Telos and Ponos Technology Collaborate on Hardware-Accelerated Ethereum L2 zkEVM

The Telos Foundation has announced a strategic partnership with Ponos Technology, a leading Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) research and development firm, to develop an end-to-end optimized, hardware-accelerated Ethereum Layer 2 network

. The new L2 will feature SNARKtor, a decentralized recursive proof aggregator developed by Telos and IOHK to scale SNARKs verifications in blockchains.

TLDR

Telos has partnered with Ponos Technology to develop a hardware-accelerated Ethereum Layer 2 zkEVM network featuring SNARKtor.
SNARKtor is a decentralized recursive proof aggregator developed by Telos and IOHK to scale SNARKs verifications in blockchains.
The new Telos L2 is being designed with a hardware-software co-design approach for better scalability, data protection, and interoperability.
Telos will collaborate with Digital M.O.B., ATKA, and Cometh during the development cycle.
The Telos team plans to demonstrate SNARKtor at EthCC in July, before the official launch of the Telos L2.

The announcement was made by Telos Executive Director John Lilic during his keynote speech at TOKEN2049 in Dubai, where Telos was a title sponsor.

The partnership between Telos and Ponos Technology aims to unlock new possibilities in terms of massive scalability, greater data protection, and trustless interoperability for Ethereum users globally.

Ponos Technology brings its expertise in end-to-end optimized solutions for ZK proving, leveraging FPGA acceleration to maximize business value streams through cost-performance optimized computation.

The team at Ponos Technology consists of experienced scientists and highly skilled industry experts with deep technical knowledge in all aspects of ZKPs.

Slobodan Lukovic, CEO and co-founder of Ponos Technology, emphasized the growing importance of Zero Knowledge technology, stating that steady enhancements in algorithms and advancements in underlying hardware infrastructures will enable the commoditization of ZKPs and result in widespread adoption in the near future.

The development of the Telos L2 will be a collaborative effort, with Telos working alongside several other partners, including Digital M.O.B., ATKA, and Cometh.

Digital M.O.B. is one of the strongest Ethereum developer teams in the world, having worked on projects such as MetaMask, MakerDAO, and Gnosis. ATKA is a Paris-based end-to-end Web3 incubator that has helped incubate world-class projects like Morpho and Mangrove.

Cometh, led by ETH France President Jerome de Tychey, joined Telos as a technical EVM advisor in March 2024.

John Lilic, who has previously led pioneering teams at ConsenSys and Polygon and is a Top 50 Web3 angel investor, will coordinate and support the transformation.

He will work closely with Alberto Garoffolo, Head of ZK technology at Telos and co-author of the SNARKtor whitepaper, and Jesse Schulman, CTO and Head of Engineering at Telos.

Lilic emphasized the importance of a hardware-software co-design approach for Ethereum to realize zkEVM performance at a tremendous scale.

He believes that the approach taken by Telos and Ponos Technology, alongside the work being done with recursive proofs via SNARKtor, will offer compelling services to the Ethereum community and beyond.