On Thursday, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a leading venture-capital firm in Silicon Valley, unveiled two open-source software projects that aim to improve the speed of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, the technology behind some of the most popular blockchain projects today.
The venture firm has taken a more hands-on approach in developing some of the core technology for the companies it invests in, and this is its first venture into deep-tech research.
This shows how venture firms are becoming more influential in shaping the technologies they fund.
The first project, Lasso, is a new technique for making ZK systems faster. The project’s whitepaper was written by Justin Thaler from a16z, Srinath Setty from Microsoft, and Riad Wahby from Carnegie Mellon University.
The code for Lasso is available for anyone to use under an open-source license.
The second project, Jolt, is a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) that uses Lasso. Jolt is currently only a research paper, but a16z plans to release its code soon – also under an open-source license.