a16z crypto unveils Jolt, an open-source RISC-V zkVM powering LayerZero’s new chain Zero with faster, GPU-accelerated succinct proofs.

a16z crypto has released Jolt, a new open‑source RISC‑V zkVM (zero‑knowledge virtual machine) that is now being used as the proving engine for LayerZero’s new chain, Zero, where it powers fast, succinct proofs with GPU acceleration. Jolt is designed around sumcheck and lookup arguments (“Just One Lookup Table”) and aims to offer state‑of‑the‑art proving performance and relatively simple extensibility for developers. According to a16z crypto’s technical materials, Jolt provides a general‑purpose zkVM for the RISC‑V instruction set and is engineered to be fast, simple, and extensible, with recent benchmarks showing large speedups over prior zkVMs plus sub‑50 KB proof sizes for hundreds of thousands of RISC‑V cycles per second on commodity hardware. It achieves this by heavily leveraging the Lasso lookup argument and sumcheck‑based techniques, combined with offline memory checking, to efficiently prove correct execution of arbitrary RISC‑V programs. The codebase is fully open source under the a16z crypto GitHub organization, with documentation and a “JoltBook” site aimed at making it easier for external teams to adopt the prover inside their own systems. For LayerZero’s new chain Zero, integrating Jolt as the zkVM means the network can generate succinct validity proofs for computation in a way that is designed to scale with GPUs, which is important for high‑throughput cross‑chain messaging and applications that need cheap, frequent proofs. Strategically, this positions Jolt as a reusable proving backend that other rollups, app‑chains, or interoperability protocols can also embed (“Jolt inside”), while giving LayerZero a performance‑oriented, open‑source cryptographic core rather than a proprietary prover stack. The launch highlights an emerging pattern in the ecosystem: specialized but general‑purpose zkVMs becoming shared infrastructure for multiple chains and services, decoupling application logic (like LayerZero’s messaging) from the underlying proof system implementation.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• a16z/jolt - GitHub (github.com)
• Building Jolt: A fast, easy-to-use zkVM - a16z crypto (a16zcrypto.com)
• A Technical Dive into Jolt: The RISC-V zkVM - ZK/SEC Quarterly (blog.zksecurity.xyz)
• Intro - JoltBook (jolt.a16zcrypto.com)
• Jolt gets a 6× speedup — and we're just getting started - a16z crypto (a16zcrypto.com)

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