Content area
This thesis explores scalable client-side proving using Incrementally Verifiable Computation (IVC) with Protostar Folding Scheme, enabling applications such as private transactions, gaming interactions, and verifiable delay functions (VDFs) on resource-constrained devices like laptops and mobile phones.
Key innovations include implementation of ”Cyclefold” compiler, which minimizes circuit complexity and prover runtime on the secondary curve with a minimal circuit comprising 3 scalar multiplications and 1 hash. Additionally, customized chips for Scalar multiplication, Poseidon2 hashing, and Non-native arithmetic significantly reduce witness size and folding time.
Benchmarks on HashChain and Scalar Multiplications demonstrate notable runtime improvements over the current standard Nova, enabling efficient light client implementations on edge devices. Furthermore, for the Minroot VDF, folding time becomes comparable to witness generation with large iterations, with the potential for further acceleration through parallelism. Thus, this expands the design space for VDFs and presents a concrete implementation of IVC, with low proving overhead compared to the main computation.