With Esli, Head of product and ecosystem at Marlin

In this episode, we met with Esli from Marlin to explore their work at the intersection of verifiable compute and trusted execution environments (TEEs). Main topics we discussed:

• Marlin’s evolution from network-layer optimizations to a confidential computing layer.
• Kalypso, a ZK proof marketplace supporting private inputs and TEE-based proving.
• Oyster, a framework for easily deploying applications and AI agents in TEEs.
• TML (TEE Machine Learning) as a faster, more practical alternative to ZKML.
• Use cases like decentralized frontends, verifiable AI, and secure key management.
• Challenges and mitigations around TEE trust, side-channel attacks, and reproducibility.