Anaxi Labs has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University's Network Security and Privacy Institute CyLab to announce the launch of a groundbreaking cryptographic compiler framework that tackles a longstanding industry challenge — building scalable zero-knowledge applications has traditionally required trade-offs at a fundamental level. Previously, the three characteristics of scalability, cryptographic security, and decentralization were deemed impossible to achieve simultaneously, which was also a barrier to widespread adoption — until now.

A Cryptographic Breakthrough Without Trade-Offs

Blockchains like Ethereum have been hailed as the future of decentralized infrastructure, with zero-knowledge (ZK) technology expected to elevate Ethereum's security and scalability to over 120 transactions per second. However, reality has been quite different. Developing zero-knowledge proofs is both complex and time-consuming, requiring dozens of developers to invest thousands of hours. To optimize proof generation speed, manual protocol design is often necessary, and manual coding and tens of thousands of lines of code bring significant security risks. This complexity has made creating security-sensitive decentralized applications challenging and has turned auditing and compliance into nightmares — all of which have hindered the widespread adoption of this technology in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and artificial intelligence.

Carnegie Mellon University's research team is collaborating with Anaxi Labs to overcome this challenge

In a recent paper published by Carnegie Mellon University, a revolutionary approach has been proposed to automatically compile high-level software into a simpler form required by the underlying proof system (low-level representation). This fully automated, reproducible, and auditable process eliminates manual work, significantly improves performance, and ensures process security at the cryptographic level. This achievement involves analyzing high-level programs, breaking them down into small, indivisible units, and then creating low-level representations from each unit, which can easily be input into various proof systems.

Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Riad Wahby stated: "Breaking computation down into very specific blocks in an automated way, rather than through a CPU, is a new approach, and this is the first time anyone has attempted this compiler approach that avoids a full program representation. We are very excited about this."

Empowering the Next Generation of Decentralized Applications

This research, along with the framework built by Anaxi Labs based on the research, will fundamentally change the industry landscape of Web3 and beyond. In the traditional and regulated financial sector, maintaining auditability while improving performance enables real-time settlement of interbank transfers (such as instant USD payments). In the healthcare sector, amidst challenges faced by 23andMe, the secure and privacy-preserving encryption tools supported by Anaxi Labs' product can now address critical issues by ensuring individuals' rightful ownership of their DNA, while supporting valuable research. In the enterprise AI and critical infrastructure sector, decentralized solutions requiring high availability and near-zero latency (such as rapid fine-tuning and inferencing across multiple data and compute resources) have also become a reality.

Most recently, products based on this research have provided the most effective solutions for Web3 enterprises grappling with scalability, security, and decentralization trade-offs, offering new design paradigms for rollups and interoperability products.

Kate Shen, Co-founder of Anaxi Labs, stated: "This research, along with the products we are building that integrate the findings of this research, will have a profound impact on many key industry applications today that require auditable solutions to address scaling bottlenecks, such as ZK and EVM, ultimately bringing us closer to realizing the vision of a cryptographically secure, real-time settlement-capable decentralized consensus."

Shen added: "We also appreciate the cross-language capability of this research, meaning various projects can benefit without modifying their code. This allows us to build an open, collaborative framework rather than adopting today's increasingly static, monolithic approach. This enables all developers to automatically select and combine the advantages of the latest proofing systems, such as lookups, co-processors, and hardware acceleration, maximizing the performance gains of each computational approach."

Anaxi Labs and CyLab: A Game-Changing Collaboration

CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University has been a hub of cutting-edge blockchain development (including zero-knowledge technologies). CyLab's renowned professor researchers include Bryan Parno, a significant contributor to the history of zero-knowledge technology development, whose lab has produced widely cited Nova paper series; and Assistant Professor Riad Wahby, whose research achievements have led to the realization of new cryptographic technologies aligning with the Ethereum Foundation's vision (recently also with the pioneering Jolt zkVM implementation by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z crypto).

The research findings of this compiler framework stem from a collaborative partnership established through the CMU Security and Blockchain Initiative, between Anaxi Labs and CyLab. This collaboration has enabled Carnegie Mellon University scholars to work with Anaxi Labs, gaining insights from their blockchain research commercial deployments in Web3 and Web 2.0 applications. It has allowed them to find business solutions to existing major issues in blockchain, bridging the gap between the known advantages of blockchain technology and large-scale applications. It has also provided a launching pad for Carnegie Mellon University students to embark on careers in the Web3 field.

CyLab's Director of Strategic Partnerships, Michael Lisanti, stated, "The collaboration between Anaxi Labs and CyLab has enhanced the ability of Carnegie Mellon University researchers to work on projects with direct real-world applications, ensuring that their work is practically relevant and potentially impactful."

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About Anaxi Labs

Anaxi Labs is a novel research and development laboratory that bridges the gap between cutting-edge academic theory and large-scale applications. We are committed to conducting original frontier research, building enterprise-grade, secure, and scalable decentralized infrastructures, and advancing the development of cryptography-driven next-generation decentralized applications.

We collaborate with world-class cryptography researchers and top-notch engineers who have successfully built and operated renowned products at the scale of hundreds of millions of users, providing robust technical support for our projects with their expertise and experience. We are an industry partner of top-tier cryptographic academic institutions like Carnegie Mellon University. We are collectively dedicated to transforming the future of the internet by unlocking the potential of science for humanity, society, and the planet.

About CyLab

CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University is the university-wide security and privacy research institute. We bring together experts from across the university, spanning engineering, computer science, public policy, information systems, business, financial information risk management, humanities, and social sciences. Our mission is to catalyze, support, promote, and enhance collaborative research and education in security and privacy across departmental, disciplinary, and geographic boundaries to have a meaningful impact on research, education, public policy, and practice.

This article is contributed content and does not represent the views of BlockBeats