Sign in Subscribe
Aligned Core

From ZK proof verification to a full stack for building on Ethereum: Aligned's 2025 recap

From ZK proof verification to a full stack for building on Ethereum: Aligned's 2025 recap

2025 was the year Aligned evolved from a single technical focus—making proof verification on Ethereum fast and affordable via our Proof Verification Layer—to offering a broader, vertically integrated stack designed to help enterprises and institutions build on Ethereum.

In early Q2 we published our updated and expanded roadmap, introducing a full suite of products that reduce the engineering and operational overhead of deploying fully-functioning L2 ecosystems: our Ethrex-based ZK-rollup-as-a-service platform, wallets as a service, and interoperability—all powered by our ZK verification infrastructure.

The Aligned Roadmap: Ethereum as a financial backend
Aligned’s roadmap has expanded to solutions for wallets, rollups, interoperability and ZK services. Everything you need to build on Ethereum.
AlignedAligned Layer

Alongside this product expansion, we shipped in public through weekly Alignment Sessions and engineering updates, established major partnerships with projects like Sovra and Loom Finance, kept up to date with the latest ZK and Ethereum news, explored cutting edge topics with our Aligned Guests, spread alignment around the world, and launched ZK Arcade to let end users experience our tech.

This article is a recap of everything we accomplished and learned in 2025. As we enter the new year, we’re using this as a chance to reflect on the journey so far and help explain where we’re headed in 2026.

Q1: Establishing fundamentals

After a year of nonstop shipping that brought our first product to market in under 10 months, we entered Q1 with the goal of setting up a foundation for sustained progress.

Our Proof Verification Layer hit over $7B in restaked ETH

Our first product, an AVS built on EigenCloud (formerly EigenLayer) that’s secured by restaked ETH, reached over 2.5 million ETH of security. It is a global, decentralized network that makes verifying ZK proofs on Ethereum 100x more affordable and more scalable. It is currently run by 47 operators around the world. (Explorer)

We raised $4.6M from community rounds on Echo and Coinlist

To broaden the distribution of the $ALIGN token and the community around it, in January the @AlignedFndn carried out two successful community rounds on Coinlist (3.6M raised) and Echo (1M raised). The entire Echo round allocation was filled in only 3 minutes!

We focused on reinforcing the fundamentals

We began neutral, standardized open-source benchmarking of RISC‑V zkVMs

Zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) took center stage this year—something we’ve expected for a long time. Before Ethproofs formalized benchmarking, we started our own effort. If you want to understand what zkVMs are (and why you should care about them) you should check out this blog post.

We rolled out our rebrand and bid farewell to the Green Monolith

Link: RIP Green Monolith (X Article)

Detailed monthly recaps for Q1:

Q2: A full stack of products for enterprises and institutions to access Ethereum’s trust and liquidity

The second quarter of 2025 marked a turning point for Aligned: we shipped the MVP of our second product, the Proof Aggregation Service, and published our expanded roadmap, taking us from only focusing on ZK proof verification to building a full-stack, vertically integrated suite of products for Ethereum.

We outlined exactly why we work on Ethereum

We had (and have) no doubt that Ethereum will become the world’s financial backend, and we realized that the highest impact products leveraging ZK that we could build (today) were the tools needed for more people to build on Ethereum.

Why Aligned is building on Ethereum
Ethereum is becoming the backbone of a new global financial system—open, programmable, and secured by cryptography instead of institutions. For the past year, our focus has been on accelerating Ethereum’s roadmap by making Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proof verification cheaper, faster, and more scalable. By building essential infrastructure—like our
AlignedAligned Layer

We published our expanded roadmap and multi-product vision

With the ZK proof verification bottleneck on Ethereum solved by our first two products, our attention turned to delivering a full stack of solutions for building on Ethereum: ZK-rollups powered by Ethrex, an interoperability protocol, and wallets as a service.

The Aligned Roadmap: Ethereum as a financial backend
Aligned’s roadmap has expanded to solutions for wallets, rollups, interoperability and ZK services. Everything you need to build on Ethereum.
AlignedAligned Layer

We Shipped the MVP of our Proof Aggregation Service

The Proof Aggregation Service is a complement to the Proof Verification Layer; using recursion it allows multiple proofs to be “compressed” into one proof which is verified on Ethereum. It provides the full cryptographic security of Ethereum with a slight latency and cost trade-off, giving developers more options to use ZK.

