BlockBeats news, September 9: a16z crypto announced the release of the new open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine, Lattice Jolt. The new version switches the underlying cryptography from elliptic curves to lattice-based cryptography, making the system quantum-resistant and increasing the speed of the prover and verifier by 2 to 3 times. Its proof size is currently under 100 KB, which a16z crypto claims is the smallest proof among post-quantum zkVMs.
Lattice Jolt uses the novel polynomial commitment scheme Akita, based on the Module-SIS lattice hardness assumption, targeting a 128-bit security level. Akita was led by the LayerZero Research and Engineering team, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California, and the a16z crypto team.
In terms of performance, Lattice Jolt can prove over 2 million RISC-V cycles per second using a CPU on the same device; with GPU acceleration via Apple Metal, it exceeds 10 million cycles per second on a MacBook. The prover’s memory footprint has also been reduced from approximately 300 bytes per cycle to 200 bytes, enabling the proof of millions of computation cycles on mobile devices. The project will further incorporate zero-knowledge functionality in upcoming papers.