How does zkMIPS work?

1

A program written in Go or Rust is compiled into a MIPS ELF binary file using the MIPS Compiler. The ELF file is the executable format for the MIPS instruction set.

2

The MIPS ELF binary file is loaded into the MIPS VM using the ELF Loader.

3

The MIPS VM runs the program and generates an execution trace for the Prover.

The execution trace is a record of the entire sequence of operations that is executed by a running program.

After each instruction is executed (left side table), we will get a value for each register. After going through all the instructions, we will get the trace table (right side table).

4

The Prover executes the MIPS program and uses the execution trace to generate a proof.

5

After generating the zkMIPS proof, the verifier contract verifies the proof on-chain.

zkMIPS Proving
Architecture

4

Prover

The program and trace are divided into segments.

The segments are divided into modules. The instructions of each segment are divided into groups of four module tables: arithmetic, logic, memory and control.

STARK – The modules are proven independently and in parallel with FRI. These proofs are FRI-based modular proofs.

LogUp (STARK) – The modular proofs from the previous step are combined into one single proof for each segment using the LogUp lookup protocol.

PLONK – All segment proofs from the previous layer are recursively combined using the continuation protocol into one single continuation proof. This proves the correctness of the entire program trace.

Groth16 – The Groth16 proving paradigm is used to enable on-chain computation by converting the proof to an EVM-friendly format. The continuation proof is converted into an on-chain Groth16 (SNARK-based) proof.

zkMIPS is based on the MIPS32 microarchitecture

Why zkMIPS?

Anything compiles to MIPS and MIPS compiles to anything