Vineet Nair, Justin Thaler, Michael Zhu
ePrint Report
zkVMs are SNARKs for verifying CPU execution. They allow an untrusted prover to show that it correctly ran a specified program on a witness, where the program is given as bytecode conforming to an instruction set architecture like RISC-V. Existing zkVMs still struggle with high prover resource costs, notably large runtime and memory usage. We show how to implement Jolt—an advanced, sum-check- based zkVM—with a significantly reduced memory footprint, without relying on SNARK recursion, and with only modest runtime overhead (potentially well below a factor of two). We discuss benefits of this approach compared to prevailing recursive techniques.
