We're proud to back Hylé in their mission to make it seamless for developers to build zero-knowledge (ZK) apps.

We think this is critical because ZK - or programmable cryptography - augment blockchains and expand the design space to applications currently impossible for performance, privacy, and compliance reasons.

Investing at cherry.xyz | writing at luc.cx

Concretely, they enable running complex applications in high performance execution environments, without loosing out on the trust and security guarantees we've come to expect from blockchains.

We can also use them to retrieve data privately and trustlessly from the offchain applications we all use daily.

Issue is, as the Hylé team has seen upclose from their time at Starknet, ZK applications are hard to develop because there are few tools and verification costs are prohibitive

The developer base able to build these apps is so niche that we lack the critical mass to generate enough experimentation with new use cases.


Hylé radically simplifies ZK app development with single purpose blockchain optimized for proof verification. 

They provide devs with a standard interface supporting any proving scheme, DSL, virtual machine, or other ZK tooling. 

By specializing on verification, they bring down costs without compromising on latency.

We're thrilled to work with them as they make it much easier to build the next generation of crypto & ZK application, and enable experimentation at the frontier of programmable cryptography.

More in our investment post:

We're thrilled to work with them as they make it much easier to build the next generation of crypto & ZK application, and enable experimentation at the frontier of programmable cryptography.

More in our investment post: https://www.cherry.xyz/writing/hyle

ZK proofs enable verifiable compute: i.e mathematical certainty that a program was executed properly. That enables blockchains to interact with external systems and data in a secure and mathematically verifiable way.