Risc Zero is preparing to launch a service designed to use zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs to bring blockchain security to any offchain application, according to a Sept. 16 announcement.
Called “Boundless,” the service seeks to resolve blockchain’s most vexing scalability challenges — including limits to transaction throughput and cross-chain interoperability— by “bypassing traditional onchain execution limits” with ZK-proofs, Risc said.
Boundless is the latest in a proliferation of potential solutions to blockchain’s scalability constraints, which contribute to higher costs and slower execution times for transactions.
Boundless aims to remove onchain computation limits. Source: Risc Zero
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“The current paradigm, where onchain applications require global re-execution of all transactions, faces scalability limitations,” Risc said. “Although more nodes make the network more secure, they don’t enable more capacity as everyone must re-execute all data.”
According to Chainspect, Ethereum’s average throughput has been fewer than 14 transactions per second (TPS) in the past 30 days.
By using ZK-proofs, “Boundless enables blockchains to verify the correctness of computations without re-execution,” Risc said.
According to Risc, “the latest generation of zero-knowledge proofs” enable “computations orders of magnitude larger than previously possible, at costs orders of magnitude lower.”
Boundless, which is still in testnet, has the potential to enable new applications in areas ranging from cryptocurrency exchanges to artificial intelligence to personal identification, Risc said in a Sept. 16 post on the X platform.
They include “DEXs with CEX-like UX, accessing the liquidity of all chains,” “[v]erifiable AI interactions with onchain results,” and “ZK-wrappers for centralized IDs,” Risc said.
Boundless ZK-proof stack. Source: Risc Zero
On Sept. 11, Cointelegraph reported Movement Labs is preparing to launch a new settlement mechanism by the end of 2024 called “postconfirmations,” with the potential to cut confirmation times to less than one second.
On Sept. 5, Celestia, a layer-1 data availability network, unveiled a technical roadmap charting a path to scaling block size to 1 gigabyte. Celestia competes with protocols such as EigenDA and Avail, as well as mainnet Ethereum.
Other networks — such as Aptos, Sui and Movement’s M2 — are exploring alternative programming languages, such as Move, to boost performance.
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