Thread by @cryptodavidw

1/10: The zero-knowledge space is seeing a number of cool zkVM projects, but have you heard of zkCPUs? Here's the thread 🧵

2/10: All zk projects are fundamentally circuits, not the kind of circuits that make up your electronics 📱, arithmetic circuits, which are almost the same but use addition ➕ and multiplication ✖️ and large numbers instead of dealing with bits.

3/ VMs, like the Ethereum VM (the EVM), are simply loops ➿ that will iterate through a list of instructions (specified by the VM). Each instruction is parsed, and logic is executed based on the instruction (for example, add these two numbers together).

4/ zkVMs are fundamentally circuits that implement the logic in that loop, and then iterate that loop in order to execute a given program. 💾

5/ zkVM are fundamentally limited, because you're dealing with this layer of abstraction between the silicon and your magical fingers 🤌

6/ ZK technology is recent, developers are going to care about low-level optimizations 🍝, and having direct access to the silicon 🥽 is going to be important . This is what zkCPUs 💻 offer, they let people customize the CPU and the circuitry directly.

7/ Once you have that, you can even write your own VM on top of that 🤯 ! Mina's next update will bring zkapps, which will be a way for developers to customize Mina's zkCPU 💾.

8/ ZkApps can be seen as modules that will get wired to the two logic units of Mina: the 🧱 blockchain unit (which advances the blockchain) and the 🧾transaction unit (which processes transactions and form blocks for the blockchain unit)

9/ the vision on the long term is to offer more and more degree of customization of this zkCPU. You can start today to play with it docs.minaprotocol.com/zkapps

you can also read more about zkCPUs on my blog cryptologie.net/article/589/zk…

10/ With zkCPUs, developers will have more control and flexibility over their zero-knowledge projects, leading to new use cases and innovations in the space. The future of zk is looking bright! #zkCPUs #zeroknowledge #innovation