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About ziskvm
ZisK is an open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) stack that enables verifiable execution of programs written in high-level languages like Rust. It generates succinct proofs that a program ran correctly, allowing anyone to verify without re-running the code or seeing its inputs.
Its core strength lies in performance. ZisK achieves 1.5 GHz RISC-V trace generation, roughly 10x faster than other public zkVMs, by using ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation to translate RISC-V programs into optimized native x86_64 code, and a two-phase 'minimal trace' architecture that decouples memory from parallel re-execution. This solves the long-standing sequential bottleneck in trace generation, significantly reducing latency and hardware costs for real-time proving.
In the past six months (March to September 2026), ZisK released version 0.11.0, adding macOS support, GPU/CPU transfer optimizations, virtual table integration, and recursive circuits migrated to PIL2. In-browser verification also became available via a third-party platform. The project spun off from Polygon as an independent entity in June 2025, with the core zkEVM team continuing development under the ZisK name. The software remains under active development and is not yet production-ready.
ZisK began incubation at Polygon Labs from May 2024 to June 2025. On June 13, 2025, it became an independent project, with all intellectual property and the core team transferred to SilentSig Switzerland GmbH, fully owned by Jordi Baylina. On June 18, 2025, Baylina publicly announced the spin-off, joined by seven core developers behind the Polygon zkEVM prover, while he remained a Polygon advisor. On June 19, 2026, ZisK released v1.0.0-alpha, entering a stabilization phase with a feature-frozen codebase, shifting focus to security audits, formal verification, and hardening. This release also introduced BLS12-381 signature verification, optimized secp256k1/secp256r1 operations, and switched the default Merkle tree hash from Poseidon2 to Poseidon1 due to recent attacks on Poseidon2.
Over the past six months, ZisK VM (ziskvm) has made significant progress. In May 2026, v0.17.0 was released, featuring a distributed proving architecture redesign with a new gRPC API for remote clients, SDK unification (zisk-sdk 1.0) exposing the full proving pipeline, and full zkVM accelerator C interface conformance. Performance work included moving Keccak/SHA-256 to libc, a new arith256 API, and multiple correctness/stability fixes. In August 2026, the team announced v1.1.0-alpha, claiming a 9.62-second p99 proving time on four RTX 5090 GPUs, within Ethereum's 10-second target. Future focus areas include further GPU optimization, stronger validation, and production release readiness, with ongoing security and correctness audits.
Jordi Baylina: Founder and technical lead of ZisK. Co-founder of Polygon, previously led Polygon zkEVM. Early Ethereum developer, created MiniMe token and LiquidPledging, audited Aragon and MakerDAO. Now focused on ZisK open-source zkVM, also tech lead at iden3.