Ingonyama Research Grants 2025

Published on:

Dec 24, 2024

‍

Exactly one year ago, we launched our first-ever grants program, offering $100,000 to support research involving ICICLE.

Today, we're excited to announce our second grants program—another $100,000 dedicated to researchers. Details below!

‍

‍

Background: Who Are We? and What Is ICICLE?

Ingonyama is a next-generation hardware acceleration company committed to democratizing access to zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and advancing privacy-enhancing technologies.

ICICLE is our flagship product—a new math library designed for cryptographers to implement ZK algorithms and protocols with exceptional user experience and performance.

Its design is straightforward:

Frontend APIs: We offer a comprehensive set of APIs, including vectors, polynomials, and hash functions, alongside specialized operations like MSMs, NTTs, Sumchecks, FRI, ECNTT, and more.
Access Options: These APIs are accessible directly in C++ or through Golang and Rust wrappers, ensuring flexibility for diverse development needs.
Backend: ICICLE supports multiple hardware devices and accelerators, including ARM, x86, NVIDIA GPUs, Apple Silicon, and more—all delivering maximum performance. It is embarrassingly simple to switch, offering instant multi-platform support.

‍

With ICICLE, every line of code has the flexibility to run on different target hardware as needed. Onboarding is seamless—start by writing your code locally on your machine. The real magic unfolds when you see that same code, unchanged, achieve 10x performance on data center GPUs—or run effortlessly on an iPhone.

‍

The Goal: Outperform Existing Research Benchmarks

We’re looking for a collaborative adventure! Choose any research paper you like, identify an algorithm implemented in the paper with reported benchmarks, and re-implement it using ICICLE. The greater your improvement over the original paper’s implementation, the larger the grant you’ll receive.

‍

How to Apply

Applying is straightforward. Here’s how it works:

Reach out to us and fill this form.
Share your proposal: Briefly describe your idea, e.g., “I want to implement Whir in ICICLE (note: this one’s already taken by Giacomo)” or more generally, “protocol X from paper Y.”
Collaborate: We’ll discuss and finalize the performance milestones together. Expect some back-and-forth to align on the project goals.
Approval: Once in agreement, we greenlight the project.
Get started: Begin your work with our support and drive it toward success!

Just like last year’s grants program, our team is here to provide end-to-end support on your journey to success. From access to hardware and ongoing support from our developers to collaborating with our research group on algorithms, we’ve got you covered. We also value detailed write-ups, and promise to showcase your work across our social channels to give it the recognition it deserves.

‍

‍

FAQ

Q: What should be the length of a project?
A: There’s no strict rule for project length—it can span a weekend or extend across multiple months and iterations.

Q: How much is the average grant amount?
A: This will be determined on a case-by-case basis, as we consider multiple factors when evaluating the quality of a proposal. That said, it would be exciting if we ended up with a linear scale: for example, a 1x improvement might earn $1k, while a 10x improvement could receive $10k.

Q: In what currency will grants be paid?
A: USDC.

Q: If I am authoring novel research and want to use ICICLE, can I apply?

A: The grant is intended for new implementations of existing literature. However, you are welcome to apply as the author of the original paper. If you’re writing a new research paper and not considering ICICLE as your default, we’d love to hear why and improve.

Q: What’s in it for Ingonyama?
A: This is a great question, so we asked Omer, our CEO. Here’s what he said:

"We stand on the shoulders of giants: There is nothing that brings us more joy than reinvesting our earned money into cryptography research. We believe we’ve built a product that can help cryptographers achieve better results while saving time and costs. The most important part of ICICLE’s development lifecycle is user feedback. So, in a way, this grant is part of our tuition."

Q: Is ICICLE good enough?

A: There’s only one way to find out! :) On a more serious note, ICICLE has come a long way and now supports a large and growing ecosystem of applications. Even a performance gain of less than 1x—especially if it highlights areas where ICICLE can be improved—will still be rewarded.

‍