ZK Bench

Which is the best framework?

There is no “best” framework. As you can see from the table above, there are a lot of caveats and trade offs. You should choose the framework that best meets your needs, which will depend on what kind of application you are building. In addition to what we have provided above, you should check the developer experience for each framework, and that the level of abstraction meets your needs.

X could be optimised further?

It probably can. In this case, it's probably one of two things: We did not write a fair benchmark - raise a PR The framework hasn't optimised for X yet, but it could theoretically be faster - I'm sure it could (everything can), but we're benchmarking things that exist today, because that's what a developer has available to them when they use a framework

What’s the difference between a STARK and a SNARK?

These are two different approaches to provable zero knowledge computation. You should prefix everything below with "in general" - there are always exceptions to the rule!

What are unbounded programs?

These are programs which have inputs or logic where the number of cycles or iterations is not known at compile time. For example, a program that iterates over a list of items and checks if each item is greater than 18. The number of items in the list is not known at compile time, so the program is unbounded. In general, SNARKs require a program to be bounded at compile time, whereas STARKs do not.

What is a ZK Recursive Proof?

A ZK recursive proof (often just called "recursion") is the ability to verify a proof, or many proofs, into another proof. There's nothing crazy going on here. Verification of proofs is simply a computation and ZK already enables proving of arbitrary computations.