RISC Zero launches Boundless testnet on Base
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The incentivized testnet (mainnet beta) of RISC Zero’s Boundless community went stay on Base yesterday.
Boundless just isn’t a brand new blockchain. Boundless is a market for zero-knowledge virtual-machine (zkVM) proofs — typically known as a proof market — that may deploy to any community and settle proofs anyplace.
Who wants it? Any chain or utility that desires to course of heavy computation onchain, however whose present digital surroundings is ill-suited to leverage zk know-how.
Boundless lets groups accomplish that with out making radical adjustments to their structure. Identical to how Chainlink introduced worth feeds to every chain, Boundless brings verifiable compute.
Boundless community
Right here’s how the community roughly works:
- Chains/apps request and submit computation duties to the Boundless community operating auctions on its contracts.
- “Provers” (miners) on the Boundless community operating CPUs/GPUs declare these jobs to carry out the costly computation off-chain.
- To simply accept duties, provers stake ZKC tokens to lock a proof request. These tokens are slashable, so there’s an financial mechanism to maintain work sincere.
- When provers end the job, a tiny, mathematically-verifiable zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) receipt is settled on the host chain.
As a result of verifying a tiny-sized proof on Ethereum or a rollup prices solely a minimal quantity of fuel, the bottom chain by no means feels the warmth from the underlying computation — even when that computation took minutes, ran on a cluster with GPUs or touched gigabytes of information.
Boundless’ CEO Shiv Shankar jogged my memory of the prohibitive prices of operating zk computation onchain, which may go attain hundreds of {dollars}.
“At present, anybody is in a position to try this huge computation with a zkVM for lower than $30. This type of boundless mindset is what we’re bringing to each chain. Elastic limitless computation [is] accessible to you at any time limit,” he stated.
The Boundless explorer exhibits 363 lively provers processing jobs at this time, although the group instructed me they anticipate no less than a thousand GPUs proving quickly.
Boundless structure
Distinctive to Boundless’ community is its self-developed cryptographic primitive known as “proof of verifiable work” (PoVW).
Conventional proof-of-work pays bitcoin miners for hashes, Boundless’ PoVW pays for helpful zkVM cycles.
PoVW tags items of verifiable metadata — or “work receipts” — to every proof as a document of how a lot computation went into it. This lets Boundless pay the tons of of provers on its community in proportion to the precise compute delivered, in addition to detect fraudulent proofs.
This contrasts to the off-chain public sale bidding that Succinct makes use of, or the time-based quotes that Kalypso makes use of.
At present’s adoption
Early adopters to Boundless embody groups like EigenLayer, Celestia, Taiko, Lido and extra.
Groups are utilizing Boundless provision of verifiable compute for quite a lot of functions.
As an illustration, EigenLayer is utilizing Boundless to energy its AVS slashing logic, Celestia is utilizing it to show the validity of its knowledge availability on any chain, the Taiko based mostly rollup makes use of it as a part of its multi-prover setup, and Lido leverages Boundless for a zk-based staking oracle.
