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The RISC Zero Virtual Machine

Welcome to the RISC Zero zero-knowledge virtual machine! These are some of the features that make the RISC Zero zkVM a powerful foundation for an off-chain proving service. If you'd like more general information about the zkVM, you can find more resources on the RISC Zero website or visit our learning-oriented YouTube channel.

A General Purpose zkVM​

Our zkVM emulates RISC-V. Using a general-purpose architecture makes RISC Zero an incredibly flexible platform. RISC Zero’s receipts can be rolled up for use with Ethereum or any other network!

Easy Onboarding​

Writing zkApps on RISC Zero is (almost) as straight-forward as building any other Rust project. No need to learn a custom language or any fancy math or cryptography.

A zkVM architecture diagram

Leverage Mature Ecosystems​

Complex software requires building blocks. RISC Zero lets you to accelerate your process with all your favorite Rust crates.

What's next for the zkVM?

Recursion​

Proving the validity of two RISC Zero receipts currently takes ~10 seconds in internal testing, with lots of room for improvement.

Continuations​

State of the art ZK systems can only verify computations of a few million machine cycles. RISC Zero’s continuations are a game-changer. With continuations, you can split long zkVM executions into chunks, and prove them in parallel.

Performance Improvements​

We’re leveraging GPU acceleration and building Poseidon support to make our proofs even faster.

More Language Support​

We’re Rust first, but the zkVM is compatible with any language that compiles to RISC-V. We plan to support a variety of languages, including Go and C++. For languages that usually run on virtual machines, we have started experiments to port small interpreters such as EVM engines to run on our zkvm.