jeremy_bruestle

Basically, you can run code in the zkVM, which looks like a normal RISC-V machine, but it generates a cryptographic proof/receipt of correct execution, so you can trust the code was run correctly (presuming the receipt verifies), even if you don't trust the machine that ran it at all. But the actual receipt 1) Doesn't get much bigger as execution time of the zkVM goes up 2) Doesn't leak anything about what happened during execution except for the what the program running in the zkVM explicitly logs to the journal.

It is similar, although rather than using a Benes net to implement the permutation, it uses PLONK (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/953.pdf), which is massively more efficient. And of course it actually implements the RISC-V ISA which makes it more useful in practice.