Irreducible

Irreducible (formerly Ulvetanna) was a cryptography infrastructure company building systems to make zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) faster and cheaper. Its central technical asset is Binius, a zero-knowledge proof system the company invented and led development of. Where most proof systems are built over prime fields, Binius uses binary field towers, which the company said are more hardware-efficient and reduce the volume of data the prover must process. The company stated that by natively handling bitwise operations, Binius achieves order-of-magnitude speedups over competing systems on ordinary CPUs, including mobile devices, and that its cryptographic design influenced Google's identity-wallet ZKP system.

The company's original commercial approach combined software and hardware co-design: it built an on-premises server cluster of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips housed in its own data centers to run an end-to-end proof generation service, drawing an analogy to hardware advantage in high-frequency trading. Application areas it targeted included self-sovereign identity with mobile-first proof generation for credentials, privacy-preserving and auditable onchain payment infrastructure, content provenance for AI-generated media, and verifiable supercomputing for blockchain systems. An early application built on Binius allowed Ethereum nodes to run on regular laptops and mobile devices without large storage requirements, without requiring protocol-level changes to Ethereum.

In September 2025 the company published a "Reinventing Irreducible" update and announced Binius64, an evolution of Binius optimized for simplicity and CPU performance. On November 12, 2025 it published a post titled "Irreducible is Shutting Down."

Founding story

The company was founded in 2022 under the name Ulvetanna, drawing inspiration from the high-frequency trading industry, where hardware advantage is decisive, to build high-performance, cost-efficient proof generation infrastructure based on software-hardware co-design. Co-founder and CEO Radisav (Radi) Cojbasic has over a decade of high-performance hardware design experience, including work on V-NAND flash SSDs at Samsung Electronics, financial data-center networks at Exablaze and radio communications at Jump Trading, with a PhD and MSc in electrical engineering from EPFL and a BSc from the University of Belgrade. Co-founder Jim Posen is a software engineer and cryptographer who was an early engineer at Coinbase, where he was tech lead of the Payments team and established the Protocol team, and holds a BSE from Duke University and an MS in computer science from Stanford focused on applied cryptography.

Business model

Irreducible operated as an infrastructure provider for zero-knowledge proof generation. Rather than running a proof marketplace itself, it participated in third-party proof marketplaces, generating revenue by executing proofs on its own high-performance infrastructure. Alongside this service, it developed and led the open-source Binius proof system, positioning the library as a foundation on which external developers could build privacy applications.

Revenue was generated by executing high-performance proofs within third-party proof marketplaces using the company's own FPGA-based infrastructure.

Traction

Reported traction includes an alpha release of the Binius library with a first application enabling Ethereum nodes to run on laptops and mobile devices, a claim that Binius' cryptography influenced Google's identity wallet ZKP design, 25 employees as of January 2025 with plans to double headcount over two to three years, and $24 million in Series A funding on top of a $15 million seed.

Latest developments

In September 2025 Irreducible published posts on reinventing the company and announcing Binius64, an evolution of Binius optimized for simplicity and CPU performance. On November 12, 2025 the company published a blog post announcing that Irreducible is shutting down.