For years, ZK has promised to transform every layer of blockchain - from core infrastructure to custom applications - but has remained inaccessible to most developers, locked behind custom languages, niche tooling, and high implementation complexity. zkVMs emerged as a solution, abstracting away constraint logic and making ZK accessible to general developers. But instead of building for verifiability from the ground up, most zkVM teams defaulted to sub-optimal ISAs like RISC-V and focused on superficial abstraction rather than constraint efficiency. The result: systems that work, but compromise on stability and performance at the root.
ZKM’s heavily upgraded zkMIPS 1.0 introduced the first stable, production-ready general-purpose zkVM with leading benchmarks on CPU. But proving on CPU alone is not enough. Scaling real-world ZK applications requires more than raw throughput - it demands accelerated proving, distributed systems, and a clean developer experience.
Enter Ziren - the next major release of ZKM's zkVM, formerly known as zkMIPS. This rebrand and upgrade mark the transition from years of building, testing, and optimizing, to a fully scalable and developer-friendly ZK proving infrastructure.
Ziren brings GPU-accelerated zero-knowledge infrastructure to developers using standard languages like Rust or C (and soon, Golang). By compiling conventional code into a verifiable MIPS-based execution environment, Ziren allows any developer to integrate validity proofs into real applications - without rewriting logic or depending on specialized circuits.
This enables teams to:
ZK is no longer just for specialist cryptographers - Ziren provides a general-purpose tool for systems engineers, app developers, and protocol builders to reliably adopt ZK with ease.
With Ziren, developers can write Rust, C/C++, and soon Golang applications, and compile them into verifiable programs that produce proofs of correct execution. These proofs can be verified on Ethereum, Bitcoin (via BitVM2/3), or any chain supporting SNARK/STARK-based verification.
Ziren turns traditional software into verifiable infrastructure:
This is made possible by Ziren’s architecture-first design: it doesn’t simulate ZK around existing systems - it enables ZK-native computation from the execution layer upward.
One of Ziren’s core differentiators is its use of the MIPS32r2 instruction set architecture. While many zkVM teams have defaulted to RISC-V - commonly used in embedded systems - ZKM took a different path. MIPS offers denser opcodes, fixed instruction width, and highly regular encoding, making it significantly more efficient to arithmetize in zero-knowledge circuits.
This choice required deeper engineering work across the toolchain and proving system. But the payoff is clear: smaller circuits, simpler constraint systems, and faster, more scalable proofs. By building for ZK performance at the ISA level, Ziren allows developer applications to run verifiably without compromise.
Ziren isn’t just a proving backend - it powers a new category of blockchain infrastructure. One key example is ZKM’s ‘Entangled Rollup’ design: a bridgeless zkRollup architecture that verifies execution across chains using shared proofs rather than asset transfers or message-passing bridges.
Ziren is already being used to power GOAT Network, a Bitcoin-native zkRollup. This unlocks Ethereum-style programmability on Bitcoin, while preserving L1 settlement, without trust assumptions, and without requiring custom virtual machines.
This cross-chain generalization of ZK computation makes new applications possible:
Ziren brings us close to the long-standing goal of real-time ZK proving. Verifiable on ethproofs.org, we doubled the total proof throughput by optimizing both stages of the pipeline: state preparation and proof generation. By switching the guest program from Revm to Reth and applying an in-parallel account state fetching strategy - combined with debug_traceBlock RPC calls - we reduced block state prep time from ~5 minutes to under 30 seconds.
This part of the stack is fully open source, and demonstrates the practical trajectory Ziren is on: from high-performance to low-latency, production-grade proving.
Ziren is the result of years of research, engineering, and iteration at every layer of the proving stack. Now, it's live.
Build with confidence. Deploy without compromise.
