PANews reported on March 4th that, according to The Block, a16z Crypto criticized the common use of the term "ZK" in some developer environments in a blog post about its Jolt zkVM. The article points out that most zkVMs do not actually possess zero-knowledge properties unless expensive "wrapping" procedures are applied. The author also mentions that "zk" is often used as a synonym for "simplicity," meaning proofs are "brief and verification is fast," rather than true zero-knowledge privacy. With the community's growing focus on privacy, this misuse of the term is becoming a real problem.

a16z's open-source Jolt zkVM received a major upgrade on Tuesday, natively supporting zero-knowledge proofs. Jolt uses the NovaBlindFold folding scheme to create blinded proofs to prevent information leakage, making it suitable for privacy applications. The zero-knowledge proofs generated after the upgrade are only about 3 KB larger than the original non-ZK proofs.