#128 Untangling: Verifiable Compute w/ Leo Fan

#128 Untangling: Verifiable Compute w/ Leo Fan

From Untangling Web3 by Jack Davies & Alec Burns

April 22, 2026 · 45 min · Season 1 · Episode 128

About this episode

Leo Fan discusses how verifiable compute and zero-knowledge proofs can enhance trust in computation.

As AI, cloud infrastructure, and blockchain systems scale, one critical issue remains unresolved: trust in compute. Today, most computation—whether powering AI models or executing financial transactions—operates as a black box. In this episode of Untangling Web3, Leo Fan, founder and CEO of Cysic, explores how verifiable compute and zero-knowledge proofs can transform computation into something that is not just fast and scalable, but provably correct. Key highlights: Why Verifiable Compute Matters in an AI-Driven World: Modern compute infrastructure has been optimized for performance and scale, not for verifiability. As computation moved from local machines to centralized cloud providers and data centers, users increasingly lost visibility into how results are produced. This becomes critical with AI systems, where outputs are often trusted without insight into the underlying process. Verifiable compute introduces a new trust model: instead of trusting a provider, users can independently verify that a computation was executed correctly. Zero-Knowledge Proofs as the Foundation of Trustless Compute Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs enable computation to produce a compact, cryptographic…

People in this episode

Hosts: Jack Davies, Alec Burns

Guest: Leo Fan

Topics covered

  • verifiable compute
  • zero-knowledge proofs
  • trust in computation
  • AI systems
  • cloud infrastructure

Keywords

  • verifiable compute
  • zero-knowledge proofs
  • AI
  • cloud infrastructure
  • trust model

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cysic

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