Anaxi Labs and Carnegie Mellon University CyLab have launched a groundbreaking proof system, paving the way for a scalable and secure real-world appl

Anaxi Labs has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab to announce the launch of a groundbreaking cryptography compiler framework that tackles a long-standing industry challenge—building scalable zero-knowledge applications that require trade-offs at a fundamental level. Previously, achieving scalability, encryption security, and decentralization in an application was considered impossible to be realized simultaneously, and this was also a barrier to large-scale adoption—until now.

A Cryptographic Breakthrough Without Trade-Offs

Blockchains like Ethereum are hailed as the future of decentralized infrastructure, with zero-knowledge (ZK) technology expected to enhance Ethereum's security and scalability to over 120 transactions per second. However, reality is 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 required, and manual coding and tens of thousands of lines of code introduce significant security risks. This complexity has made building security-sensitive decentralized applications challenging and has turned audits and compliance into nightmares—hindering 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

Carnegie Mellon University's recent paper introduces a revolutionary approach that can automatically compile high-level software and simplify it into a simpler form (low-level representation) required by the underlying proof system. This process is fully automated, reproducible, and auditable, eliminating manual work, significantly improving performance, and ensuring security at the cryptographic level. By analyzing high-level programs, the approach decomposes programs into small, indivisible units and then creates low-level representations of these units that can easily feed 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 to avoid a full program representation in favor of the CPU is a brand-new approach—this is the first time anyone has tried this kind of compiler approach that eschews the full program representation. We are very excited about this."

Empowering the Next-Gen Decentralized Application

This research and the framework built upon it by Anaxi Labs will fundamentally transform the landscape of Web3 and beyond. In the traditional and regulated financial sector, maintaining auditability while enhancing performance has made real-time settlement of interbank transfers (such as instant dollar payments) possible. In the healthcare sector, amidst the challenges faced by 23andMe, the secure and privacy-preserving cryptographic tools supported by Anaxi Labs' developing product can now address critical issues by ensuring individuals' legitimate ownership of their DNA, while also supporting valuable research. In the enterprise AI and critical infrastructure space, decentralized solutions requiring high availability and near-zero latency (such as rapid fine-tuning and inference 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 a new design paradigm for rollups and interoperability products.

Kate Shen, Co-founder of Anaxi Labs, stated, "This research and the products we are building that incorporate its findings will have a profound impact on many critical industry applications today that require auditable solutions to address performance bottlenecks at scale, such as ZK and EVM, ultimately advancing us further toward realizing the vision of a cryptographically secure decentralized consensus with real-time settlement capability."

Shen added, "We also appreciate the cross-language capability of this research, which means various projects can benefit without code modifications. This allows us to build an open, collaborative framework rather than adopt today's increasingly static, monolithic approach. It enables all developers to automatically select and combine the advantages of the latest proof systems, such as table lookups, coprocessors, 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 research in blockchain development, including zero-knowledge technologies. CyLab's renowned faculty researchers include Bryan Parno, a key contributor to the history of zero-knowledge technology development whose lab has produced widely referenced Nova paper series; and Assistant Professor Riad Wahby, whose research outcomes have driven novel cryptographic technologies realizing the Ethereum Foundation vision (recently also with the groundbreaking Jolt zkVM implementation by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm a16z crypto).

The research findings of this compiler framework stem from a symbiotic partnership established through the CMU Security and Blockchain Consortium between Anaxi Labs and CyLab as the second research project. 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 empowered them to find business solutions to the existing major issues in blockchain, bridging the gap between the known advantages of blockchain technology and large-scale applications. It has also provided a stepping stone for Carnegie Mellon University students to kickstart their 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."

For more information about Anaxi Labs, please visit the official website.

To learn more about the latest work of Anaxi Labs and CyLab, please visit here.

For more information about the collaboration between CyLab and Anaxi Labs, please visit here.

About Anaxi Labs

Anaxi Labs is a novel research and development lab 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 infrastructure, and driving the development of cryptography-driven next-generation decentralized applications.

We collaborate with world-class cryptographic research talents and top-notch engineers who have successfully built and operated widely-used products serving hundreds of millions of users, providing our projects with robust technical support based on their expertise and experience. We are an industry partner of top-tier cryptographic academic institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University. Together, we are committed to transforming the future of the internet by unleashing the potential of science for the benefit of 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 make a meaningful impact in research, education, public policy, and practice.

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