Telos Partners with Ponos Technology to Develop Hardware-Accelerated Ethereum L2 zkEVM Network

[PRESS RELEASE – Dubai, United Arab Emirates, April 19th, 2024]

The Telos Foundation today announced that it will work with Ponos Technology, the leading Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) research and development firm, to develop an end-to-end optimized, hardware-accelerated Ethereum Layer 2 network featuring SNARKtor, the Telos-developed decentralized recursive proof aggregator. The teams will take a hardware-software co-design approach that will help unlock new possibilities in terms of massive scalability, greater data protection and trustless interoperability for Ethereum users globally.

Ponos Technology provides end-to-end optimized solutions for ZK proving, which is essentially achieved by leveraging FPGA acceleration, thus maximizing business value streams through cost-performance optimized computation by matching hardware-software co-designed modules and dedicated execution environments. The team includes a unique blend of experienced scientists and highly skilled industry experts that have accumulated deep technical knowledge on all aspects of ZKPs.

“Zero Knowledge technology is going to become increasingly mainstream and can open the door to increased efficiency and security across so many industries,” said Slobodan Lukovic, CEO and co-founder, Ponos Technology. “Similarly to AI, steady enhancements in algorithms coupled with advancements in underlying hardware infrastructures will enable commoditization of ZKPs and result in the technology being widely adopted in the near future.”

Telos will also be working with several other new partners during the development cycle, including:

• Digital M.O.B. – One of the strongest Ethereum developer teams in the world, having worked on projects including MetaMask, MakerDAO and Gnosis, among others.
• ATKA – A Paris-based end-to-end Web3 incubator that has helped incubate world class projects such as Morpho and Mangrove, and whom Telos announced a strategic partnership with in March 2024.
• Cometh – An award-winning dev team led by ETH France President Jerome de Tychey, who joined Telos as a technical EVM advisor also in March 2024.

Telos Executive Director John Lilic, who helped lead pioneering teams at Consensys and Polygon in addition to maintaining his role as a Top 50 Web3 angel investor, will help coordinate and support the transformation. He will work closely with Alberto Garoffolo, Head of ZK technology at Telos and co-author of the SNARKtor whitepaper, and Jesse Schulman, CTO and Head of Engineering at Telos.

“Fundamentally, Ethereum will need to take a hardware-software co-design approach in order to realize zkEVM performance at tremendous scale,” said Lilic. “That’s the approach we’re taking with Ponos Technology and our growing partner network as we build a hardware-accelerated zkEVM L2. We believe that this formula, alongside the exciting work our team is doing with recursive proofs via SNARKtor, is going to offer compelling services to the Ethereum community and beyond.”

Telos was created in 2018 through a fair drop network launch that did not include an ICO nor token sale. Over the past six years, the Telos Foundation has helped steward the development of two primary networks – Telos EVM and Telos Zero – and will now also focus on building a highly performant and succinctly provable L2 zkEVM.

Additional details on the Telos L2 will continue to be announced in the lead up to EthCC in July, for which Telos is a primary sponsor. Live in Brussels from EthCC, the Telos team plans to broadcast its first-ever demo of SNARKtor to the world as a precursor to the official launch of the Telos L2.

About Telos

Telos is a decentralized blockchain ecosystem that includes Telos EVM, which tested as the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine globally, and its high-speed consensus layer, Telos Zero. The project is also focused on expanding its capabilities with novel Zero Knowledge technology through the development of a hardware-accelerated Ethereum Layer 2 network powered by SNARKtor, which promises to enhance privacy and scalability for global use cases. Telos is overseen by The Telos Foundation, an ownerless foundation dedicated to advancing the Telos blockchain network and its community.