Bankless - StarkWare Sessions #9 | zk-Hardware with Omer of Ingonyama

Starting point is 00:00:01 Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And sometimes that frontier is at a conference. Like last weekend, where over 1,000 developers, founders, builders, and investors attended the Starkware sessions in Tel Aviv in order to participate in growing the Starknet ecosystem ecosystem ecosystem ecosystem systems. This is Bankless's StarcNet. Which are nine bite-sized episodes interviewing the founders, builders, and ecosystem developers of Starknet. Every once in a while in the crypto world, a conference happens. not everyone is available to attend. Don't worry. Bankless has your back because I go to basically every conference that's out on the frontier and I bring an entire podcast studio in tow with me

Starting point is 00:00:41 in order to make sure that the Bankless Nation stays on the frontier of what's happening in crypto. In this interview, we are talking to Igno Yama, Omer from Igno Yama. Igno Yama is an interesting product where most things that we talk about on bankless are on chain, we're actually talking about hardware in this episode. ZK proofs are computationally intensive and especially for CPUs. So Igna Yama is working on building chips, which are just A6, first FGPAs and then A6 later, to help speed up the Prover set of ZK Proofs. And so while ZK Proofs are computationally intensive, we still want the ability for anyone to run those proofs. And so the bulk case for Igna Yama is to put a bunch of ZK Prover chips in all of the hardware and devices that we use in this world. Disclosure,

Starting point is 00:01:29 Ryan and I are actual investors into Igno yama. So we have exposure to what Omer is building here. But the thesis is that self-sovereign ZK technologies are going to be so proliferated and we need ZK provers to be equally as democratized and accessible so that individuals can confirm their own ZK proofs. The fact that ZK roll-ups and other ZK technology are valid, when we have chips that are specialized for this, we can extend this out to more and more people.

Starting point is 00:01:58 It's highly aligned with a bankless philosophy. So that's why we are investors. I hope you enjoy this interview with Omer, but first a moment to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Cracking has been around for almost as long as crypto itself. As crazy as crypto is, Cracken has remained a rock for its clients,

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Starting point is 00:03:58 Bankless Nation, once again, we are here at the StarCware Sessions in Tel Aviv, and I'm here with Omer of Ingo Yama. And Ingo Yama is doing something quite interesting that you might not be familiar with. Omer, can you kind of walk us through why we need Ingo Yama? So like every successful technology in history, we can set that there are three pillars to this technology. We have the software, the algorithms, and the hardware. So zero knowledge, which is a core technology in our space. It's basically a cornerstone for trustless computing, which is what we need for decentralization. It's just such a technology, and we want to make it successful.

Starting point is 00:04:38 We want to make it mainstream. We want to make it at the hands of everybody. So out of these three pylers, basically what we do is we are taking care of the hardware. And so this is the hardware, as in once upon a time, the bank the station will know I got into the world of Ethereum through GPU mining. is also the world of ASIC's proof of work. How does, and this is the same sort of subject matter, but as it relates to zero knowledge computation, how is this world similar to the proof of work industry

Starting point is 00:05:06 and how is it also different? Right. So dynamics can be very, there are similarities, but I think one step before we need to understand what exactly is the connection or what do we need hardware for zero knowledge. And specifically, you know, zero knowledge, it's been around like decades in academia,

Starting point is 00:05:24 and only recently over the last few years, it's doing the transition into industry. And we chose, in the space, represented by many companies, what we chose is to focus on very specific type of zero-knowledge provers. You might have heard about snarks, starks, and companies such as Zero Knowledge Roll-Up site.

Starting point is 00:05:48 And basically, they have some very interesting properties, this type of zero-knowledge systems. one of them is that the proof is very small and the other thing is that it's publicly verifiable so before we even go into explaining what zero knowledge is and why do we need it just in terms of like the analogy here to proof of work what we see is that there is kind of like

Starting point is 00:06:09 a trade-off because we gain all of this like very nice properties but we need to pay somewhere and where we need to pay is by computing this proof so roughly it takes seven orders of magnitude more than the computation itself to actually compute the proof. Once you have the proof, you have a lot of power, right? But to get to this point, you need to spend a lot of money and compute power. This is where hardware can make a big difference.

