Anaxi Labs and Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Unveil a Breakthrough Proof System

Pittsburgh, United states, December 6th, 2024, Chainwire

Anaxi Labs, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab, the university’s cybersecurity and privacy institute, is announcing a compiler framework for cryptography that resolves an impasse – building scalable applications with Zero-Knowledge require fundamental trade-offs. The elusive trifecta of scalable, cryptographically-secured and decentralized applications have been considered impossible, and a barrier to mass adoption — until now.

A Breakthrough in Cryptography with No Trade-Offs

Blockchains such as Ethereum have been hailed as the future of decentralized infrastructure, with Zero-Knowledge (ZK) technology heralded to enhance Ethereum’s security and scalability beyond 120 TPS. According to the team, developing ZK proofs is complex and time-consuming, requiring thousands of hours across dozens of developers. Prioritizing speed in proof generation also means manually designing protocols, and with manual coding and tens of thousands of lines of code this introduces significant security vulnerabilities. This complicates the creation of security-sensitive decentralized applications and makes auditability and compliance a nightmare – all hindrances to widespread adoption in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and AI.

A team of Carnegie Mellon researchers is collaborating with Anaxi Labs to overcome this trade-off

CMU’s recent paper presents a revolutionary way to directly compile high-level software and convert it into simpler forms (low-level representations) needed for underlying proof systems to work. And all this is done automatically, repeatable and auditable, getting rid of the manual work, drastically improving performance while cryptographically ensuring security of the process. The work achieves this by analyzing the high-level program, breaking the program into small, indivisible units, then creating low-level representation from each unit that can be easily inputted into varieties of proof systems.

“This idea of breaking the computation into very specific chunks that take the place of a CPU in an automatic way is a new approach, and this is the first time that somebody has attempted this kind of approach where we avoid the full program representation for the compiler,” said Riad Wahby, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We’re extremely excited about it.”

Unlocking New Decentralized Applications

The research and the framework Anaxi Labs is building from the research are set to revolutionize industries in Web3 and beyond. In traditional and regulated finance, the performance boost while maintaining auditability enables real-time settlement of intrabank transfers like instant USD payments. In healthcare, amid challenges faced by 23andMe, secure and privacy-preserving encryption tools enabled by product being developed by Anaxi Labs, could now address critical concerns and safely utilize private genetic information by ensuring rightful ownership of one’s DNA, while enabling valuable research. Within the realm of enterprise AI and critical physical infrastructures, a decentralized solution that requires high availability and close to zero latency such as rapid fine-tuning and inference across multiple data and compute power resources becomes a reality.

In the immediate term, products based on the research provide the most effective solution for Web3 companies grappling with the scalability, security and decentralization trade-offs, offering a new design paradigm for rollups and interoperability.

“This research and the product we are building incorporating the research will have profound implication to many important industry applications today that need a safe solution for their massive performance overheads, such as ZK and EVM, finally bringing us to the doorstep of our vision of cryptographically-secured decentralized consensus with real-time settlement,” said Kate Shen, co-founder of Anaxi Labs. 

“We also like the fact that it is language and library agnostic, meaning a wide variety of projects can benefit from this without code modification. This enabled us to build an open, collaborative framework as opposed to the increasingly static, monolithic approaches today,” Shen adds. “This enables all developers to automatically choose and combine the best of the latest advancements in proof systems such as lookups, co-processors and hardware acceleration; maximizing the performance gains of each computational substrate.”

Anaxi Labs and CyLab, a Game-Changing Partnership

Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab has been at the center of cutting-edge research that’s served as the foundation for blockchain development – including Zero-Knowledge. Notable faculty researchers from CyLab include esteemed professor Bryan Parno, a critical contributor to the history of ZK whose lab produced the widely cited Nova paper series, and assistant professor Riad Wahby, whose findings resulted in new cryptographic technologies that realized visions of the Ethereum Foundation (and more recently, the pathbreaking Jolt zkVM implementation by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto division, a16z crypto).

The findings set forth in this compiler framework are the result of the second research project originating from the symbiotic partnership between Anaxi Labs and CyLab through the CMU Secure Blockchain Initiative. This partnership enables CMU academics to collaborate and learn from the insights gleaned from the commercial deployments of their blockchain research, spearheaded by Anaxi Labs, for both Web3 and Web 2.0 applications. It enables them to find commercial solutions to major existing issues with blockchain that fails to bridge the gap between the known benefits of blockchain technology, and mass adoption. And it also serves as a springboard for CMU students to launch their careers in Web3.

“Anaxi Labs’ partnership with CyLab advances CMU researchers’ ability to work on projects with direct, real-world applications, ensuring that their work has practical relevance and potential for impact,” said Michael Lisanti, CyLab’s Senior Director of Partnerships.

To learn more about Anaxi Labs: https://www.anaxilabs.com/

To learn more about Anaxi Labs and CyLab’s latest work: https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/ 

To learn more about CyLab’s partnership with Anaxi Labs: https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/news/2024/07/17-anaxi-labs-strategic-partner.html

About Anaxi Labs

Anaxi Labs is a new kind of research and development lab that bridges the worlds of advanced academic theory and mass adoption. They are dedicated to producing original, cutting-edge research, building enterprise-grade, safe and scalable decentralized infrastructure, and catalyzing the next generation of decentralized applications powered by cryptography.

Anaxi Labs work with world’s top minds in cryptography research and world-class engineers who have experience building and operating household-name products with hundreds of millions of users. They are the industry partner of top academic institutions in cryptography such as Carnegie Mellon University. Together, they are committed to transforming the future of the internet by unlocking the power of what science can do for people, society and the planet.

Website: https://www.anaxilabs.com/

About CyLab

Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab is the university’s security and privacy research institute. They bring together experts from all schools across the University, encompassing the fields of engineering, computer science, public policy, information systems, business, financial information risk management, humanities, and social sciences. Our mission is to catalyze, support, promote, and strengthen collaborative security and privacy research and education across departments, disciplines, and geographic boundaries to achieve significant impact on research, education, public policy, and practice.

Website: https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/

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Daisy Leung
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