Opportunities in blockchain often come from "solving market needs."
How do you understand this? Let me give you an example and you will understand.
In the last cycle, the DeFi Summer on ETH was hot, but it also led to problems such as high ETH Gas and congestion. BSC appeared during that period, and many wealth opportunities emerged accordingly. In addition to BSC, we are also familiar with Alt-Layer1 such as Solana and Avalanche.
The same is true for NFT Summer. As the price of ETH rises, the market is in urgent need of new wealth opportunities in the ecosystem to earn and accumulate ETH, or to leverage ETH, so NFT has become a pig in the wind.
The same is true for ZK hardware acceleration. ZK hardware acceleration aims to solve the problem of "low efficiency in generating ZK-SNARK proofs".
At the previous conference, V God mentioned that ZK-SNARK proof takes too long (about 20 minutes) and is too inefficient. Ideally, it would be best to be able to prove in real time. Therefore, in order to solve this problem, V God gave three solutions: "Parallelization and aggregation tree", "Using SNARK algos and hashing to improve efficiency", and "Using ASIC for ZK hardware acceleration".
My understanding is that the first two solutions are to improve the efficiency of ZKP from the perspective of technological upgrades, which takes time to improve (to be honest, I don’t quite understand them and can only understand them superficially), and using "ASIC for ZK hardware acceleration" is like some people in the gaming world installing a tool in their mouse, using peripherals to solve the problem of low ZKP efficiency.
ZK hardware acceleration can be divided into GPU, FPGA and ASIC. Why did Vitalik mention ASIC separately? Because from the perspective of flexibility, GPU>FPGA>ASIC, and from the perspective of performance, ASIC>FPGA>GPU.
Simply put, GPU is universal, while ASIC is customizable and special-purpose. Universal means that everyone can use it, but the performance advantage is not so obvious, and ASIC chips can only adapt to a single solution. FPGA is between ASIC and GPU, with a certain degree of flexibility, and its performance is better than GPU but weaker than ASIC.
Overall, ASIC can provide higher computing performance for ZKP, because the current ZKP proof technology is relatively fixed. If ZKRollup is currently seeking ZK hardware acceleration, GPU is a general solution, and in the future customized high-performance ASIC chips will obviously be the optimal solution.
Currently, the leader of the ZK hardware acceleration project is the Cysic protocol led by Polychain.
Many people have already given a detailed introduction to Cysic. I am not a technical person, so I can only share my understanding with you. Friends who are interested in the technology itself can go to the official page/media reports to check it out.
Cysic's hardware acceleration solution consists of two parts: ZKVM + hardware design (GPU + ASIC). Currently, Cysic provides GPU acceleration solutions for ZKRollup such as Scroll (Cysic has reserved nearly 100,000 GPU devices. Currently, Cysic's advantage is that it has sufficient GPU computing power, and the focus will shift to ASIC chips in the future).
ZKVM is a virtual machine environment that supports ZK circuits. Its main advantages are continuity and parallelism. In layman's terms, when we deal with a large piece of cake, we have high requirements for computing equipment, bandwidth, and memory. ZKVM allows us to cut the large piece of cake into small pieces, which makes it convenient for us to eat and has higher controllability and compatibility. Parallelism allows us to cut and eat the cake at the same time, which improves efficiency.
In terms of hardware design, Cysic packs the actuator (the thing used for computing), a certain number of ZKVM chips and other necessary hardware into a chassis. This improves the flexibility of the device in computing and its portability in the physical world.
In short, Cysic's design is based on cost-effectiveness and energy efficiency considerations.
Finally, let me share my thoughts.
Why pay attention to the ZK hardware acceleration track? It is based on the optimism about the future development of ZKRollup. ZK hardware acceleration can help ZKP proofs achieve real-time proofs under peripheral conditions, which meets the needs of ZKRollup. Therefore, when the ZKRollup narrative is hot, we can definitely take a look at ZK hardware-related projects, and there may be opportunities for speculation at that time. I personally think that it is not too late to speculate on the ZK narrative after it starts to be hyped (it is estimated that it will be a bit difficult this year).
References:
"Why is Vitalik optimistic about ZK hardware acceleration?" https://www.odaily.news/post/5194489
https://twitter.com/BeWaterOfficial/status/1784083328737669165
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