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Vision

We believe that all software executions will be proven, making blockchains the world’s settlement layers.

Blockchains will allow the creation of a cohesive and borderless internet of value, with self-custody, agency and privacy at its heart. People and communities will be able to better coordinate worldwide via this digital fabric, powered by ZK. Ethereum and Bitcoin will remain the leading settlement layers for this new era of decentralized coordination.

To make this vision a reality, Kakarot is created to bring EVM provability to various environments ranging from Ethereum L2s to EVM-compatible blockchains, as well as sidechains and rollups on Bitcoin. By combining our STARK-friendly EVM implementation and Starkware’s STARK Two Prover (STWO), Kakarot will achieve order-of-magnitude improvements in speed and cost compared to other solutions like Succinct’s Reth SP1, RISCZero’s Zeth, enabling real-time and efficient proving.

Why ZK + EVM?​

Connected by ZK, Standardized by EVM

We believe that Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) are two key technologies needed to build a decentralized future that is trustless, scalable, and resilient.

Zero-knowledge​

ZK is a revolutionary technology in its ability to help decentralized networks in two ways: scalability and privacy.

In the short-term, we will focus on the scalability aspect. ZK at its heart enables compression of compute. There were initially two ways in which one could convince other parties that a digital action was executed properly:

  • In a centralized setting, trust the entity which performs the action (Alice trusts her bank to wire $20 to Bob after performing that same action on her banking app, without double spends or bug);
  • In a decentralized network, re-execute the action locally (e.g. run your own Bitcoin full node, download a new block and re-execute every transaction in the block, thereby having full confidence that the latest block is valid). This is the core logic of all full nodes in blockchain networks.

Now, with ZK, a third way is introduced:

  • Verify a ZK proof certifying that a particular action was performed with integrity.

This new method yields a strong advantage: it is exponentially cheaper to verify the proof of a computation than to re-execute it.

Nodes in a ZK-powered network no longer need to re-execute every single computation to ensure integrity, but instead, can verify ZK proofs that transactions were executed properly. This cost saving is exponential compared to the former approach. ZK-rollups’ scalability is based on this concept.

This practice also applies for cross-network interoperability, especially as the industry is evolving to embrace more modularity. Many different networks will co-exist, as hundreds of rollups continue to emerge in Ethereum, Bitcoin (Layer 2s) and Solana (Network Extensions).

Fragmentation inevitably occurs and these networks require ZK to achieve frictionless interoperability. ZK enables chains to prove and verify their state on any other network while achieving fast finality. This set of characteristics is crucial to trustless and secure bridging.

In the longer-term, we will also include the privacy aspect of ZK technology as part of our focus. It is clear to us that crypto mass adoption will not happen on a distributed system that is fully transparent with every single transactions publicly viewable. There are no technical blockers to using privacy in our current proof system, and we are keen to incorporate privacy in our products. Private banks and governments require transactions to be private as well as compliant (e.g., only accessible by one's bank and a judge).

In short, ZK will grant us the privacy, scalability, speed, and secure interoperability we need between networks.

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)​

Ethereum and its broad ecosystem of rollups enable builders and users to coordinate openly and expressively. This ecosystem continues to mature, allowing its different sub-networks and sub-cultures to flourish on top. In September 2024, as per DefiLlama, the smart contract language powering Ethereum, Solidity, has secured more than $120B TVL, which is >10 times of Rust's $9B.

All smart contracts on these Ethereum-compatible chains live on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Being Turing-complete, the EVM enables any on-chain application to be built, including decentralized finance (DeFi), identity, real-world assets, gaming, AI, logistics, just to name a few. Over the years, the EVM has been the leading VM in the space, and dominates in every metric (e.g., Total Value Locked, volumes, mindshare & number of developers). For example, over 95% of stablecoins currently live on EVM networks.

While there are more performant virtual machines and execution environments that are being created closer to date, we believe that the EVM will continue to be the dominant choice in uniting and standardizing builder initiatives in the coming years.

We are also starting to see the use of the EVM in other ecosystems including Solana, Bitcoin, Move and others. For example, the combined TVL (amount of $BTC locked) of all EVM-compatible chains on Bitcoin (including sidechains and rollups) is currently $1.6B. The network effect on EVM will continue to grow and we will bet on its success in the medium run. However, we also acknowledge that altVMs such as MoveVM or FuelVM have appealing propositions and might be interesting to explore in the long run.