What story is ZKM telling? What are the application scenarios?

Author: Kiwibig.eth, Source: Author’s Twitter @KiwiCryptoBig

Congratulations to ZKM

1) I looked through the records and found that we first talked about this project in March last year during the deep bear market.

At that time, the team was still polishing the entire product, and the concept of zkmips seemed completely different from now.

2) Technical difficulties: At that time, ZKM was using zkMIPS to build a universal zkp system, which is a method of using the MIPS instruction set as the programming language for ZK rollup.

The MIPS architecture was developed by Stanford University more than 20 years ago and is a concise, optimized, and highly scalable RISC architecture. Features include: a large number of registers, instruction counts and characters, and visible pipeline delay slots, which enable the MIPS architecture to provide the highest performance per square millimeter and the lowest energy consumption in today's SoC designs.

These features are actually very suitable for writing ZK instructions, but the problem is that there are few development components and toolkits, and it is a relatively difficult project to build.

3) Therefore, my personal judgment at the time was that it would take a long time to do such a low-level project. In a bear market, it is a typical project with a medium winning rate and extremely good odds.

The current story of ZKM

1) After rereading the white paper, the pattern of ZKM has opened up again:

ZKM's mission is to significantly enhance and integrate the decentralized Internet by building a universal zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) to allow state change communication between different blockchains (even non-blockchain systems) without sacrificing security and decentralization, and ultimately achieve the integration of blockchain systems and non-blockchain systems.

2) Technical details

zkMIPS provides an efficient and secure way to verify the correctness of calculations under the MIPS architecture in the form of zero-knowledge proofs.

- MIPS Architecture:zkMIPS is designed for MIPS processors, which are known for their concise instruction set and efficient performance and are widely used in embedded systems and IoT devices. zkMIPS takes advantage of the fixed instruction set of MIPS to make the generation and verification of zero-knowledge proofs more efficient.

- Zero-knowledge Proofs:zkMIPS leverages technologies such as Algebraic Intermediate Representation (AIR) and Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs of Proximity (FRI). AIR is responsible for converting MIPS calculations into polynomials, while FRI is a technology for verifying that polynomials are approximately low-degree. The combination of these two enables zkMIPS to efficiently generate and verify zero-knowledge proofs.

- Software system architecture:Including ELF loader, MIPS virtual machine (VM), proof generator (Prover) and communication manager, it supports compiling programs into MIPS executable files, executing MIPS instruction sequences, and generating ZKP based on execution traces.

3) Application scenarios

zkMIPS has a wide range of application scenarios, covering multiple fields such as blockchain, Internet of Things, cloud computing and machine learning, and has significant security and privacy advantages.

a. Layer2 solution:In the blockchain, zkMIPS is combined with the second-layer solution to enhance the privacy and scalability of transactions through ZKP. It can accelerate transaction processing while maintaining the immutability and transparency of on-chain data.

Internet of Things (IoT): zkMIPS can be used to improve the security and privacy of communication between IoT devices. When sending sensitive data between IoT devices, zkMIPS can ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data and avoid the leakage of sensitive information.

b. Decentralized cloud computing:In cloud computing scenarios, zkMIPS allows users to use cloud resources to perform computing tasks while ensuring the correctness and credibility of the computing results without trusting the cloud service provider.

c. Zero-knowledge machine learning (zkML):zkMIPS can be applied to machine learning models, allowing model users to verify the correctness of model outputs without exposing private data or model details used for calculations. This is especially important for scenarios that process sensitive data (such as medical information and personal privacy data).

Landing scenario: Entangled Rollups

Entangled Rollups enable efficient cross-chain communication between different Rollups by sharing data and status between them.

It is also very good at catering to the market and seizing the wave of Bitcoin. Entangled Rollups can be used as a secure cross-chain bridge for Bitcoin.

1) Cross-chain liquidity unification:Through the Entangled Rollups architecture, seamless connections between blockchains can be achieved, allowing assets and information to flow freely between different blockchain networks (such as Ethereum, Cosmos, TON, etc.), solving the problem of highly fragmented liquidity in the current blockchain ecosystem.

2) Secure cross-chain bridging:Existing cross-chain bridging methods have security risks. Entangled Rollups synchronizes the status of different blockchains through recursive zero-knowledge proofs, bypassing the traditional bridging mechanism and providing a safer user experience.

3) Bitcoin Layer 2 Solution:Entangled Rollups provides a Layer 2 solution for the Bitcoin network, which not only provides BTC holders and miners with a new way to obtain transaction fee income and ZKM mining rewards by participating in decentralized sequencer nodes, but also achieves sustainable Bitcoin revenue and network security through the proof-of-stake decentralized sequencer architecture.

4) Local security and sustainable income:Entangled Rollups provides native security for the BTC Layer 2 network and sustainable income channels for node operators, stakers, and users through its unique Optimistic Challenge Process mechanism and decentralized sequencer.

Finally, I also feel that more than a year has passed in the blink of an eye.

For a researcher, observing a project that was judged a year ago is a good feedback and cognitive closed loop.

Going back to look at the original research report at the time, I found that the team has really been completing the idea of ​​the year bit by bit this year.