Starting point is 00:06:36 You know, it's still going to be seven orders of magnitude, more computation. But the fact that you, what you'll feel in terms of the cost, and the time that it takes you, we aim to make it. as simple as possible, obviously, but also as close as possible to the user experience and developer experience that we have by just running the computation. Now, what it means is that, as I said,

Starting point is 00:07:05 trust is computing and zero knowledge can mean many things. There are definitely few applications that we see today that are touching or try to replace exactly the old mechanism of proof of work by something that's based on zero knowledge. There are huge advantages of doing it. so, but this is far from being the only use case. So I think that right now we are talking about level that is way lower, somewhat lower than the actual proof of work type of mining that we had in the space, but it's definitely involved. It has some kind of relations to it. For example, you can

Starting point is 00:07:39 build something similar to a proof of work mechanism based on zero knowledge. Of course, with many benefits that I can go over. So it's been part of the trajectory of much of Ethereum to actually get rid of hardware. Like we want to prove of state because we don't have, we don't want to have proof of work miners. But there's a dynamic here about zero knowledge computations, which also is part of the broad Ethereum roadmap where we want like ZK rollups with zero knowledge proofs and other reasons to apply zero knowledge technology to what we're doing here,

Starting point is 00:08:13 which means that are we committing to some sort of hardware layer to the Ethereum future because of just the commitment to zero knowledge? Yeah, so that's a good question. And I think that to understand it or to answer it first, I do need to explain why ZK zero knowledge is useful in the context of Ethereum. So let me just take two big ideas. One is scaling, the other is privacy.

Starting point is 00:08:42 Now in scaling, what zero knowledge basically is doing is kind of compressing, right? I mean, just like trying to simplify it a bit. We try to compress many transactions that we just don't have enough room for put them on chain. So we put only the proof. And it's veryifiable computation. Everything should be fine. In a way, we are saving a lot of money by doing so, right?

Starting point is 00:09:05 The end goal is to have it in a full decentralized manner, right? You don't want people to actually or to create this kind of market around or this kind of dynamics. You actually need, it's open only for certain type of actors. You want to enable anybody to obviously verify a proof. This is definitely super cheap and efficient. As I said, it's the properties of these like snark stocks that we chose. But you also want the proving and computing the proof to be done basically by anyone on even commodity hardware or close to it,

Starting point is 00:09:40 such as GPUs. So this is just, when it comes to scaling, I don't think that we are committing in a way to a few, where we actually need to pay more or to consume much more electricity. I think it would save us much more than in terms of, when we try to compare it to what we know until now. Privacy, this is, you know, this is like an application. This is like another thing that we can gain that was not accessible to us before.

Starting point is 00:10:12 Privacy at scale, privacy on-chain, privacy as a layer two. I think it's kind of an application that zero knowledge is bringing. And of course, you need to consider the cost of such an application. Personally, I think it's a rightful cause and would pay for, you know, a future that is really great. And it's worth to kind of put some effort into it in terms of computation. Long-term thinking, again, this hardware is going to be in your, I don't know, your iPhone. So part of the chip would run ZK. It would be seamless, right?

Starting point is 00:10:44 it would be very efficient and so on. So again, I don't think it's going to go into committing to where we're coming from and allowing this proof of work to proof of stake transition. So the idea that I have for the future of Ethereum, and actually even baked into the Ethereum roadmap, is to ZK the whole entire blockchain. But then there's like applications that can use ZK Tough, and there's other layer 2s that can use ZK stuff.

Starting point is 00:11:16 All of this, any time of zero knowledge is executed upon, that's a computation that needs to be run. Where are we today? Like, how is that computation being done today? And with the future that you have in mind, how will it be done in the future? Right. So, yeah, that's true.

Starting point is 00:11:32 ZK is very powerful, and it can find use cases in many places. And obviously, all of layer 2, ZK rollups, And I think also at some point, optimistic roll-ups would start using this technology to some extent. So we are talking, if you try to sketch like a graph of the number of proofs per unit of time, so what I think would see is that now it's growing and it's keep going, which is very interesting. And at some point, you know, it will consume kind of a lot of electricity.

Starting point is 00:12:08 As you said, any application that is being built on top of a roll-up, eventually would require to verify it on chain and it means another proof that needs to run. Not only that, you want, you know, for, you want often to run the same proof more than once so that in case something happens to one of the prover, you have like a backup, right? So it can scale, definitely. There are other type of ideas that are counter to that scaling,

Starting point is 00:12:38 which are, for example, kind of pecking more than one proof together. So because basically you are proving a computation, you can also proof another proof, right? So you can just stack them up in some kind of recursive manner. And this kind of saves you a lot of the trouble. This is a lot of what we see today in ZK roll-ups, how they move, like StarQuil, for example,

Starting point is 00:13:01 moved into using recursion, which allows you not only to stack proofs one or to another and eventually end up just with one proof, it also makes these proofs way smaller, right? Because you can just like aggregate them together. And so this is kind of counter trend to the growing need in proofs, right? What will happen is that with the introduction of hardware, getting these proofs going to be the threshold or the barrier

