SNARKs quickly get beyond my paygrade, but I think the interesting thing here is that they are replacing the elliptic curve cryptography that the SNARKs are built on with lattice-based cryptography...which is supposed to be more resistant to quantum computers.

Bitcoin doesn't really rely on SNARKs, but I think they are useful to some of the BitVM projects, so yay for them, they get a potential path toward quantum resistance for the complicated things they do.

Also, apparently using lattice-based cryptography makes the usually slow SNARKs a little faster:

Not only is Lattice Jolt post-quantum, it’s faster than the elliptic curve-based version it replaces.

The speedup primarily comes from a simple source. Elliptic curves forced Jolt to work over 256-bit fields; lattice cryptography achieves comparable security over 128-bit fields. The Jolt prover’s work is dominated by multiplying field elements (essentially, very large numbers) — so halving their size makes each multiplication several times faster.

We need a resident cryptographer to explain these things to us, because I frequently come across cool-looking cryptography things, but me and my LLM only get so far.