Abhiram Kothapalli

Postdoctoral Scholar
University of California, Berkeley
Email: akothapalli at berkeley dot edu
CV | Google Scholar

I am a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Berkeley hosted by Sanjam Garg. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Bryan Parno.

My research develops fundamental technologies aimed at scaling expressive privacy and integrity guarantees across the internet. I am currently focused on designing performant zero-knowledge proofs, which are are short certificates that attest to the correctness of a computation without revealing any secret inputs.

Today, zero-knowledge proofs enable a wide variety of applications such as anonymous credentials, verifiable databases, and private cryptocurrencies, making them a central tool in modern secure systems. I am best known for my work on bringing memory-efficient zero-knowledge proofs to practice, overcoming a key bottleneck in the last decade. Memory-efficient proofs have the potential to significantly scale secure computation due to their unique ability to handle large computations with dynamic control flow.

I am on the 2025-2026 academic job market for tenure-track positions in computer science.

Research News

  • October 2025: HyperNova is integrated into the Aztec network, a privacy-preserving layer on Ethereum that enables confidential transactions.

  • April 2025: Our reductions of knowledge framework for composing zero-knowledge proofs has been adopted and extended by over a dozen academic works, both to manage complexity and to precisely formulate new techniques.

  • July 2024: Nexus, a $25M series-A company, adopts our work HyperNova to verifiably outsource computations to untrusted computers at scale.

  • July 2024: A zero-knowledge proof system based on our work Nova is helping the Brazilian central bank pilot a digital currency with built-in privacy protections.

  • August 2023: Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE) and 0xPARC jointly develop Sonobe, an ongoing community implementation of our Nova line of work.

  • March 2023: An online course on zero-knowledge proofs hosted by Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Georgetown University, and Texas A&M University features a lecture on our works Nova and SuperNova.

  • April 2022: The textbook Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Justin Thaler includes a detailed treatment of our work Nova.

    • Publications