Jolt: a faster zkVM

Andrew Tulloch's team at a16z crypto... wait, the article does not name its author in the text. The article states that a16z crypto released an initial implementation of Jolt, a new SNARK design that it says is up to 2x faster than the state of the art. The post says Jolt builds on Lasso, a lookup argument released in August 2023, and uses the sum-check protocol, with a claimed 6x speedup over RISC Zero and up to 2x over SP1 on CPUs. The article says the initial version uses the Hyrax commitment scheme, that several optimizations are expected to add about 1.5x, and that replacing Hyrax with Binius is expected to yield an additional 5x speedup.