Starting point is 00:13:28 to get this like very complex proof in computation, we just get lower and lower. And usually, just like with other inventions, what it means is that there would be more and more use cases using these proofs. So I think that overall we're just seeing increase in the number of proofs, but definitely it would be contained. It would be contained at the hardware level, it will be contained in the algorithmic level in a way that will be manageable. And for us as a community, it would eventually be a net positive. So to use a metaphor, would you say it's fair

Starting point is 00:13:59 to say that Ingo Yama is trying to build the engines to run zero knowledge computation? You're building the combustion engine for zero knowledge? Yeah, kind of. I mean, we are building computers. Like, you know, you can look at the traditional computer architecture and something is missing. I mean, something that, like, you know, a finite field arithmetic, some discrete met,

Starting point is 00:14:22 like the stuff that are the fundamental in the computer architecture is not really accelerated. It's not used in AI, network, storage, acceleration, but it is needed in cryptography, even not just zero knowledge, fullyomorphic encryption, and even, you know, lattices and such, like the basics of post-quantum cryptography, everything is built on the same math.

Starting point is 00:14:42 We are just trying to bring a modern type of computer architecture that will support natively this type of computations. So is the idea that what you just said, that we have this new thing in this world called zero knowledge proofs. They're computationally intensive. Is the future state of the world, one where, there is a new component, a new hardware component in perhaps every single device out there, my phone, my computer, my laptop that is specialized to run a zero-knowledge proof?

Starting point is 00:15:14 Is that kind of the future that we're looking at? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and we also can tell, you know, it's going to start from more of the server side, like the data centers. This is where it's easier to kind of take a whole new computer architecture and just like push it and then get some optimizations in, running ZK Provers. But, you know, phones, they are like very,

Starting point is 00:15:38 the phone factor very small, it's going to be very hard. But let's say decentralized identity. All right, this is something that we know several, like phone vendors, manufacturers are looking very deeply into. So this will require some of these functions, like some IP cores that are relevant to their border like Zika computation, but they can also fit inside,

Starting point is 00:15:56 like chips that are being manufacturers by others. Also, you know, when it comes to privacy, eventually you need it in your hand. You need full control. So that's definitely going to be like in every one of our hands, in phones and so on. Yeah. So I know one of the big conversations that's going out here at the StarCware sessions is account abstraction and how account abstraction uses the secure enclave of a phone to store data to unlock, you know,

Starting point is 00:16:20 assurances about a private key. And so there's already the conversation happening about how does our physical hardware impact the technology that we have in the virtual space, right? Like even though we're all love to be in the meta-vriac. the physical nature of our hardware is still very, very important. And so maybe to use another metaphor is like we have the secure enclave to store our private keys, and that's a physical component of our devices that help us do our crypto things. And then what you're perhaps envisioning is that there's also going to be another

Starting point is 00:16:51 additional part of a hardware that is meant to do zero knowledge computation, to allow for zero knowledge computation to be done by the individual on their device. Is that all line up with you? Yeah, I think it is Like when I look at the future In a world where ZK is cheap I mean there's no reason why you cannot just

Starting point is 00:17:11 Verify any computation you do I mean the entire everything you were on the phone Including communication with secure and cleave and so on Can be verifiable You can also output a proof that the computation was done correctly It's even more important Once you outsource the computation to someone else I don't know to the cloud

Starting point is 00:17:29 Everything can be verified and it should, right? So I think, yeah, I think we are talking about kind of a new modern type of architecture that will also include a component that is specialized for this type of cryptography. Yeah, and if we don't have this kind of research and this kind of like R&D effort that you're doing, then we probably ultimately outsource that proof generation to a third party, which is not exactly what we're going for in this world of self-sovereign technology. Is that Is that a fair assumption? It is.

Starting point is 00:18:03 I mean, there's an ongoing research on how you can actually separate the compute-intensive part from the privacy-preserving part of the computation. It's not easy. There are a few ideas. And right now it seems very far away. So I think definitely a way to go is to try and get everything done on the hardware locally. And it's a future. It will take a lot of time, but we'll get there.

Starting point is 00:18:28 Meanwhile, there are many use cases and applications that can still run only on data centers, by miners, and some people and corporates that have access to this, like, to this like specialized hardware. That's for sure. But yeah, we are going into this like future where there's A6 that are like different chips that can be used in any type of computing device and can bring you this technology to the level that, again, user experience is going to be completely seamless. You won't feel that you are computing a proof.

Starting point is 00:19:01 So maybe we can really judge about how trustless and self-sovereign the world is with how many, how far your chips have proliferated across the world. I mean, it's one way to look at it. Again, remember that right now, even the roll-ups, the Zika roll-ups, all of them are more or less centralized. So they're still far away to go. We still need to, and, you know, we are hardware plays. So we are long-term thinkers. This is how we are building the company. Yeah, I mean, at some point, I do hope that many of us would have this freedom of just, no, verifiable and private type of privacy-preserving computation, very-fiable computation.

