zkDaily - 2026-05-16

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ZKP Frontier Tracker 🎯

Sat

05.16

2026

Jagged Polynomial Commitments (or: How to Stack Multilinears)

Paper

https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/917

Tamir HemoPCSzkVM

The Succinct team (Hemo et al.) introduced a Jagged PCS that commits the entire computation trace as a single polynomial while enabling per-column evaluation proofs, drastically reducing zkVM recursion overhead. It requires only 5 finite field multiplications per element with no additional oracles.

NotesNotes要点

Jagged PCS is designed for polynomial commitments with columns of varying heights in zkVM.
No extra oracles required compared to general sparse PCS; prover cost is 5 field multiplications per element.
Verifier circuit depends only on total trace area, avoiding combinatorial explosion in zkVM recursion.
Commits entire trace as a single polynomial while allowing per-column queries.
Highly performant, especially for hash-based SNARKs.

Collected by @icerdesign

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Q&A Deep Dive 💬

Sat

05.16

2026

Why do zkVMs need Jagged PCS?

Traditional zkVMs commit separately to each instruction table or column, causing high verification costs. Jagged PCS combines these multilinears into one structure.

How does Jagged PCS reduce prover cost?

It avoids additional sparse polynomial oracles, so the prover mainly performs finite field multiplications, making it faster than general sparse PCS systems.

Why is Jagged PCS suitable for zkVM recursion?

Its verifier circuit depends only on the total trace area instead of many separate tables, reducing combinatorial explosion in recursive zkVM proofs.

Prompted by @icerdesign