How did Nil achieve a valuation of $220 million with its zero-knowledge circuit compiler zkLLVM?

Original Title: "How did Nil use the zero-knowledge circuit compiler zkLLVM to achieve a valuation of 220 million US dollars?"

Original Author: Chloe, Chain Tea House

Established in 2018, ZK technology development company Nil completed a $22 million financing with a valuation of $220 million, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from IOSG Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Starkware, Mina Protocol, and others.

It's not just the amount of financing that's worth paying attention to, but also the list of investors - Starkware and Mina Protocol, two technical players in the ZK ecosystem, are also involved.

Previously, Chain Teahouse introduced Starkware and Mina Protocol.

Starkware team has launched a proof system called STARK and has accumulated a relatively complete business logic in subsequent technology outsourcing careers. Eventually, they launched StarkNet ("From DEX to Layer4, StarkWare's "build a hard fort, fight a tough battle" approach is worth learning for all public chains").

Only 22 KB lightweight blockchain Mina is also worth paying attention to ("Technical Principles and Ecological Development of Lightweight Privacy Public Chain Mina"). The proof system zk-SNARK it uses can recursively refer to itself, thereby creating proofs and keeping blocks fixed in size.

Their investment in Nil can also be seen as a technical endorsement.

Especially, the Mina Foundation has provided Nil Foundation with $1.2 million in funding to develop Snapp, which enables dapps on various public chains to prove themselves through Mina, providing privacy protection based on data verification, effective proof of large-scale computation, and secure one-click login functionality.

What are the noteworthy technologies of Nil Foundation in the ZK field?

Nil Foundation is a protocol developer established in 2018. Initially, it only wanted to develop a database management system and cryptographic applications. However, in recent years, with the accumulation of technology, it wants to establish a complete set of technology - allowing L1 and L2 blockchains and protocols to generate zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs as needed.

For example, on January 20th, it was announced that Mina Protocol will launch zkBridge, a bridge between Mina Protocol and Ethereum, which allows Mina to provide ZK proofs to Ethereum.

But the most noteworthy new technology of the Nil Foundation is actually zkLLVM, where LLVM stands for "Low-Level Virtual Machine", which allows developers to use mainstream programming languages Rust and C++ to build, significantly reducing workload. For example, Mikhail Komarov, founder of the zkEVM platform Scroll, said that they used a special software library developed in Rust to manually build circuits, saving the project several months of time.

The key here lies in zero-knowledge circuits, which is a part of building zkEVM (zkEVM is divided into three parts: execution environment, proof circuit, and verifier contract), used to complete the proof generation process. 

Compiling zero-knowledge circuits often means involving niche programming languages, specific domain software libraries, and a deep understanding of cryptography, making it a complex and time-sensitive task.

Nil Foundation has built a mainstream language compiler on top of LLVM, aiming to become the best tool for developers to compile zero-knowledge circuits.

Recently, it was also announced that a ZK proof market will be created to help the ZK team share their work and outsource certain types of calculations to third parties. The Nil Foundation has released the project on Github, and any developer is free to use or modify the code of zkLLVM.

Currently, most members of the Nil Foundation team are located in Europe, with employees from Switzerland to the Far East region of Russia, all working remotely.

The founder, Mikhail Komarov, is also the architect and software engineer of Cryptarithm. Previously, he served as a senior software engineer at cyber•Fund.

However, if there are programming errors in zero-knowledge circuits, there will be irreversible consequences. Earlier versions of the zkLLVM codebase were leaked online, and at the time, developers expressed disbelief in the circuit generation capabilities of the Nil Foundation.

Therefore, there are still limitations to the application scope of zkLLVM, and these programs may be too complex to be converted into zero-knowledge form.

However, no matter what, the direction of Nil Foundation is currently correct - focusing on the maturity of the zkLLVM codebase, so that developers do not have to spend too much time on the details of ZK circuit construction, but rather focus on the application itself.

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