Helius CEO Mert Says Anthropic Uses Cryptography First Applied by Zcash

Helius CEO Mert said Anthropic and Claude are using cryptographic technology first applied globally by Zcash. According to ChainCatcher, Anthropic open-sourced FlashProve, a research prototype, on November 2. The system uses zero-knowledge proofs (zkSNARKs) for verifiable inference, allowing a model provider to prove that a response came from its declared model without revealing the model’s weights. Providers first publish an offline commitment to the model weights, then generate a proof for each request, which users can verify on a standard CPU in seconds. For the 400-billion-parameter Llama 4 Maverick, a single H100 can generate proofs for about 110 tokens per second; a proof for a 1,024-token request is about 19 MB. Claude helped optimize the system, whose security properties were formally described in Lean. Anthropic said proof generation currently requires about 70–95 times the GPU time of conventional inference. FlashProve remains a research prototype and is not yet ready for production.