Live from TOKEN2049: Telos announces Ethereum Layer 2 partnership with Ponos Technology

Telos has revealed the details of a new partnership with Ponos Technology to develop a hardware-accelerated Ethereum L2 zkEVM network
Plans for the new network were officially unveiled live today at TOKEN2049 in Dubai, where Telos is a title sponsor
TOKEN2049 is one of the world’s top crypto events, bringing together 10,000 attendees from more than 4,000 companies and 100 countries to explore the future of crypto

The Telos Foundation has revealed the details of a new partnership with Ponos Technology, the leading Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) research and development firm, which will see the two companies work together develop an end-to-end optimized, hardware-accelerated Ethereum Layer 2 network featuring SNARKtor, the Telos-developed decentralized recursive proof aggregator.

The new partnership was announced today at TOKEN2049 in Dubai, one of the world’s premier crypto conferences.

Teams from Telos and Ponos Technology will take a hardware-software co-design approach that will help unlock new possibilities in terms of massive scalability, greater data protection and trustless interoperability for Ethereum users globally.

Ponos Technology provides end-to-end optimized solutions for ZK proving, which is essentially achieved by leveraging FPGA acceleration, thus maximizing business value streams through cost-performance optimized computation by matching hardware-software co-designed modules and dedicated execution environments. The team includes a unique blend of experienced scientists and highly skilled industry experts that have accumulated deep technical knowledge on all aspects of ZKPs.

Slobodan Lukovic, CEO and co-founder, Ponos Technology, said:

“Zero Knowledge technology is going to become increasingly mainstream and can open the door to increased efficiency and security across so many industries.

“Similarly to AI, steady enhancements in algorithms coupled with advancements in underlying hardware infrastructures will enable commoditization of ZKPs and result in the technology being widely adopted in the near future.”

Telos will also be working with several other new partners during the development cycle, including:

Digital M.O.B. – One of the strongest Ethereum developer teams in the world, having worked on projects including MetaMask, MakerDAO and Gnosis, among others. 
ATKA – A Paris-based end-to-end web3 incubator who helped incubate world class projects such as Morpho and Mangrove, and whom Telos announced a strategic partnership with in March 2024. 
Cometh – An award-winning dev team led by ETH France President Jerome de Tychey, who joined Telos as a technical EVM advisor also in March 2024.

Telos Executive Director John Lilic, who helped lead pioneering teams at ConsenSys and Polygon in addition to being a Top 50 Web3 angel investor, will help 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. 

Announcing the new partnership, John Lilic said:

“Fundamentally, Ethereum will need to take a hardware-software co-design approach in order to realize zkEVM performance at tremendous scale.

“That’s the approach we’re taking with Ponos Technology and our growing partner network as we build a hardware-accelerated zkEVM L2. We believe that this formula, alongside the exciting work our team is doing with recursive proofs via SNARKtor, is going to offer compelling services to the Ethereum community and beyond.”

Telos was created in 2018 through a “fair drop” network launch that did not include an ICO nor token sale. Over the past six years, the Telos Foundation has helped steward the development of two primary networks – Telos EVM and Telos Zero – and will now also focus on building a  highly performant and succinctly provable L2 zkEVM.

Following TOKEN2049, additional details on the Telos L2 are expected to be announced in the lead up to EthCC in July, for which Telos is a primary sponsor. Live in Brussels from EthCC, the Telos team plans to broadcast its first-ever demo of SNARKtor to the world as a precursor to the official launch of the Telos L2.