AI TRENDS | Espresso and Succinct Researchers Release Flock SNARK Prover, Claiming Record Speed

Espresso, together with Succinct’s Ron Rothblum and NYU scholar William Wang, has released Flock, a SNARK prover, and said it is currently the fastest SNARK prover. According to Foresight News, Espresso said Flock’s performance is about three times the benchmark for Ethereum’s post-quantum transition cited by Vitalik Buterin, and that for Bitcoin it can generate a signature-hash proof corresponding to a single block within 2.5 seconds. The team reported benchmark results on a consumer laptop equipped with an Apple M4 Max chip, stating that Flock can perform 661,000 Blake3 compression operations per second and 338,000 SHA-256 compression operations per second. It said Flock is about nine times faster than the previously fastest solution, Binius64, on SHA-256, and about 14 times faster than Binius64 and Plonky3 on Blake3. The developers said Flock remains a research prototype. They added that AI coding assistants, including Claude Opus 4.7 and 4.8, were used during development, and that the project has been open-sourced.