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About Lita
Lita is building Valida, a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) with a custom instruction set architecture (ISA). Unlike most zkVMs that adapt existing ISAs like RISC-V, Valida designs its own ISA from scratch to maximize proving efficiency. Its core business includes the Valida zkVM itself, a compiler toolchain supporting Rust, C, and WASM, and the Plonky3 proving system. Lita also showcases real-world applications through Lita Studios, such as provable gaming (Cat Runner), trustless payments (Lita Pay), and AI/ML use cases.
The core competitiveness lies in performance and modularity. Valida's custom ISA reduces unnecessary operations, and its modular chip-based design allows users to add custom chips for specific workloads. The use of Plonky3 with the Brakedown encoding achieves significantly faster proving speeds—roughly three orders of magnitude faster than some existing solutions. This makes it suitable for high-throughput, latency-sensitive applications.
The market pain point Lita addresses is the high computational cost and poor scalability of existing zk-proof generation. Many current zkVMs are too slow or inflexible for practical, large-scale use. Valida aims to lower this barrier, enabling more efficient and affordable verifiable computation.
In the past six months (2026-03 to 2026-09), Lita has focused on maturing Valida's implementation. This includes ongoing internal audits, planning for external audits, and addressing known constraints. They have also been expanding their application ecosystem through Lita Studios, demonstrating use cases in gaming, payments, and AI. Performance optimizations, particularly around the Brakedown encoding, have been a key area of progress.
However, Valida is still experimental. Some arithmetic operations (like SDIV32, MULHS32, and certain shift operations) currently lack complete constraints, and the prover can only handle a limited number of instructions in a single execution. These limitations are being addressed, but they mean Valida is not yet production-ready for all use cases.
Key progress (2026-03-15 to 2026-09-15):
Valida 0.10.0 released, introducing continuations (multi-segment proofs) for long executions, a client-side WASM API enabling in-browser proof generation/verification, updated Rust 1.86/LLVM 18.1.7 toolchain, experimental Secp256k1 and memcpy opcodes, Docker support for x86/ARM, and ReVa—an Ethereum block prover in Rust.
Valida 1.0.0 released, adding parallel proving for multi-segment proofs, debugger support, and strengthened soundness via boolean constraints for opcode flags, program trace consistency checks, and enforced STOP as the final instruction.
Keccak Acceleration Chip integrated with Valida zkVM, cutting proving time for 500 sequential Keccak hashes from 183s to 23s (~8x speedup) on AWS z1d.metal, advancing Ethereum block proving.
Official roadmap: finalize proving soundness, add prover support for Secp256k1/memcpy, recursive aggregation for multi-block proofs, Rust no_std and threading support, plus continued Keccak/ECDSA optimizations and hardware acceleration toward real-time block proving.
Ventali Tan (Co-founder)
Founder of Lita. Previously co-founded Delendum, worked at Redpoint Ventures and Hillhouse. Co-founded S2R.AI. Studied physics, philosophy, and computer science at Duke University. Interested in AI for science, zero-knowledge proofs, and agentic systems.