Nexus 2.0
Jolt Integration
The Jolt arithmetization system, developed by the research team at a16z and their collaborators, is now part of Nexus 2.0. This integration makes verifiable computation significantly faster than before.
Jolt’s scientific contribution is that all instructions are decomposed into a set of lookups, thus increasing performance by eliminating the overhead of having a large instruction set. Some zkVMs have a cost that scales with the number of opcodes in the instruction set architecture by requiring specialized constraints for each, but with Nexus and Jolt, users simply need to switch the lookup tables. This eliminates the overhead, thus allowing a zkVM with rich instruction sets.
HyperNova Proof System
Our 1.0 zkVM led the industry by implementing Nova folding, and the Nexus 2.0 builds on this with Hypernova. Hypernova enables greater expressivity to allow our zkVM to perform larger and more extensive checks all at once.
Hypernova promises a number of scalability and efficiency gains, and is a major step forward toward turning theoretical concepts into practical, real world solutions.
The Nexus SDK
The Nexus SDK exposes an ergonomic, modular and stable interface designed for computing proofs asynchronously as part of larger more robust proof-production pipelines
It introduces a programmatic guest/host mechanism, with I/O enabled, allowing developers to initialize the zkVM with a program and generate multiple proofs for different inputs. It also allows developers to compute multiple proofs in parallel from the same host using parallel Rust computation frameworks like Rayon. The zkVM automatically uses the maximum number of cores available.
And, it presents a stable interface for developers that is optimized for modularity and configurability, while abstracting the inner workings of the zkVM. Advanced developers can now find multiple prover backends with different time/space tradeoffs, including Nova, SuperNova, HyperNova and Spartan+Jolt.
Building the Future of Computing
Nexus 2.0 embodies our vision for the future of computing — one that prioritizes correctness, transparency, security, and accountability — and marks a potential turning point for bringing a new level of verifiability into the digital world at a global scale.
A Fully Open Source zkVM
Developers, researchers, and enthusiasts can explore and build on our work, which is documented and freely available under both MIT and Apache 2.0 open source licenses. We look forward to you joining us.