Super Computer

Introduction

Zero-knowledge cryptography projects generally fall into two categories:?

• Special purpose ZK: these attempt to improve blockchain scalability by proving particular computations. For example, the zk-rollup stack, zkEVMs for the execution layer, ZK proof aggregation, settlement, etc. These companies include zkSync Era and Starknet.
• General purpose ZK: these attempt to prove any computation, regardless of programming language, and are called zkVMs. These are designed to allow developers to ship ZK projects in days, instead of months, by allowing them to focus on writing normal code, instead of circuits.

The latter depends on building an entirely new system from the bottom up, requiring industry leaders to expand the frontier of ZK research. These companies include RISC Zero, Succinct, and Nexus.

Building verifiable computation is really hard, so these companies have focused on building specific parts of the stack, like the zkVM, prover network, or customizable circuits. Nexus has approached this with an entirely different perspective. Building a secure internet requires reinvention of how zero-knowledge machines are designed and used. We believe Nexus has the talent and ingenuity to build an entirely novel verifiable computation machine from the ground up to optimize every layer of the zkVM to build the fastest and most efficient verifiable computer.

What is Verifiable Computation?

In the modern age, truth is difficult to verify. AI, deep fakes, VPNs, remote hacking, and phishing make it easier than ever to obscure the truth behind any computation. Currently, in our computers, the CPU runs code and outputs a solution. With Nexus 0.0, an input of code outputs both the solution and a corresponding zero-knowledge proof that the solution was created correctly, allowing us to be certain that the output is valid. In this way, any information can be proved to be true without revealing anything about the underlying information.

Progress and Milestones

Nexus builds on decades of research on zero-knowledge proofs, which, in a nutshell, allow a user to prove that a computation was completed correctly, without revealing any information about the underlying inputs. Medical records, military secrets, identity, and browsing activity; these are all industries that have failed in the past to maintain security. Verifiable computation is the silver bullet but companies face huge hurdles. Current ZK applications are slow, cannot run arbitrary computations, and offer poor developer experience.

The Nexus 1.0 has built a machine that can prove any arbitrary Rust code and has designed a tech stack that optimizes for innovation and scalability. The end goal is to scale verification to accommodate any application, even as large as the Internet. Nexus 0.0 ran at 1Hz (1 CPU cycle per second) and came out in September 2023. At EthDenver in February 2024, the new version, Nexus 1.0, ran at ~100Hz, which is a ~100x improvement over just 5 months. The team hopes to exponentially increase the speed of the Nexus zkVM.

This exponential growth comes from a modular design of Nexus 1.0, allowing each piece from the prover to proof compression, to be individually optimized to use the latest and greatest research in zero-knowledge proofs. This also lends the Nexus to very easily apply its technology to blockchains.

Crypto Application

Nexus’ modularity means that it can be used in a monolithic application or individual pieces can be used to support other modular applications. For example, the Compression layer combines many large proofs into a single succinct proof. This technology depends on Nova, which is a folding scheme only invented in 2022 through a research paper. Nexus has built the only production-grade implementation of folding in the world, allowing for highly efficient recursion and proof aggregation. This layer can be independently used to support other zkVMs.

This design also easily lends itself to integrating with current blockchain consensus and security standards. For example, in the NVM or Nexus Virtual Machine, “Precompiles” allows developers to extend the machine with custom instructions to precompile common schemes like Keccak-256 (used to create and verify transactions on Ethereum). This means the Nexus could integrate and verify computations done on EVM (and many other) chains.

ZK applications today spend millions of dollars to generate and verify proofs on L1s. A network of Nexus proving, compression, and compiler nodes would drastically improve the performance of existing ZK applications, all the while netting huge market share in the existing ZK chain industry which may become worth billions of dollars. The ZK industry is growing quickly and Nexus is uniquely positioned to dominate the market with best-in-class design across the entire technical stack from proving to compression.

Key Players

This team is star-studded with the brightest minds in cryptography and computer science. The executive team includes:

• Daniel Marin, CEO: A recent Stanford graduate, advised by renowned cryptographer Dan Boneh.?
• Jens Groth, Chief Scientist: A former Director of Research at DFINITY, Professor at the University College London, and inventor of Groth16, the most widely used zk-SNARK.
• Alex Fowler, Chief Strategy Officer: Co-founder and former SVP at Blockstream, and Chief Privacy Officer at Mozilla.?
• Don Beaver, VP of Cryptography: Former Chief Cryptographer with Jump Crypto, as well as senior researcher and scientist with Meta, Uber, Apple, and Google.

The core team includes cryptography experts:

• Michel Abdalla: Senior Cryptography Scientist, President of the International Association of Cryptography Research (IACR), former Professor at ENS, France, and a Staff Research Scientist at DFINITY.
• Samuel Judson: Cryptography Engineer with a Ph.D. in Cryptography from Yale, advised by Ruzica Piskac, and a previous role as a Security Engineer at Auth0. He has authored 7+ papers in ZKPs, Formal Methods & AI.
• Kristian Sosnin: Cryptography Engineer with prior roles as a Rust Engineer at Matter Labs and Parity.?
• Vamsi Policharla: Cryptography Engineer, pursuing his Ph.D. in Cryptography at Berkeley, advised by Sanjam Garg. He is a core rust engineer at Berkeley’s cryptography group and has authored 4+ papers in ZKPs.
• Yinuo Zhang: Cryptography Scientist, also pursuing a Ph.D. in Cryptography at Berkeley under Sanjam Garg. He previously interned in zkVM research at a16z Crypto ‘23 and has authored 5+ papers in ZKP.

We believe that if there was any team to create verifiable computation at internet scale, this would be it.

Pantera co-led the $25 million Series A round for Nexus alongside Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Nexus 1.0 has already been publicly launched, meaning anyone can prove arbitrary Rust programs with just a few lines of code. Follow the steps here to try it for yourself.

Conclusion

Nexus is tackling the brave new world of scalable verifiable computation with a star-studded cast and ingenious technical design. We believe Nexus is a fundamental step in humanity’s future to create a secure internet. Zero-knowledge proofs have historically been slow, not general-purpose, and have had a poor developer experience. Nexus has solved all three of these by combining the decades of innovations made in space with a highly parallelized and modular system. We believe Nexus is positioned to be the go-to place for efficient verifiable computation and ensure that the next trillion computations are secure, verifiable, and efficient.

Try out Nexus for yourself using their public GitHub here. For a more detailed explanation of Nexus, watch this video and read their whitepaper here.

- Paul Veradittakit