Starting point is 00:19:45 It will take time until it will get, basically, to be democratized and be by the hands of anybody. So the topic of hardware is not one that we've actually talked a lot about on bankless, and so this is probably striking the imaginations of a set of bankless listeners that doesn't previously, get a bunch of attention. Walk us through the roadmap for like how a chip actually gets produced and what is the roadmap for Igna Yama. Right. So the first thing to understand about us is that we're not religious about hardware, meaning that, you know, there are a few types of specialized hardware with differences. I can name a few FPGAs, GPUs, and of course ASICs, like this like specialized chips. For us, it's about finding where is the pay.

Starting point is 00:20:30 and then solving it. And when I say solve it is about catering for the little guy. Again, we want to make the user experience seamless. That's the goal, that's the ideal. And what it means is that right now, in terms of roadmap, we are doing a lot of R&D internally to kind of build our hardware and our IP to run everything. What we want to do is basically run everything inside of this specialized hardware.

Starting point is 00:20:59 And then we try to feed the right solution to the right problem, right? So you can think about, let's take StarCore, right? We are in a StarCore event. Let's take StarCware, for example. So for StarCore right now, the Pover is centralized. It's one problem. It's not the most important problem they have. They have also a problem with witness generation, with sequencer.

Starting point is 00:21:20 They pay much more on getting the transaction on chain for fees than they pay on running the Pover. So we're talking with StarCware and we want to develop. hardware, what we basically try to do at this point is just to move the bottleneck from the prover to somewhere else in the system. Okay? Now at some point these other places in the system would also have their bottleneck remove. The only bottleneck that I predict will remain would be the hardware for Zika Provers and maybe, you know, a bit beyond. But right now it's just about being efficient enough and cost effective enough to move this bottleneck someplace else in the system. That's one example. Obviously we have projects.

Starting point is 00:21:59 where we want to optimize on the throughput, right? We want to run as many proofs at the same time, and we don't really care about the cost, let's say. There are other projects where we care just about the form factor. We have a project, by the way, for Filecoin, where it's mostly about just replacing GPUs with FPJs that are tiny, right? It's like small, it fits a data center. So it really depends.

Starting point is 00:22:21 Overall, our vision is, and I think this is the long-term solution, is to have these dedicated chips. And to go to this place, we need a lot of, We first needed to come up with an architecture. Something very similar to a GPU, if you try to think about it, like many, many cores that run in parallel, but are suitable to the type of computation that you can see in zero knowledge. And once we have this figure out, remember that Zika and this public question,

Starting point is 00:22:44 ManySk, it's a fast-moving space, right? Everything is kind of changing. How do we derisk it when we build something that is meant to last for many years to come? And one way that we try to do it is by basically building it in a programmable way. That's one thing, and the other thing is to battle test it all the time, right? So every time there's a new ZK protocol primitive coming out from academia even, we try to kind of retim it and see if we can support it and to what extent.

Starting point is 00:23:15 And then we fine tune our design. Hopefully we'll be able to go to a tapeout, which is, to your question, kind of the no return point where you kind of say, okay, this goes, and when it gets back, it's in silicon, then it goes into, I don't know, minors and whoever needs it. So hopefully we'll be able to go to tape out soon, meaning when I'm saying soon, it still can mean a couple of years. And it's really going to depend on how this market is going to evolve.

Starting point is 00:23:42 We first want to target roll-ups, Ziki roll-ups, and therefore we are very much dependent on their decentralization efforts, and we try our best also to help with what we can. Omar, if somebody is interested by what you are doing, what you've talked about here today, How can they join? How can they help? Who do you need help from or how can people get involved? Right. So at this point, we do mostly R&D. My team, they are a bunch of very talented, cryptographers, mathematicians, and hardware guys, like chip designers, architects and so on.

Starting point is 00:24:16 We are trying to build an ecosystem in software. What we're going to do soon is going to open source, much of what we do. Hardware is traditionally a very closed source type of environment. This is not good for our space. We try to break this narrative. We try to go and be and walk in the open, be transparent,

Starting point is 00:24:34 and also put some code and IP out there for people to use and play. Feedback is critical from developers mostly that are going to build on ZK. Any type of application, everything is applicable. You can find us in Twitter, Ingo, ZK.

Starting point is 00:24:51 We have a website. We launch not long. ago in Goniama.com. We have a GitHub with all of our stuff open. We have a Discord that soon we're going to launch it officially. Right now, if you are working on some technical problem, we want to join the

Starting point is 00:25:05 Discord, meet the team. This is a very good place. Reach out to me and I'll be able to connect you with the team. Homer, thank you so much. Thank you.

Bankless - StarkWare Sessions #9 | zk-Hardware with Omer of Ingonyama

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