Cysic Partners with ZPrize to Advance Hardware Acceleration for ZKP

ZPrize is a community that focuses on promoting the use and development of zero-knowledge cryptography. In 2022, it launched a competition addressing various aspects of this emerging technology, such as using GPUs/FPGAs to accelerate key computational components. The competition’s goal was to promote funding for public goods within zero-knowledge cryptography while ensuring that leading open-source solutions are both effective and applicable in real-world scenarios. The first competition was a resounding success. Significant advancements were made in several crucial areas of zero-knowledge cryptography because of it. ZPrize continues to host this competition with strong support from the ZK community.

Cysic focuses on hardware acceleration for ZKP. When Cysic was incorporated last year, the ZPrize’22 competition had already concluded. It was regrettable that Cysic could not contribute to the community at that time. During our engineering process, we drew inspiration from the results of ZPrize’22. We closely monitor the ZPrize community and are eager to contribute when our assistance is sought. Now, we have the opportunity to collaborate with a top-tier group to help design Prize 1: End-to-End Hardware Accelerating ZKP. The objective of this prize is to maximize efficiency in the entire proof generation process. The ZK circuit involves computing a Merkle tree of a specific height using the Poseidon hash, a ZK friendly hash function. The Poseidon-Merkle tree is widely utilized in the community. For the Poseidon hash, we employ the winner of the ZPrize’22 Poseidon track, which has the smallest number of constraints.

The rationale behind our design primarily revolves around the following two aspects:

• End-to-End Hardware Acceleration: Owing to the successful ZPrize’22 competition, the community has made notable strides in accelerating key computing components, such as MSM and NTT. We observed that when these major components are accelerated, what were once considered minor components now assume a significant role in proof acceleration. Furthermore, the community is more invested in the end-to-end proof acceleration than in individual components. Bearing these observations in mind, we crafted the track to explore whether the community might present innovative solutions to enhance performance throughout the entire proof generation process.
• Evaluating Performance in Relation to Energy Consumption: With considerable advancements in recent years, many ZK projects are either already online or on the brink of launch, leading to a substantial increase in computational demand. It’s recognized that computational performance can be amplified by employing large-scale hardware, akin to Bitcoin mining, which however draws immense power. We aspire to prioritize environmental considerations from the outset when designing hardware for ZK proof generation.

We have completed the prize specification, incorporating feedback from the community and the test harness. These can be found on the discord channel and ZPrize website. We will collaborate with Trapdoor Tech to provide a baseline FPGA/GPU implementation for this Prize. We are thrilled to work alongside the ZPrize community to push the boundaries of ZKP hardware acceleration!