- Telos has revealed details of a new partnership with Ponos Technology to develop a hardware-accelerated Ethereum L2 zkEVM network.
- Plans for the new network were officially unveiled today live at TOKEN2049 in Dubai, where Telos is the title sponsor.
- TOKEN2049 is one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency events, with over 4,000 companies and 10,000 attendees from 100 countries exploring the future of cryptocurrency.
Telos Foundation has revealed details of a new partnership with Ponos Technology, a leading Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) research and development company. This will see the two companies work together to develop an end-to-end optimized, hardware-accelerated Ethereum layer. 2 network featuring SNARKtor, a decentralized recursive proof collector developed by Telos.
The new partnership was announced today at TOKEN2049 in Dubai, one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency conferences.
The teams at Telos and Ponos Technology will take a hardware-software co-design approach that will help unlock new possibilities in terms of massive scalability, improved data protection, and trustless interoperability for Ethereum users globally.
Ponos Technology provides an end-to-end optimized solution for ZK proof that is essentially achieved by leveraging FPGA acceleration, matching hardware-software co-designed modules with a dedicated execution environment to drive business value flow through cost-performance optimized computation. Maximize . The team includes a unique mix of experienced scientists and highly skilled industry experts who have accumulated in-depth technical knowledge of all aspects of ZKP.
Slobodan Lukovic, CEO and co-founder of Ponos Technology, said:
“Zero Knowledge technologies will become increasingly mainstream and can open the door to improved efficiency and security across numerous industries.
“As with AI, steady improvements in algorithms combined with advances in the underlying hardware infrastructure will enable the commercialization of ZKP and lead to widespread adoption of this technology in the near future.”
Telos will also work with several other new partners throughout the development cycle, including:
- Digital MOB – One of the world’s strongest teams of Ethereum developers, working on projects such as MetaMask, MakerDAO, Gnosis, and more.
- ATKA – Paris-based end-to-end web3 incubator that helps incubate world-class projects such as Morpho and Mangrove, and with whom Telos announced a strategic partnership in March 2024.
- Cometh – Award-winning development team led by Jerome de Tychey, President of ETH France, who joined Telos as Technical EVM Advisor in March 2024.
Telos Managing Director John Lilic, who not only helped lead pioneering teams at ConsenSys and Polygon but is also a top 50 Web3 angel investor, will help coordinate and support the change. He will work closely with co-author Alberto Garoffolo, head of ZK technology at Telos. SNARKtor White Paperand Jesse Schulman, CTO and Head of Engineering at Telos.
Announcing the new partnership, John Lilic said:
“Fundamentally, Ethereum needs to take a hardware-software co-design approach to realize zkEVM performance at massive scale.
“This is the approach we are taking with Ponos Technology and our growing partner network as we build hardware-accelerated zkEVM L2. We believe this formula, along with the exciting work our team is doing with recursive proofs with SNARKtor, will provide a powerful service to the Ethereum community and beyond.”
Telos was created in 2018 through a “fair drop” network launch that did not involve an ICO or token sale. Over the past six years, the Telos Foundation has helped manage the development of two major networks, Telos EVM and Telos Zero, and will now also focus on building a highly performant and succinctly provable L2 zkEVM.
Following TOKEN2049, additional details about Telos L2 will be announced ahead of EthCC in July, of which Telos is a major sponsor. EthCC’s Brussels-based Telos team plans to broadcast the first demo of SNARKtor to the world ahead of the official launch of Telos L2.