Lasso in a nutshell

Justin Thaler

A quick overview of Lasso — a fundamentally new approach to SNARK design based. Together with Jolt, a new SNARK frontend, Jolt improves on other widely deployed tool chains by an order of magnitude or more, and promises further performance improvements in the future.

About the speaker

Justin is Research Partner at a16z and an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. His research interests include verifiable computing, complexity theory, and algorithms for massive data sets. In 2011, he produced the first implementation of a general-purpose interactive proof system. He is the author of a comprehensive survey on SNARKs titled Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge, and a co-creator of Apache DataSketches, an open-source library of production-quality streaming algorithms. Before joining a16z crypto and Georgetown, Justin was a Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs. Before that he completed her PhD in Computer Science at Harvard University.

About a16z crypto research

a16z crypto research is a multidisciplinary lab that works closely with our portfolio companies and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet. More about us: a16z.com/2022/04/21/announcing-a16z-crypto-research