The Wormhole Foundation, a research and development organization dedicated to cross-blockchain communication, is delighted to announce a Contributor Grant to Lurk Lab. This marks a pivotal advancement in the evolution of the Wormhole platform, which, in collaboration with Lurk’s engineering team, will be incorporating trustless verification of cross-chain messages leveraging ZK (zero-knowledge) technology.
Lurk Lab has distinguished itself with its innovative work in the field of zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology, particularly through its development of the Arecibo implementation of the Nova folding scheme and the Lurk programming language. Arecibo is the fastest implementation of Nova to-date, and includes advanced extensions for non-uniform IVC and parallelism. The Lurk language is a Turing-complete statically scoped dialect of Lisp, whose execution can be proved using zk-SNARKs and can directly integrate with zkDSLs such as Circom. Lurk allows developers to create succinct proofs that can attest to the correctness of a computation without revealing any other information about the computation, and without requiring specialized cryptographic expertise. Lurk presents a unique and world-class approach to verifiable computing applications in that it combines the generality of a zero-knowledge virtual machine with the performance of low-level zero-knowledge circuits. This is crucial for verifiable computing applications which require high levels of security without sacrificing performance or ease of development.
The Wormhole protocol currently leverages the industry’s leading message verification system, the decentralized network of 19 Wormhole Guardian nodes. Lurk Lab's involvement in Wormhole's ecosystem now aids in introducing a new verification mechanism for any Wormhole message, leveraging zero knowledge proofs, as outlined in last week’s ZK Roadmap announcement. Lurk will focus initially on light clients for Aptos, Sui and Cosmos, and verifiers for Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, Aptos, Sui and Near. By leveraging ZK proofs, Wormhole will begin offering new cross-chain corridors fully verified by ZK proofs, thus removing any trust on centralized parties. This integration is expected to greatly benefit decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), governance, and various other applications that operate across multiple blockchains.
Wormhole Foundation Co-founder and COO, Dan Reecer, said, “the addition of Lurk Lab to the decentralized team of collaborators and the integration of Lurk's zero knowledge proof technology into the Wormhole platform is a major milestone for Wormhole. We are ecstatic to start offering our developer community trustless verification for their messages across several high volume cross-chain corridors," said Reecer. "Lurk-based zk-bridges will enable permissionless growth of Wormhole by enabling new platforms such as L1 blockchains to self-integrate into the network in a decentralized fashion.”
For inquiries and collaboration opportunities, please reach out to the Wormhole Foundation at [email protected].
Today marks a major advancement toward improving the trust assumptions of the Wormhole protocol, with the announcement of Wormhole’s ZK Roadmap. By integrating zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, the Wormhole protocol adds the following improvements:
Stronger Trust Guarantees – ZK enables a new option for trustlessly verifying messages sent via Wormhole. ZK also reduces trust in the protocol, enabling stronger security guarantees to multichain apps and users.
Permissionless Verification: With ZK, anybody can quickly and easily participate in verifying Wormhole messages, enabling a larger and more diverse set of independent contributors to cooperate in securing the Wormhole protocol.
Permissionless Integrations – With ZK, new blockchain networks will be able to permissionlessly, quickly, and easily join the Wormhole ecosystem. This will enable new networks to connect to the broader Wormhole ecosystem without the explicit consent of the network of Guardians.
Strong Composability – True multichain applications require a high degree of composability. Composability enables clients, users, and applications to leverage the state and data of other networks seamlessly and at low cost. Different blockchain networks often have distinct runtime semantics, consensus models, or architectures. ZK can help define a more unified interface for access to state and data, improving consistency across applications operating across distinct blockchain networks.
Flexibility: ZK will serve as an additional option for message verification, providing users and applications with an alternative approach to verifying messages. This offers greater flexibility, allowing clients to choose the method that best suits their specific preferences and needs.
Today, a Wormhole message is produced when at least 13 of the 19 (a supermajority) Guardians agree on the state and execution of the blockchain the message originated from, and they all observe the same message being sent. This means that users and applications that rely on these messages (e.g. consume them on another blockchain) must rely on the Guardians to validate messages accurately. This constitutes the verification mechanism underlying Wormhole — its root-of-trust.
The Guardians were recently recognized for security and decentralization by the Uniswap Foundation’s third party Bridge Assessment Committee in a report released in 2023, naming Wormhole as the only unconditionally approved interoperability protocol for Uniswap’s multichain governance system.
Although sufficiently decentralized and highly secure, the Wormhole protocol is becoming more secure, decentralized, and less trust-based over time; the next step toward this objective is decentralizing Wormhole’s verification layer and moving toward a trust-minimized model using zero-knowledge technology.
The Wormhole ecosystem will be launching a portfolio of software solutions to achieve the following collective vision for ZK-enabled interoperability. The path ahead for Wormhole ZK is marked by a few significant milestones and strategic collaborations, all aimed at enabling extremely fast, cheap, and trustless message verification.
Here’s a detailed look at the roadmap:
Onboarding Cryptography Expertise – The Wormhole Foundation has given Contributor Grants to four new engineering teams specializing in zero-knowledge cryptography and will roll out these announcements over the coming weeks.
Unlocking Hardware Resources – Wormhole contributors will be collaborating with a strategic hardware provider to accelerate a number of light client implementations, as well as to source hardware accelerators for Wormhole contributors as the number of ZK-enabled corridors and ZK-verified messages continue to scale.
Upcoming Light Client Rollouts – Light clients allow users and applications to quickly and efficiently verify the state (e.g. current account balances, smart contract data, etc.) of a blockchain network**.** Running a light client directly on-chain (as a smart contract) is still infeasible on many blockchains due to the high cost of verification, but possible using succinct, verifiable computation. This allows performing the expensive light client verification off-chain, and more cheaply verifying the correctness of the light client execution on-chain. Over the coming months, ZK light-clients for blockchains, including Ethereum, Sui, Aptos, Near, and Cosmos will be deployed and integrated with Wormhole, enabling trustless, bi-directional transfers of data.
In summary, Wormhole's verification system and ZK Roadmap is focused on:
Adding flexibility to Wormhole by enabling the protocol to support a variety of verification mechanisms in addition to the Wormhole Guardians.
Advancing trust-minimization of the protocol through accelerated ZK proofs and light-client integrations, thereby enabling trustless communication between blockchains.
Allowing more efficient scaling to accommodate rapid, permissionless integration of new blockchains.
Enabling stronger multichain composability for clients so they can more easily build richer and more expressive applications across a diverse set of blockchains with distinct semantics.
The wider Wormhole network is trusted and used by teams like Circle and Uniswap, and to date, the platform has facilitated the transfer of over 35 billion dollars through over 900 millions cross-chain messages. To learn more about Wormhole, visit the wormhole website, Twitter, Discord.