Apparently, I'm coming across lots of weird Bitcoin adjacent things at the moment.
The main purpose of this POC was to test the integration of our Rust-based proving stack into the C++ codebase.The ultimate vision? To improve Initial Block Download (IBD) dramatically by allowing the entire chain's validity to be verified with a single recursive proof.
I really don't know much about ZK stuff, and probably less about StarkWare (mostly thought of them as an eth thing), but I certainly don't understand how a ZK proof could validate the entire chain.
Here's their github repo where they have a lot of different bitcoin projects.