zkDaily - 2026-03-20

零知识证明 zkDaily

ZKP Frontier Tracker 🎯

Fri

03.20

2026

SoK: Understanding zkVM: From Research to Practice

Paper

https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/525

Yunbo Yang zkVM zkML

Yang et al. conducted a systematization of knowledge on zkVMs in their paper, decomposing them into ISA, VM, and proving layers, and evaluated representative systems for performance, scalability, and usability.

Notes

zkVM is a key infrastructure for proving program execution correctness, widely used in blockchain rollups, privacy-preserving ML, and off-chain computation.
Existing zkVMs have heterogeneous designs in instruction formats, trace layouts, and proving backends, making system relationships hard to understand.
Proposes a three-layer decomposition: ISA layer for instruction semantics, VM layer for program execution, and proving layer for final proof generation.
Conducted comprehensive experimental evaluation of representative zkVMs using this framework to analyze design impacts on performance, scalability, and usability.
Summarized key observations and outlined potential directions for zkVM design and implementation.
Bridges the gap between theory and practice, offering insights for standardization and optimization of zkVMs.

Collected by @icerdesign

零知识证明 zkDaily

Q&A Deep Dive 💬

Fri

03.20

2026

What are the roles of the three zkVM layers?

ISA defines instructions and trace structure; VM executes and organizes constraints; Proving converts traces into algebraic constraints and uses sum-check to generate proofs. This separation enables optimization.

How does trace layout impact zkVM performance?

Trace layout affects polynomial representation and constraint count, impacting sum-check and batch evaluation efficiency. Good layouts reduce cost and improve parallelism.

How does the proving layer formalize execution correctness?

It encodes traces as polynomials and enforces state transitions via AIR or R1CS. Sum-check and polynomial commitments verify them, while batch evaluation reduces cost.

Prompted by @icerdesign