Ansgar Dietrichs

It's

It's general purpose cryptography.

It is basically now the ability to make cryptographic statements about arbitrary computation.

Instead of having to like handcraft it for a specific use case, you're now, you're going to this general purpose world.

And this is like a huge leap because it means that instead of like just say signing a message, you can prove whatever you want.

And anything Turing complete, anything that you, any execution whatsoever, you can now compress, you can make it, you can make a cryptographic statement over.

And that...

That was a giant leap.

It was, I think, only really... It was pulled from academic theory to feasibility, I think, through a lot of funding that came from the blockchain space, of course.

And it's really incredible progress.

And that progress, I think, I would think of it as several stages.

So one was just... Not just.

One was what we saw with ZK roll-ups.

And then, of course, already prior to that, special purpose chains like Zcash, right?

Was...

Just the ability at all.

You have a protocol and you can make a proof of it.

You can basically prove that a block of a blockchain is valid.

what we've seen since is this progression of the tech stack.

So for example, all of these earlier stages like Zcash, early ZK rollups, what they all did is they basically handcrafted the rules of the chain that they were trying to verify into very low-level circuits.