Interpretation of Pi Squared: Led by academic leaders from prestigious universities, ZK Universal Settlement Layer raised $12 million

Written by: Xiaobai Navigation Coderworld

The market situation is not like a bull market, and the financing is not like a bear market.

While BTC has been falling in the past few days, the primary market has continued to reveal information about large-scale financing.

In addition to the $85 million in financingAI Behemoth Sentiment (see:Is the value of personal connections 85 million? A brief analysis of Sentient, a massively-funded AI project led by Polygon),Another financing project worth noting this week is Pi Squared, which is related to ZK.

On July 2, Pi Squared announced that it had received $12 million in seed round funding led by Polychain Capital, with participation from ABCDE, Bloccelerate, Generative Ventures, Robot Ventures and Samsung Next.

Angel investors include Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation and Sreeram Kanaan, founder of EigenLayer.

From the public information, the name of Pi Squared has a profound mathematical meaning. The infinitely repeating pi plus the square creates a hardcore and mysterious technological habitat.

The project itself is focused on building“Universal ZK Circuits and Universal Settlement Layer", it's that feeling again when you read the introduction and find that "you know all the words but you just can't understand it".

It’s still the sophisticated infrastructure, and ZK has a high valuation, plus a number of big VCs and well-known figures act as angel investors…

Although raising the banner of opposing high-profile projects does not guarantee that you will not lose money, it is not a wise move to directly ignore new projects with sufficient financing.

What is the origin of this square of pie?

Pi Squared, led by academic leaders from prestigious universities

If you draw the square of pie on the blackboard, of course people will be confused; but if an academic leader draws the same thing, the effect will be very different.

Pi Squared was actually invented by a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Grigore Rosu He led the establishment and is also the CEO of the project.

In 2014, Grigore Rosu was already a professor at the school, and his main research areas were formal verification and runtime verification. To put it simply, the former is to study the use of mathematical methods to prove the correctness of software and hardware systems and ensure that they can operate normally under various circumstances, while the latter is to monitor system behavior in real time to improve system stability andSafetysex.

Wikipedia shows that many related papers by Professor Grigore Rosu have also won top paper awards from the Association for Computing Machinery and the International Association for Automated Software Engineering.

But what does this have to do with crypto projects?

If you look at the main business introduction of Pi Squared, you can find that it usesZero knowledge proof(ZK) technology to verify the execution correctness of any program without relying on a specific programming language (PL) or virtual machine (VM), and provide a general and efficient verification method to achieveBlockchain, languages, and applications.

This is exactly related to Professor Grigore Rosu mentioned aboveverifyThe research direction is in line with the major, and it is also a place for academic leaders to display their skills.

When academic giants lead a project with a strong technical background, the credibility will naturally be higher.

In addition, Pi Squared's CTO, Dr. Xiaohong Chen, graduated from Peking University with a bachelor's degree and then became a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also has a strong academic background. He is from the same school as Professor Grigore Rosu and has similar research directions. It is very likely that they are teacher-student or colleagues.

Another co-founder and COO of the project, Patrick MacKay, also graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was also the founder of the previous startup company founded by Grigore Rosu. Runtime Verification COO,It can be said that it is a smooth migration of old colleagues and old positions;Xiaobai Navigation Runtime Verification business, including virtual machines and smartcontractconductSafetyaudit.

Led by academic giants and with smooth migration of old colleagues and alumni, it is no wonder that Pi Squared, a project with strong academic and industry background, is favored by VCs.

USL, promotes system transaction settlement

Let’s take a look at what this “universal settlement layer” that Pi Squared mainly wants to do is.

The first thing to be clear is that Pi Squared is not directly facing users, but provides products for various types of encryption and developers.

Pi Squared The goal is to create aUniversal Settlement Layer (USL), to simplifyBlockchain/language/application interoperability and completely eliminates the need for traditional, often error-prone language implementations such as compilers, translators, or interpreters.

If you want to understand it simply, you can think of it asA super translator,Let differentBlockchain, programming languages, and applications interoperate seamlessly. Developers can more easily createCross-chainand cross-language applications.

This diagram from the Pi Squared website illustrates the function of this super translator:

1. Initiate a transaction: A user (such as Alice) initiates a transaction request, such as transferring 1 WETH to Bob. WETH complies with the ERC20 standard.Token;

2. Universal Settlement: Transaction requests are submitted to an environment that supports any virtual machine and any programming language, such as EVM or Python. This is the so-called universal settlement layer. As long as there is a language specific VM ofOnce formally specified, the computation can be expressed in any language or VM.To put it bluntly, it doesn't matter which virtual machine or programming language you use.

3. Generate proof: For step 2, generate a mathematical proof to prove the correctness of the transaction. This mathematical proof is very precise, but may be very large;

4. Proof Checking: We then use a ZK-ED (Zero Knowledge – Matching Logic) proof checker to verify the “big proof” above. This checker is small and can be processed in large quantities in parallel.

5. ZK compression: finally generates aZero knowledge proof, used to prove the correctness of the previous transaction. This zero-knowledge proof is small in size and can be efficiently transmitted and verified.

Therefore, the above process shows how to start from a simple transaction request, generate and verify mathematical proofs, and finally generate a smaller zero-knowledge proof to ensure the correctness and privacy of the transaction.

The entire process supports multiple programming languages and execution environments, is efficient and trustless, and is suitable for cross-chain connections and otherSafetyand privacy protection application scenarios.

From the perspective of the ecological niche of the project, Pi Squared is in the middle of the technology stack. The computing layer and sorting service are above, and the consensus and data availability layer is below.

Pi Squared’s USL can be viewed as a layer of optimistic aggregation that explains and verifies the correctness of computational transactions, connecting the upper-layer computations with the lower-layer consensus.

At the same time, Pi Squared also mentioned that it will have its own network, with nodes running the consensus protocol, and it is speculated that there may be an economic system based on staking, which will be directly related to the project.Tokensuperior.

不过目前项目文档中并未透露Token的任何信息，只能说网络设计给了代币合理的存在空间，至于后续怎么玩还要看进一步信息的放出。

Pi Squared is still in the proof-of-concept stage. Professor Rosu said the project will enter the testnet at the end of 2024. It is still in the preheating and promotion period, and there are no activities and tasks to participate in.

We will continue to pay attention to the project. No matter how much we shout that we will not take over each other, there are always opportunities worth participating in.

The article comes from the Internet:Interpretation of Pi Squared: Led by academic leaders from prestigious universities, ZK Universal Settlement Layer raised $12 million

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