Check out this short 5W1H thread about our Aggregation Service or see the blog post to learn more.

We demonstrated the first parts of our RaaS platform

A critical part of our stack is our upcoming Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform. Leveraging our Proof Aggregation Service, we are able to offer performant, reliable, and cost-effective ZK-rollups to customers.

We shared the first demo of a full Ethrex <> Aligned integration in collaboration with LambdaClass, a big step towards helping enterprises and institutions build on Ethereum.

Detailed monthly recaps for Q2:

Q3: Giving our partners the tools they need to build important solutions for the world

Equipped with our updated roadmap, Q3 had us focusing on helping the community understand the different products we’re building and sharing the first concrete use cases of our tech by our partners.

Sovra becomes our first major client to start building with our RaaS platform

We are proud to be working with Sovra to deliver the infra needed to serve over 6 million users in Latin America with their Digital Identity Stack.

Learn more by reading our announcement or check out the podcast RJ did with Sovra co-founder Diego Fernandez on The Rollup:

We explained why we chose Ethrex for our ZK-rollup stack, and why we believe based rollups are the ideal solution

Aligned RaaS: Based rollups to build the future of Ethereum
Aligned is in the business of selling access to Ethereum. Our product stack began with the Proof Verification Layer (live on mainnet since November) which was followed by the Proof Aggregation Service (currently on testnet). Together, this two-part ZK Verification Layer allows ZK proofs to be verified on Ethereum without
AlignedAligned Layer
Why Aligned Chose Ethrex as the Rollup Stack for Our RaaS Platform
Aligned’s Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform will soon give teams everything they need to access Ethereum’s trust by making rollup deployment as easy as any web2 service. We’re making based ZK-rollups accessible to anyone—so you can focus on your business case.We chose Ethrex as the stack for
AlignedAligned Layer

Loom Finance, our second major RaaS client, was announced

Loom Finance is a new protocol being built in collaboration by Levenue and LambdaClass to give companies access to non-dilutive funding from onchain markets while bringing real world yield onchain. We are excited to be supporting them as the infrastructure provider for their new L2 which will anchor the protocol to Ethereum.

EthCC left us feeling fired up about Ethereum’s direction

Held in sunny Cannes for the first time this year, @EthCC was an amazing chance to hear the latest from our partners. Check out our full writeup here:

Link: Cannes Alignment: Ethereum’s Bright Future (X Article)

We attended Google’s AI & ZK Summit

For the second year in a row, Diego and Mauro, two of our co-founders and respectively our heads of research and engineering, attended Google’s AI and ZK summit. Find out what they learned:

Key Highlights from Google’s 2025 ZK & AI Summit
San Francisco might have been cold, but Google’s ZK & AI Summit was on fire. Researchers, engineers, and industry leaders came together to push zero-knowledge, identity, and AI closer to the core of tomorrow’s secure and scalable systems. Engineers and researchers dominated the summit, with fewer VCs, marking it
AlignedAligned Layer

This summit also gave us a chance to think more broadly about how the technology we’re building will become increasingly important as AI advances and is adopted:

The era of AI needs Ethereum and ZK
The era of AI needs Ethereum and ZKAligned is a vertically integrated stack for building on a verifiable internet. Whether it’s financial infrastructure or AI systems, we ship one‑click rails for wallets, rollups, interoperability, and zero‑knowledge (ZK) services. The thesis? As AI picks up more of our
AlignedAligned Layer

We made a push into Asian markets, building local relationships while attending EDCON and KBW

At EDCON in Osaka, Diego gave a talk on zkVMs + post‑quantum signatures and STARK design tradeoffs, highlighting some of the most important areas of research for Ethereum that we’re contributing to: Youtube

EDCON was immediately follow by Korea Blockchain Week (KBW)—one of the largest events we’ve ever attended, and an incredible opportunity to connect with the community in Korea. See the full rundown on the week here:

Link: Aligned @ KBW (X Article)

Detailed monthly recaps for Q3

Q4: Sustained momentum

We entered the final stretch of 2025 balancing several equally important areas for our team. We launched the mainnet version of ZK Arcade, a demonstration of how our Proof Verification Layer unlocks the ability to operate new ZK-powered apps on Ethereum, and a fun way for the community to experience our tech.

