Expander, Still the World’s Fastest ZK Prover
A month ago, we announced the release of the world’s fastest ZK prover with our launch of Expander, an open source proof system which could verify 4,500 Keccak-f permutations per second. Today, we are excited to share that Expander now supports Poseidon hash functions specifically designed for zk-SNARKs. With Poseidon, Expander has achieved a throughput of 2.16 million hashes per second (HPS) using an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D — greatly surpassing the previous record from Stwo of 0.96M HPS and maintaining Expander’s position as the world’s fastest ZK prover. Additionally, Expander scales to support professional hardware and laptop hardware. While other provers top out near 3M hashes, Expander can deliver 16M HPS on a 256 core server machine.
For hashing, the zkEVM utilizes two state machines: Keccak and Poseidon. The Keccak-256 hash function is used for seamless EVM compatibility, whereas Poseidon is best suited for an efficient zkProver with its STARK-friendly hash function. Thus, enhancing the efficiency of Poseidon hash proofs directly amplifies the effectiveness and speed of recursive proving systems, like those used in zkEVMs and zk-rollups.
With Expander, developers can now combine the efficiency of Poseidon with the institutional scale of Keccak to deliver the fastest zkEVM proof systems. Expander brings blockchains one step closer to the performance and redundancy characteristics of centralized/trusted computation without actually needing trust.
By increasing the efficiency of zkEVM systems we are closer to Vitalik’s ZK Endgame — centralized block production supported by a robust system of decentralized validation that ensures strong censorship resistance. These improvements also bring the cost of ZK verifiability down significantly and allow ZK solutions for new use cases that were previously determined too costly, like optimistic rollups.
With Expander, ZK provers have reached a new level of speed and security for zkEVM two state machines. Developers can now build the most efficient applications with full native Ethereum support. Find out what Expander unlocks for your application.
