Solana gives you finality in under 400ms.

Darklake hides your intent before anyone else sees it.

But to protect encrypted trades at scale - every slot, every swap, every slippage-sensitive flow - we need hardware that speaks ZK natively.

Today’s proving stacks are already reaching their limits. We see where the road is going: Solana validators are about to compete on who serves privacy faster. And most won’t be ready.

Darklake is preparing for that world now.

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Solana runs at sub-second finality.
Darklake obfuscates trade intent with zero-knowledge.
But here’s the real tension: most proving systems still run like it’s 2018.

A Groth16 proof on a CPU can take 2–5 seconds. That’s 5 slots too late; and 5 windows of slippage. Even optimized GPU setups struggle to keep up with Solana’s latency demands. And when the goal is encrypted orderflow with real-time responsiveness, you can't afford to lag even a slot.

This isn't about speed. It's about privacy margins, validator economics, and the capital at stake in a world where slippage leaks = alpha lost.

And it’s why we don’t believe privacy at scale can run on general-purpose chips.

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• CPUs are brilliant multitaskers, but arithmetic-heavy proofs leave their cores twiddling thumbs.
  
  
• GPUs feast on parallel math, yet their memory lanes choke on the weird access patterns inside a circuit.
  
  
• FPGAs let you rewire logic, right up until you need a new protocol tomorrow.
  
  

ASICs promise blistering speed: if you’re willing to nail your design to the wall and never move again.

Encrypted trading is moving deeper into the validator stack.

Darklake already proves slippage protection at the AMM layer. The next evolution is about giving validators the tools to run encrypted orderflow as a native part of their infra.

That requires proving engines that can:

• Keep pace with block production
  
  
• Handle swap batches without slowdown
  
  
• Run deterministic, auditable circuits under competitive latency
  
  
• Increase energy efficiency, potentially reducing costs for verifiers and fattening up margins
  
  

Today’s best proof systems aren’t the problem. Their bottleneck is the hardware underneath.

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We’ve been tracking the work out of MIT CSAIL closely, especially the NoCap project, which paired Spartan+Orion circuits with custom-built ZK accelerators.

The results weren’t subtle:

• 586× faster than 32-core CPU Groth16
• 41× faster than FPGA+CPU hybrids like PipeZK
  
  

It’s the first benchmarked proof system we’ve seen that actually meets the throughput and latency needs of a Solana validator node operating under pressure.

Yes, Spartan+Orion generates bigger proofs than Groth16.But for our purposes: speed, scale, slippage protection; it’s the right trade.

The next obvious question: who builds this?

The answer isn’t a private lab or a stealth ASIC startup. It’s something we’re doing differently.

Darklake has signed an MoU with two leading engineering institutions in Brazil:

• Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ)
  
  
• Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
  
  

Together, we're launching a research track that connects real-world ZK workloads with emerging chip design talent in cybersecurity and systems labs. We may expand this model to include U.S.-based universities as early as next semester.

This gives us:

• Direct access to hardware prototyping
  
  
• Academic partners trained in silicon + cryptography
  
  
• A long-term pipeline of contributors who understand both math and markets
  
  

And unlike closed R&D, we’re doing it with open visibility and shared incentives. We’ll start on generic, open-spec ZKP hardware. Anyone who proves they can ship real results will be invited into Phase 2: pushing forward Darklake-specific IP as part of the core team.

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Let’s step back.

Validators today compete on latency, uptime, and extractive edge. But as private mempools evolve, and more flows route through encrypted swaps, a new question emerges:

“Can your validator prove privacy at scale?”

If not, you miss the orderflow.

This flips the MEV arms race:

• From “who can extract the most?”
• To “who can prove the fastest, with the strongest guarantees?”

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The loop is simple:

1. Solana gives us speed.
   
   
2. Darklake gives us encryption.
   
   
3. Hardware gives us scale.

ZK can’t go mainstream if it runs at 2 FPS.

We’re here to fix that.

If you’re a university, a validator, a founder building at the zero-knowledge edge - DM us on X

Because Lunarpunk doesn’t stop at privacy. It scales with silicon.

Darklake Research
Encrypted by default. Built for Solana.

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