Conversation with Scroll and Cysic Co-founders: Proof-of-Stake Network and ZK Hardware Acceleration

Interview with Scroll and Cysic Co-founders: Proof-of-Stake Network and ZK Hardware Acceleration

On the third episode of the podcast interview series with the theme “Decentralized Rollup” curated by ECN, Scroll co-founder Ye Zhang and Cysic co-founder Leo Fan were invited to discuss topics such as ZK circuits, hardware acceleration, open decentralized proof networks, ZK-generated mining markets, and the differences between PoW mining mechanisms of Bitcoin.

What exactly is a zero-knowledge proof circuit? This is related to how you use zero-knowledge proofs. In short, if you want to generate a proof for a program, that program is rewritten in the ZK language to create an encoded circuit. ZK circuit is actually an algebraic circuit, which is an algebraic encoding of the program. Therefore, you can understand that ZK circuit is a bunch of mathematical equations like A multiplied by B equals C. It is completely different from receiving a circuit board. However, what is usually referred to as hardware acceleration is not actually speeding up the process of ZK circuits, but just another representation of the original program. When the ZK circuit is used as input to run a cryptographic algorithm, an accelerator is needed to speed up the process of generating proof, rather than the process of writing the circuit.

What Scroll wants to do is to build a zk-Rollup of ZKEVM. ZKEVM is actually a version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) written in the ZK language. But what we want to do now is a general network, and we don’t want those who write contracts and solidity to use ZK. So we built a ZK version of the EVM. For developers, all the experiences are the same as Ethereum. They still face the EVM, but we actually write the logic of the EVM in the ZK language. Then, when proving, we prove that all EVM transactions are correct. A simpler way to understand this is that Scroll is a network with higher throughput, faster, cheaper, but with the same security as Ethereum. Its magic is that we can accept transactions and generate proofs, rather than broadcasting them and letting nodes reach consensus. So the prover plays a role in proving the validity of each block.

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The reason we started working on Cysic is because of my previous work on Algorand. I worked on Algorand state proof, which is essentially a zk proof that can be used in cross-chain bridges. After I completed the entire PoC in March or April of last year, I found that the time it took to generate the proof was too long, almost several minutes. At that time, I thought of using hardware to speed up the proof generation process. Cysic’s goal is to create an ASIC and set up a universal ZKP accelerator for ZKP. However, before creating the ASIC, we need to do a lot of testing and prototyping on the FPGA. This is the direction we are currently focusing on. Although a single FPGA cannot outperform a GPU, we can connect many FPGAs together to achieve much higher performance than a GPU. We can also do various tests on the FPGA, which can help us with our ASIC design in the future.

Reference: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/qyedR8JBUphA7fC1XojoWg

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