Tech
Venture capital firm A16z launches Jolt, a ‘zero-knowledge virtual machine’
Silicon Valley venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) made headlines last year when it announced it was delve into in-depth technological research – ditch the investor cap to become a part-time IT researcher and builder. On Tuesday, the company unveiled some of the first fruits of this foray with the release of an open source code implementation for “Jolt,” its zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM).
In addition to positioning a16z as a bona fide research and development company, the new code could help blockchains – and some of a16z’s portfolio companies – expand their operations.
Virtual machines, colloquially known as VMs, are software-based computing environments that serve as the foundation for blockchain and other programs. Jolt’s “zero-knowledge” (ZK) bit refers to a form of cryptographic deception that powers the a16z VM under the hood, allowing the virtual computer to process and verify data while adhering to special privacy and security constraints .
Jolt currently supports the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) – an open source standard for designing computer processors – and applications written in the Rust programming language. Programmers can run an application through Jolt to “verify its execution,” explained Eddy Lazzarin, CTO of a16z crypto. The program “will produce ‘proof’ that demonstrates that the result of that program actually results from the correct execution of that program.” The big advantage of A16z with Jolt is that it is “10 times” faster than RISC Zero, its closest competitor.
ZK encryption has applications outside of blockchain, but ZK research has grown alongside the growth of the industry. So-called “ZK proofs” – the mathematical proofs produced by ZK programs – have become the dominant method to help blockchains reduce fees, increase speed and preserve transaction privacy.
Technology powers many of the the so-called zkEVMs – zkVMs specific to the Ethereum runtime environment, known as Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM – have emerged in recent years to make the blockchain faster and more secure. (A16z is an investor in Matter Labs, a leading producer of zkEVM.)
ZK proofs “scale blockchains by doing the hard work off-chain and having the blockchain only verify proofs,” explained Justin Thaler, a16z researcher and associate professor at Georgetown University and co-author of the Lasso and Jolt research. an interview last year. With ZK proofs, “you can have assurance that this work was done correctly, but not have every blockchain node in the world doing all the work.”
While Jolt was not tuned for Ethereum or any other blockchain, a16z insists that its technology can be layered into zkEVM and other blockchain-based ZK applications. “Tuning specific circuits makes them very fragile. It’s very difficult and opaque to get it right,” Lazzarin said. “Our techniques are not only simpler, but faster.”
A16z first embarked on its deep tech journey in August last year when it announced a couple of projects: Jolt, the one launching today, and Lasso, a special method for powering ZK systems that underlies some of Jolt’s programming.
According to Lazzarin, a16z embarked on its deep tech research journey partly as a way to improve its own liquidity as an investor: “I mean, why take money from someone who is just money when you can take money from someone who is right there?” with you at the forefront, doing the hardest things possible in cryptocurrency?”
But that’s not the only way Lazzarin believes a16z’s research initiatives can help advance the company’s bottom line. The code for Jolt is open source, meaning anyone can theoretically use or repurpose it without paying a16z. “Because we are long-term investors, we don’t trade day to day, week to week or even month to month,” Lazzarin said. “We benefit more if space advances faster over the next five or 10 years, and so our incentive is simply to move everyone forward through public goods that we will never monetize.”