Paper 2025/2041
Sum-check Is All You Need: An Opinionated Survey on Fast Provers in SNARK Design
Abstract
SNARKs work by having a prover commit to a witness and then prove that the committed witness is valid. The prover’s work is dominated by two tasks: (i) committing to data and (ii) proving that the committed data is well-formed. The central thesis of this survey is that fast SNARKs minimize both costs by using the sum-check protocol. But not all uses of sum-check are equally effective. The fastest SNARKs invoke sum-check in highly sophisticated ways, exploiting repeated structure in computation to aggressively minimize commitment costs and prover work. I survey the key ideas that enable this: batch evaluation arguments, read/write memory checking, virtual polynomials, sparse sum-checks, and small-value preservation. These techniques unlock the full potential of the sum-check protocol as a foundation for fast SNARK proving.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- Keywords
- SNARKssum-check protocolbatch-evaluation argumentszkVMs
- Contact author(s)
- justin r thaler @ gmail com
- History
- 2026-03-05: last of 3 revisions
- 2025-11-04: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2025/2041
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/2041,
author = {Justin Thaler},
title = {Sum-check Is All You Need: An Opinionated Survey on Fast Provers in {SNARK} Design},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/2041},
year = {2025},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/2041}
}