Explore the docs: https://zkm.io/docs
Start building: https://github.com/ProjectZKM/Ziren
Follow on X: https://x.com/ProjectZKM
For years, ZK has promised to transform every layer of blockchain - from core infrastructure to custom applications - but has remained inaccessible to most developers, locked behind custom languages, niche tooling, and high implementation complexity. zkVMs emerged as a solution, abstracting away constraint logic and making ZK accessible to general developers. But instead of building for verifiability from the ground up, most zkVM teams defaulted to sub-optimal ISAs like RISC-V and focused on superficial abstraction rather than constraint efficiency. The result: systems that work, but compromise on stability and performance at the root.
ZKM’s heavily upgraded zkMIPS 1.0 introduced the first stable, production-ready general-purpose zkVM with leading benchmarks on CPU. But proving on CPU alone is not enough. Scaling real-world ZK applications requires more than raw throughput - it demands accelerated proving, distributed systems, and a clean developer experience.
Enter Ziren - the next major release of ZKM's zkVM, formerly known as zkMIPS. This rebrand and upgrade mark the transition from years of building, testing, and optimizing, to a fully scalable and developer-friendly ZK proving infrastructure.
Ziren brings GPU-accelerated zero-knowledge infrastructure to developers using standard languages like Rust or C (and soon, Golang). By compiling conventional code into a verifiable MIPS-based execution environment, Ziren allows any developer to integrate validity proofs into real applications - without rewriting logic or depending on specialized circuits.
This enables teams to:
ZK is no longer just for specialist cryptographers - Ziren provides a general-purpose tool for systems engineers, app developers, and protocol builders to reliably adopt ZK with ease.
With Ziren, developers can write Rust, C/C++, and soon Golang applications, and compile them into verifiable programs that produce proofs of correct execution. These proofs can be verified on Ethereum, Bitcoin (via BitVM2/3), or any chain supporting SNARK/STARK-based verification.
Ziren turns traditional software into verifiable infrastructure:
This is made possible by Ziren’s architecture-first design: it doesn’t simulate ZK around existing systems - it enables ZK-native computation from the execution layer upward.
One of Ziren’s core differentiators is its use of the MIPS32r2 instruction set architecture. While many zkVM teams have defaulted to RISC-V - commonly used in embedded systems - ZKM took a different path. MIPS offers denser opcodes, fixed instruction width, and highly regular encoding, making it significantly more efficient to arithmetize in zero-knowledge circuits.
This choice required deeper engineering work across the toolchain and proving system. But the payoff is clear: smaller circuits, simpler constraint systems, and faster, more scalable proofs. By building for ZK performance at the ISA level, Ziren allows developer applications to run verifiably without compromise.
Ziren isn’t just a proving backend - it powers a new category of blockchain infrastructure. One key example is ZKM’s ‘Entangled Rollup’ design: a bridgeless zkRollup architecture that verifies execution across chains using shared proofs rather than asset transfers or message-passing bridges.
Ziren is already being used to power GOAT Network, a Bitcoin-native zkRollup. This unlocks Ethereum-style programmability on Bitcoin, while preserving L1 settlement, without trust assumptions, and without requiring custom virtual machines.
This cross-chain generalization of ZK computation makes new applications possible:
Ziren brings us close to the long-standing goal of real-time ZK proving. Verifiable on ethproofs.org, we doubled the total proof throughput by optimizing both stages of the pipeline: state preparation and proof generation. By switching the guest program from Revm to Reth and applying an in-parallel account state fetching strategy - combined with debug_traceBlock RPC calls - we reduced block state prep time from ~5 minutes to under 30 seconds.
This part of the stack is fully open source, and demonstrates the practical trajectory Ziren is on: from high-performance to low-latency, production-grade proving.
Ziren is the result of years of research, engineering, and iteration at every layer of the proving stack. Now, it's live.
Build with confidence. Deploy without compromise.
Explore the docs: https://zkm.io/docs
Start building: https://github.com/ProjectZKM/Ziren
Follow on X: https://x.com/ProjectZKM