Meanwhile our research team, led by Diego Kingston, focused on longer-term initiatives related to post-quantum security for Ethereum as well as work with our partners at 3MI Labs on a new zkVM.

Finally, we had the pleasure of hosting the wider community in our hometown of Buenos Aires during Devconnect in November.

ZK Arcade demonstrated how scalable ZK proof verification enables new use cases on Ethereum

ZK Arcade is a verifiable gaming application built on Aligned that gives our community a way to experience our technology while serving as a demonstration of how to integrate our Proof Verification Layer into new apps. We worked with over 20 partners to raffle off 700 early access NFTs to our community. Our players verified over 5000 proofs to prove their scores on the onchain leaderboard, demonstrating how our infra scales to support new use cases for ZK.

Diego introduced our new zkVM during Ethproofs call #6

At the final Ethproofs call of 2025, Diego announced LambdaVM, the new zkVM we are developing in collaboration with LambdaClass and 3MI labs. Following the same design philosophy as Ethrex, this RISC-V-64 VM will be simple with minimal dependencies and post-quantum secure from day 1 with 128 bits of security. We believe this will be valuable for prover and VM diversity and will help us deliver more secure and performant products to our users.

Watch past Ethproofs calls (including this latest one) on Youtube.

3MI labs visits Buenos Aires

In October, our research partners from 3MI Labs visited us in Buenos Aires for a week-long workshop to focus on development of the LambdaVM and other topics.

Link: 3MI Labs x Aligned in Argentina (X Article)

At the beginning of 2025 we identified and responsibly disclosed an exploit in the SP1 zkVM with 3MI and LambdaClass researchers, which you can learn about in this blog post.

You can learn more about our partnership here.

Bonus: check out our 3 part series of blog posts on hash functions published in collaboration with 3MI labs last year:

A Series On Hash Functions
The development and use of integrity/zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs has accelerated over the past few years. The introduction of general purpose ZK virtual machines, which allow us to write and prove Rust code, has made developing verifiable applications easier and faster. We have blockchains like Mina that prove every block
AlignedAligned Layer
Introduction: Hash functions in Cryptography
Cryptographic Hash Functions (CHF) are fundamental to securing the digital world. From protecting passwords to enabling blockchain and zero-knowledge (ZK) systems, CHFs play a crucial role in ensuring the integrity, security, and privacy of data. This blog is the first in a series where we’ll explore the world of
AlignedAligned Layer
Design Strategies: How to Construct A Hashing Mode?
Recap In our previous blog, we explored the fundamental properties of cryptographic hash functions (CHFs) and discussed their crucial role in maintaining the integrity and security of data with 3MI Labs. In this post, we delve into the architectural strategies behind hash functions. These strategies, or modes of operation, are
AlignedAligned Layer

We attended the Ethereum Foundation's Lean Roadmap workshop at Cambridge University

As part of our work contributing to Ethereum's Lean Roadmap, in particular on post-quantum security and the new Lean VM, Mauro and Diego were invited to participate in October's EF workshop at Cambridge.

Link: Inside the Cambridge Ethereum Workshop (X Article)

Devconnect gave us a chance to play host for the biggest conference of the year

Being based in Buenos Aires, we were thrilled to find out our hometown was chosen as the location for Devconnect 2025. Between main stage talks, the first Ethrex summit, the inaugural Ethproofs day, and other side events we also hosted two days of brunch and had the pleasure of meeting with many of our partners.

Link: Aligned @ Devconnect (X Article)

Detailed monthly recaps for Q4

Looking towards 2026

As we kick off 2026 we are more energized than ever to keep building tools and infrastructure that the institutions of the world need to upgrade to Ethereum.Expect to see the first L2s to be launched by our partners using our Ethrex-based RaaS platform, along with the other products detailed in our roadmap.

We remain committed to building in public with regular engineering updates and Alignment Session streams that explain the state of our project and our view of the world and industry. 100% open source, as always.

The financial infrastructure we all rely on demands not only performance, but also verifiability. And we’re here to make these rails accessible to everyone without compromise.

Read next