Ansgar Dietrichs

And so ZKVM is this fundamental... It comes from the cryptography side, these snags, these knowledge proofs.

And it is this fundamental insight that what you can do is you can basically...

allow nodes to verify that a block followed all the rules without having to re-execute the block.

And that's, again, that's something that's a very non-intuitive thing, right?

Normally, a blockchain, by its nature, is a very symmetrical thing.

Every node basically does the same thing.

Of course, you have block producers, but then every node kind of has to download, re-execute.

You're duplicating the effort across the network.

And now you're jumping to this, like,

through this very fancy cryptography, you're jumping into this world where you still have the same effort to build a block, but then verification in a way is effortless.

It has this magical compression element to it.

And then specifically, what's so important in the L1 context is the real-time element to it.

So a ZK-AVM just allows for this compression.

And for example, many listeners, I think, will already be familiar with the concept of ZK roll-ups, right?

So

So those have been around for a while, and that actually was a huge first jump in this technology, which just allowed for this compressed ZK verification in the first place.

But so far, this is done in an asynchronous way.

So meaning you have your L2 blockchain that, you know, it's its own chain, basically, and it keeps progressing.

And then

Afterwards, with some, you know, up to several hours of delay, you come and you basically you compute over a long time these proofs and then you bring them to the chain.