The nice thing about watching Olympic swimming is that it’s not that complicated to determine who is the fastest. Everyone dives into the same pool, there is some paddling and at the end of the last lap one person is the first to touch the wall.
The same cannot be said for blockchains, where engineers are releasing increasingly powerful and faster systems, and use cases and transaction types vary from project to project, as do performance measurement tools and methods. The dilemma extends to designers of cryptographic tools and the myriad methods of reporting hash per second.
That was the backdrop when Polyhedra Network, a team building a crucial blockchain component known as a cryptographic “prover,” set out to develop a just-released platform called “Proof Arena” that’s designed to serve as, well , a testing ground.
Just a few months ago, the Polyhedra team released an open-source zero-knowledge proof system – used in many setups for additional blockchains, known as ‘layer 2s’ – that was:almost 2x faster than alternatives.” But how did they really know?
Eric Vreeland, Polyhedra’s chief strategy officer, said the team decided to develop Proof Arena so developers could test different proofs in a controlled environment — “people evaluating the performance of different proof systems for a given proof generation task.”
“Proof Arena will allow makers of ZK-proof systems to compare their systems to others in a clear and scientific manner, while ensuring all controllable variables are held constant,” according to a Wednesday press release.
The test system’s output includes proof generation time, memory peak and setup time, Vreeland said. Here’s what that could look like in a hypothetical scenario:
Provers’ builders can also submit their systems “for inclusion in the arena,” Vreeland said.
Initially, the project will be set up to generate benchmarks for Polyhedra’s own “Expander” ZK-proof system, Polygon’s Plonky3, StarkWare’s Stwo and Linea’s Gnark.
“The team plans to support all open-source proof systems and will provide benchmarks for frequent ZK tasks such as Keccak and Poseidon hash verification running on different machine configurations,” the press release said.
That may all sound like nonsense, but for cryptographers, this is what they care about.
And the professionals may like the opportunity to prove their worth.