Paper 2026/525

SoK: Understanding zkVM: From Research to Practice

Abstract

Zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) is a powerful infrastructure for proving the correctness of a program execution with a succinct proof, attracting significant interest from researchers, developers, and users. It has been widely used in applications such as blockchain rollups, privacy-preserving machine learning, and off-chain computation. As the field grows, a wide range of zkVMs have been proposed. However, they adopt different choices in instruction formats, trace layouts, and proving backends, which results in a highly heterogeneous design landscape and makes it difficult to understand the relations among these systems. To bridge this gap, we provide a comprehensive study of zkVMs that covers both their theoretical foundations and practical implementations. We decompose zkVMs into three layers: (1) the ISA layer, which defines instruction semantics and determines the structure of the execution trace, (2) the VM layer, which captures program execution and organizes constraints through modular circuit components, and (3) the proving layer, which converts execution traces into algebraic constraints and generates the final proofs. This decomposition allows us to isolate the role of each layer while also examining how they interact in real systems. To give readers a more direct understanding of how these design choices affect performance, scalability, and usability, we conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of representative zkVMs following this layered framework. Finally, we conclude the paper by summarizing the main observations from our analysis and outlining several potential directions for zkVM design and implementation. Note that: This work will appear in AsiaCCS 2026.