LayerZero Cuts Quantum-Safe Proofs Down To Record-Breaking 65 Kilobytes With Akita

Akita, a new post-quantum cryptographic scheme, has been released by LayerZero. This scheme is built in collaboration with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Southern California. Akita cuts down proof sizes to as little as 65 kilobytes when used inside Jolt prover, a virtual machine developed by a16z crypto.

LayerZero announced Akita on September 9 in a blog post. This production-ready lattice-based commitment scheme is the first of its kind and has been built specifically for zero-knowledge proving systems. The scheme handles a single job inside a proving system, committing to a record of a computation and then proving to an outside party that the record is correct.

a16z crypto rebuilt Jolt around Akita and shipped the result as Lattice Jolt. This rebuild makes proving two to three times faster and roughly halves the memory a prover needs. Everything else in Jolt stayed put, with only Dory, the elliptic-curve scheme that Jolt had relied on since its launch, being dropped.