TechFlow reports that Cysic, a ZK proof generation layer, has announced on X that the Cysic team, in collaboration with zhangzhenfei from the Ethereum Foundation, has completed the Jolt-b paper. This work improves the recursive friendliness of Jolt—a zkVM scheme developed by @a16z—making it more efficient. Now, zkVMs can execute programs of arbitrary size and generate ZK proofs for their execution. The key to achieving this lies in decomposing a program into subroutines, generating proofs for each subroutine, and then using recursive proofs to verify the correctness of all subroutine proofs.
Jolt-b enhances recursive friendliness by adopting an alternative commitment scheme called Basefold, making the IOP (Interactive Oracle Proof) more efficient. This approach is similar to how Plonky2 enhances the Plonk scheme. Additionally, the Cysic team notes that Binius—the proof backend developed by Irreducible—is not well-suited for building zkVMs but performs well for precompiles. Binius optimizes proof complexity by using minimal quadratic extension fields, yet it increases the complexity of recursive proofs when handling u16 or u32 structures.
