors and that's when you're people are happy they built a decentralized system right um so I think ZK is similar where it's like oh maybe using the multisig is fine 99% of the time but then there's this catastrophic tail risk and you really wish you actually did have full validity proofs in those situations um and so I think as an ecosystem one of the biggest things

today is like we're all just you know kind of living in the happy path and living in this world where we don't worry about those scenarios um and I think in general there needs to be like like more of a push to like actually having decentralized verifiable systems that um operate that actually going to fulfill like the promise of all the stuff that we're doing yeah no I I agree I think people don't like thinking about um the failure modes kind of as long as things are good right yeah they don't think about the failure modes until it's like too late yeah

absolutely what kind of metrics um do do you look at for Su sync to gaug your success so kind of like what what are you optimizing towards I think one really concrete metric is just number of proofs and also like you know amount of computation uh so we call it like Cycles like how many risk five instructions are we proving so that's a really fun metric to look at I think recently like in the past month we proved like trillions of Cycles um and that's been going up and to the right very quickly especially as we get more and more rups using it because they use a lot of Cycles the other metric I think I

personally care a lot about is like kind of like the quality of the usage so it's like are we meaningfully moving the ecosystem towards more verifiable systems and like um you know more verifi able applications in general so for me obes sync was really exciting because it was like an opportunity where you can now finally see a path for every roll up on ethereum to be a ZK rollup uh and even though that doesn't happen like today it's kind of like the first step and then you can fill in the dots um so yeah that's like another metric it's like oh like can this thing be generalized to like in more instances

so sp1 is open source right yeah so as a proa network what's your mode kind of like what stops me from kind of just um uh setting up um a second Prov Network um that kind of just make sure there's a kind of fee raised to the bottom yeah that's a good question I think um integrating with a Network um there's like a developer integration cost and developer switching cost uh and then also like all the provs will be connected to our Network and generating proofs with our Network um and so if you want to access kind of all the provs in

our Network then and you there there becomes another competing Network then you're not going to like want to switch over so I think the network itself kind of aggregates it's both the supply side so like all the provs and then also all the demand side which is like all the pro requests and then with that there becomes this like flywheel that's like you know the more demand there is then the more Supply gets built out um you know and then the more Supply that gets built out proofs get cheaper so hopefully there's more demand um and so I think it would it would be really difficult for another Prov Network I think to come in and compete

and like make sure all the provs are integrated and make sure all the demand also gets routed there and stuff like that which way do you see suing developing so kind of like if you if you think about kind of suing in the next say three to five years or so so something inordinately long kind of like in blockchain terms um where where are you going I think for us like we just want ZK to be as widely adopted as possible and making you know as many things verifiable as possible uh I think verifiability is this like very fundamental new primitive and obviously in the context of blockchains it's very powerful and

needed because that's like one of the fundamental premises is that you're building these like verifiable trustless systems um and for systems to be trustless they have to be verifiable so I think it's very fundamental to blockchains so I really hope it gets adopted in all the blockchain contexts that it should be so that's like rollups Bridges stuff like that um but then yeah beyond that I think I'm also really excited about seeing these verifiable systems more in the real world as well um Beyond blockchains um and I think that will be very very interesting and I think that's uniquely kind of enabled by being able to write

normal code like I think it's hard to imagine that normal people adopting this DK stuff if they had to go through all the pain of writing custom circuits and doing all this cryptography and stuff like that but now that you can just take normal rust code and generate proofs of it hopefully that enables a much larger class of applications to become verifiable what new features or improvements can we expect or is it I mean I I assume kind of the Stack's not aifi right kind of like it'll keep developing yeah um we're we're always trying to make it faster and cheaper so that's like our main series of improvements is on the proof system side um kind of

innovating and figuring out how to make the underlying cryptography better uh also on the engineering side there's a lot more optimizations that we're always working on to make it faster and cheaper so yeah on the one side that's like our Northstar is to make it as fast and as cheap as possible and then I think um a really big upgrade will be finally having an actual Pro Network where anyone in the world can participate uh in generating proofs um and hopefully that also enables sp1 to get better and better as well because now it's not just us generating proofs it's like harnessing Humanity's collective intelligence and

optimizing the system so I kind of view it similar to like mining where in Bitcoin mining you had this proof of work game or proof of work puzzle and there became this global scale Hardware buildout centered around it right you had so many mining companies that were developing you know their custom as6 and then also deploying it in data centers across the world and it became this like Global movement to optimize Computing a shaash function and our hope is kind of like by having this approver network and also setting up this very similar game and objective that but you know it'll be like this Collective Global race um to also improve

sp1 if kind of uh sp1 and uh ZK Tech kind of gets um integrated into other Tech that kind of like you're hoping it will will get integrated too um how will the internet be different in five or 10 years from from now to how it is today um yeah I think today like if you want verifiability on the internet there's two options one is you transact with like a decentralized system like ethereum or something like this right

you have this very expensive like decentralized consens consensus um or you have regulations so for example like if I want to get a credit score there's a credit scoring agency that is responsible for you know Computing my credit score based on a bunch of statistics and then uh they're regulated by the government to make sure that they're like not doing anything racist or bad um and then yeah we just have trust and verifiability through basically regulation or trusting centralized intermediaries uh so I think in a world where verifiability is like very easy and very ubiquitous you could imagine instead that the same credit scoring

company uh instead has to post his DK proof that they updated everyone's scores in a correct way according to a fair model um that we all agree on is like the correct model and instead of having regulation you basically verify a cryptographic computation and you can make sure that people are doing the correct things and like you know uh respecting the properties you might want of their systems so I think that's pretty exciting um you can just have verifiability in a lot more places and you can have it enforced with code instead of with like regulations so kind of like if you look

at um metrics that pertain to the average user how would they notice that yeah it's a that's a good question I guess um in this credit scoring example I think they would probably notice systems becoming like more transparent so um you have just like more transparency on like what's actually going on in like all these currently regulated entities and right now you're like trusting that the government is a reasonable job regulating but in the future you can check yourself so I think you just get a lot more transparency and then I think

if you have more verifiability then you know it should also be a lot more efficient right um because and I think that's also like one of the thesises of like crypto broadly right is like okay now we can have this like trustless exchange um and now we can have like trustless exchange of like any asset and that's kind of what lets us have like all the millions of assets we trade today on chain like all the me coins and like nfts and stuff like that and so you can imagine that like oh now that verifiability is really easy um maybe we have more expressive conditions um that we can use in our day-to-day lives if that makes sense I

mean I guess this is a bit abstract but I think you just have more expressivity and then that leads to more efficiency because you can just like do more complex stuff so um tell us about the timeline for the proval network when when uh is the test net going to come live um how can people find out more about it how can they be prepared to kind of take part as Pro us I think the kind of architecture and design will be out in like the next few weeks um and then after that the test will probably be out in like the next few months um we already have like an internal version working that we're testing out so maybe we have like a devet internally that we

use but yeah the test net that's like people can participate in in in a full form i' be out in like the next few months and how do people stay a breast of developments kind of where where should they follow you on on Twitter or where do we send them um yeah Twitter's great um just this the S to lab's account or my personal account is also a good resource cool fantastic Uma thank you so much um for coming on today and telling us about um the pro Network and sp1 it's been a pleasure yeah thanks for having me