CompanyGevulot

We are excited to finally introduce Gevulot - a fully permissionless and programmable layer 1 blockchain for deploying proof systems as on-chain programs. It’s designed with the end-user in mind and comes with high liveness guarantees, predictable fees and performance to match centralised provers. Gevulot is built by a team from Equilibrium Group where the members of the team have previously worked closely with industry leaders such as Aleo, Starknet and Avail. Why Are We Building Gevulot? Zero-knowledge-proof technology is being leveraged in blockchains for succinctness (recursive blockchains), scaling (validity rollups, bridges, off-chain compute…) and privacy (Aleo, Aztec, Zcash…). As these applications get more usage, the demand for proof generation will increase rapidly. Today, almost all proving infrastructure is permissioned and many applications rely on a single prover. While the centralised solution is less complex, decentralising the proving architecture brings several benefits. One key benefit comes in the form of liveness guarantees which are crucial for applications that depend on frequent proof generation. Users also benefit from higher censorship resistance as well as lower fees driven by competition and sharing the workload amongst multiple provers. Applications that want to decentralise the role of provers can either choose to bootstrap an internal proof network (multiple provers, single application) or outsource the proving to an external proof market (multiple provers, multiple applications). However, getting the right incentives and mechanism design is difficult. Internal proof network designs tend to be inefficient, in that they only ever use a small amount of total proving capacity for their single application. They also create unnecessary complexity for provers who due to the inefficiency will be participating in many proof networks and must navigate each network's interfaces & incentives. Proof markets, on the other hand, cannot provide liveness guarantees, making them a poor choice for mission-critical applications. They also suffer from unpredictable pricing and the complexity of bidding logic. Finally, they do not offer deployment or smooth upgrade paths, meaning a tight integration is required for each application. Gevulot takes a fundamentally different approach by aiming to serve as a fully permissionless and general-purpose proof network for any system that requires zero-knowledge proofs to operate. What Is Gevulot? Gevulot is a permissionless and programmable layer 1 blockchain for deploying proof systems as on-chain programs. It’s designed specifically for applications that require cheap and fast proof generation, with high liveness guarantees. Similar to other PoS blockchains, Gevulot has balances, transfers, staking with the native token, as well as, proof system deployment, which resembles smart contract deployment. However, the two main differences to most other blockchains are that Gevulot lacks traditional smart contract state and verification of computation is done through validating ZKPs rather than re-execution. Provers run deployed prover programs and the proofs are verified by the network, after which they get added to blocks. Blocks on Gevulot contain financial transactions and proofs, rather than smart contract state transitions. Users can deploy programs permissionlessly on Gevulot and benefit from proving speed that matches centralised providers. The two types of programs on Gevulot - provers and verifiers - can either be deployed as a pair (“proof system”) or just as a standalone verifier program for validating proofs produced outside the Gevulot network. Interacting with the proof program is as simple as interacting with a smart contract. For provers, Gevulot aggregates proving workloads across many different applications maximizing both hardware utilisation and financial return. Gevulot also provides a compelling target for both software and hardware optimisation given its broad applicability.