Ansgar Dietrichs

You basically express it in very low-level constraints that you then make zero-knowledge proofs about.

And

Where we've been going from there is now we have this, and you can really, it's really, it parallels the early progression of computers as a whole, right?

We went from, you have to specify, you have to manually specify every individual system you want to prove.

Yes, as like the set of constraints of circuits.

It basically went from there to introducing, and it's such an elegant idea, but it's crazy that it works.

Just introducing this intermediate instruction set.

So it's called an ISA, instruction set architecture.

And you can think of it like how a processor in a computer has instruction sets.

So x86, for example, right?

Like Intel or ARM or whatnot, right?

Basically, it's what instructions does your processor understand?

And the way these modern ZK systems are now built is you pick one of those instruction sets, like the one that is actually becoming the standard in Ethereum right now is RISC-V.

RISC-V is similarly, in principle, it's just like a list of operations that your processor could do, right?

Like it's often run in a virtualized way.

So it's not actually run on real RISC-V hardware.

It's mostly run in a virtualized kind of way.

But basically, it's just like a list of instructions.

And then

you then write zero-knowledge provers that can just prove arbitrary RISC-V code.