Is it ZK Hardware season?

The hardware has caught up to the hype, maybe.

February 13, 2024

16 February  2024 · Block Height 830700 · Bitcoin Price $51K

Welcome back to the Blockspace Newsletter!

Today we have an article on ZK-hardware, some links and podcasts with Bit Digital and Gwart!

Quick Hits

  • Cleanspark flips Riot Platform’s marketcap, rising to over a $3.6 billion.

  • Genesis has been given the greenlight to sell $1.3 billion in GBTC, per Bloomberg.

  • Peter Thiel’s Founder Fund dropped $200 million into crypto before price run, says Reuters.

  • Justin Sun wants Tron to work on Bitcoin L2 designs.

  • Coinmint told to pay $14 million in settlement to ASIC-designer Katena.

Want to get the news in podcast form? Listen to our news roundup on the Blockspace Podcast Network. Subscribe to get all our shows in one location.

Chart of the Week

Bitcoin is now once again a $1 trillion marketcap asset.

Is it ZK hardware season?

Last week, well known Ethereum bull Justin Drake tweeted something that caught crypto Twitter’s attention: a new ASIC chip.

What is it? The chip is designed for computing zero knowledge proofs, similar in concept to how Bitcoin ASICs run SHA-256 computations.

Who would want this? Since 2020 at the very least, multiple Ethereum projects–and increasingly Bitcoin projects–have started identifying the Zero Knowledge space as the next frontier of both privacy and scalability. Particularly, ZK-based rollups allow for computation of a transaction history’s accuracy and validity when settled from an L2 to an L1.

In other words, a ZK-proof (or something similar) can be used to prove that the L2 is not cheating users before it settles to Bitcoin, Ethereum or another chain–a big win for blockchain throughput.

Okay, name some projects? Scroll, Aztec, Aleo, zkSync and Linea are the best known names in this game as of now, but there’s a ton of ZK-projects out there.

Thanks to Fabric Crypto for sharing this graphic.

What’s next? Most ZK projects are in the beginning of tape out, if not deep R&D. It’s a highly speculative bet with a handful of players looking for room with chip manufacturers, a process that normally takes deep relationships and capital. That being said, the aforementioned projects have a lot of hype and backing, such as with Aleo and Bitmain.

A world with ZK-hardware doesn’t necessarily mean a world full of people using private, scalable L2s. We still need people to onboard to these systems, which would be quite the feat. Still, getting tape out space shows capital allocators are taking the ZK-space seriously.

Be on the lookout for more ZK-hardware coverage from Blockspace in The Mining Pod here soon.

Blockspace Podcasts

🎙️ Bit Digital’s AI Play With Sam Tabar

(YouTube) Sam Tabar, CEO of BitDigital, joins the show to discuss the bitcoin miner’s strategy, its AI investments and how he thinks of the upcoming halving.

🎙️Was The Rollup Roadmap A Mistake? With Anatoly Yakovenko

(YouTube) Gwart continues in his journey to find the real meaning o decentralization, this time with Anatoly of Solana. In this two hour show, Gwart and Anatoly go through rollup roadmaps, Solana’s commitment to monolithic architecture and, of course, Bitcoin.

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