The Future of Verified Computation: From Blockchain to Zero-Knowledge

The Foundation: Secrets That Build Great Businesses

Great businesses are built on secrets—unique insights that create competitive advantages. Our thesis rests on two fundamental beliefs that will reshape the computational landscape:

IVC (Incremental Verifiable Computation) will become a cornerstone of zero-knowledge cryptography
Zero-knowledge proofs will scale to encompass increasingly complex computation

Understanding the Technology Stack

Cryptocurrency and zero-knowledge proofs operate as fundamentally different technologies across distinct layers of the computational stack, each solving unique problems in the decentralization puzzle.

Blockchain: Decentralizing State and Consensus

Blockchain technology revolutionized the state management and consensus layer. Before blockchain, these critical functions required centralized authorities—banks, clearinghouses, and payment processors maintained exclusive control over transaction validation and state management. Blockchain distributed these responsibilities across networks of nodes that collectively maintain consensus about system state.

However, while blockchain successfully decentralized the base layer (L1), many applications built on top remained centralized. Exchanges, bridges, oracles, and other infrastructure components still required trust because they needed to see, process, or custody user data and assets.

Zero-Knowledge: Decentralizing Computation and Proving

Zero-knowledge proofs address this limitation by decentralizing the computation and proving layer. The core breakthrough: “We don’t need trusted parties to see your data to verify your computation.”

This capability enables decentralizing applications that previously required centralization for practical reasons. When verification required data inspection, centralized parties were inevitable. ZK breaks this requirement, pushing decentralization up into the application layer that sits atop the L1.

Canonical Applications: From Primitives to Possibilities

Blockchain’s Killer Apps

Blockchain applications converged around three fundamental primitives:

Swaps (DEXs): Decentralized exchanges
Votes (DAOs): Decentralized governance
Mints (tokens/NFTs): Asset creation and transfer

These applications share a common pattern: ordering and recording state changes publicly.

Zero-Knowledge’s Emerging Applications

ZK’s canonical applications follow the pattern of “compute elsewhere, verify onchain”:

P2P Bridges: Prove state on chain A to chain B without intermediaries
L2 Scaling: Batch transactions offchain, prove validity onchain
Coprocessors: Execute expensive computation offchain, verify cheaply onchain

The IVC Revolution: Making the Impossible Possible

Incremental Verifiable Computation (IVC) addresses computation that is:

Too large to prove in one shot
Naturally incremental or streaming
Collaborative across time and parties

Transforming Trust-Based Markets

IVC enables verifiable compute markets—decentralized GPU/compute networks where providers must prove they correctly executed jobs over extended periods. This eliminates the need to trust providers during long-running computations.

The broader pattern: anywhere we currently trust long-running services (indexers, keepers, solvers, agents) could become trustless with IVC. These services derive value precisely because they accumulate state and knowledge over time that others rely on.

AI Meets Cryptographic Verification

IVC makes AI compute as trustlessly verifiable as Proof of Work, enabling true competition for computational resources. Without it, AI compute remains a trust-based market that cannot properly compete with mining’s permissionless economics.

During provider switches or resource allocation changes, IVC ensures AI customers aren’t being defrauded—a critical protection in dynamic compute markets.

The Thesis: Datacenters as the New Power Plants

The Current Landscape

Datacenters are becoming the power plants of the digital age—massive infrastructure converting electricity into computation. Two competing forces vie for this power:

Bitcoin Mining: Computationally simple but perfectly verifiable
AI Inference: Computationally sophisticated but entirely unverifiable

This creates a fundamental imbalance: mining has perfect verification while AI has none.

The Catalytic Event

An AI catastrophe shatters public trust in black-box systems. Regulatory response follows swiftly: all critical AI must be verifiable or it cannot operate. Overnight, unverified AI compute becomes worthless.

The New Paradigm

In this transformed landscape:

Datacenters must provide verified computation to survive
IVC/ZK infrastructure becomes as critical as the power grid itself
Mining and AI no longer compete—they’re part of the same verified compute market
Power flows to computation that can be both proven and valued highest

The Market Evolution

The compute market splits into two distinct tiers:

Verified computation: Commands premium pricing
Unverified computation: Becomes commodity

Every datacenter runs verification alongside computation. Public blockchains become the audit backbone of the AI age. The survivors are facilities that built verification infrastructure before it became mandatory.

Conclusion

The convergence of blockchain’s state management capabilities with zero-knowledge’s computational verification creates unprecedented opportunities. As IVC makes long-running, complex computations verifiable, the distinction between mining and AI compute dissolves into a unified market for verified computation.

The future belongs to those who recognize that in a world demanding computational accountability, verification isn’t just valuable—it’s essential for survival.