Aligned Monthly Recap - December '2025
As we wrap up December, we’re excited to share a snapshot of what the Aligned ecosystem has been building and exploring over the past month. From core infrastructure progress to live demos and in-depth research, this recap highlights the ideas and work shaping our direction as we head into the new year.
Below, you’ll find announcements, product demos, and articles that reflect our focus on clarity, performance, and long-term impact across zero-knowledge systems, Ethereum, and the broader crypto-financial stack.
► Lambda VM Announcement
In collaboration with LambdaClass, Aligned is building a minimalist, simple, and high-performance RISC-V zkVM to address a key challenge in Ethereum today: the lack of clearly defined constraints, documentation, and readable code in existing zkVMs. As zero-knowledge technology rapidly matures, many current provers remain complex and hard to inspect.
Following the same philosophy applied to the Ethrex client, Lambda VM prioritizes minimalism and modularism, making it easy to understand, audit, and optimize.
► Demo: new version of the Aligned Proof Aggregation Service
A demo of the new version of the Aligned Layer ZK proof aggregation service is now live on Hoodi. In this release, the proof aggregation service and the proof verification layer (AVS) are split into two independent products, allowing users to submit proofs to either service separately.
A blog post and updated documentation will be published to explain the new architecture in more detail. The demo video shows a user submitting an SP1 proof to the new gateway service, the aggregation mode searching for pending proofs, multiple SP1 proofs being aggregated, and a single aggregated proof being submitted to Ethereum for verification.
The transaction hash for the verified aggregated proof is provided, with links available on Etherscan and the Aligned Explorer.
► Articles
This article explains how zkVMs and zero-knowledge proofs address Ethereum’s scalability limits by replacing full re-execution with efficient verification. It outlines the evolution from early zkVMs like Cairo to modern high-performance systems, culminating in 2025 with real-time proving of Ethereum blocks. Finally, it shows how zkVMs are central to Ethereum’s Lean Ethereum roadmap, enabling higher throughput, proof-based execution, and long-term security.
The article describes a curated learning map to understand Aligned’s vision, technology, and ecosystem. It covers Ethereum’s role as the global financial backend, the importance of zero-knowledge proofs, and the impact of AI. It also outlines Aligned’s product launches, partnerships, roadmap, ZK infrastructure, proof aggregation, interoperability, blockchain architecture, and core cryptographic concepts, providing a structured overview of the knowledge behind the Aligned stack.
The article explains how Levenue enables companies to access working capital by selling future recurring revenues to investors, avoiding equity dilution. It also shows how Loom Finance extends this model into DeFi, using smart contracts and crypto liquidity to bring real-world yield onchain while balancing transparency, privacy, and trust.
Bonus track:
Federico Carrone with Roberto Catalan are developing a series of articles that present their mental framework on several topics. The goal is to clearly explain how they understand and approach the technologies they are building at LambdaClass and Aligned, and to create reference material that can be reused to communicate these perspectives more effectively.
- The first article, “The Missing Institution of the Internet: Ethereum,” explores how the internet transformed communication but failed to create neutral institutions for ownership, enforcement, and coordination in digital economies. It explains how Ethereum addresses this gap by encoding property rights, contracts, and financial logic directly into software, enforced through cryptography and economic incentives. By replacing platform and state intermediaries with open, programmable infrastructure, Ethereum enables global digital ownership, interoperable finance, and new forms of coordination that complement both traditional institutions and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.
- The second article, “Ethereum Is the New Financial Backend of the World,” examines how Ethereum is evolving into a global, general-purpose financial infrastructure that reduces costs, complexity, and friction in financial services. It explains how Ethereum embeds ownership, transfer, and enforcement into software, replacing fragmented institutional systems with shared, secure, and programmable infrastructure. By shifting trust and administration from organizations to code, Ethereum enables faster settlement, global access, new business models, and more efficient financial institutions.
► Educational content
Aligned used games as a showcase because they offer a fun, intuitive way for the community to experience ZK technology that is usually hidden behind infrastructure used by protocols. ZK Arcade demonstrates how developers can integrate Aligned into ZK-based dapps, enabling verifiable gameplay and onchain leaderboards. It highlights how Aligned drastically reduces ZK verification costs, making experiences feasible that would otherwise be too expensive, while complementing more serious use cases like rollups and bridges.
The main benefit Aligned delivers is drastically cheaper and faster onchain ZK proof verification, reducing gas costs by over 90%. This removes a major bottleneck for ZK adoption on Ethereum, enabling scalable rollups, privacy apps, and bridges. Developers get a full-stack ZK infrastructure, including proof aggregation, RaaS, SDKs, and interoperability tools, making it easier to build, deploy, and scale ZK-powered applications.
Aligned already supports live testnets for major partners using its Ethrex-based RaaS platform, including Sovraio and Loom Finance. Sovraio uses Aligned to power a decentralized identity rollup expected to serve over 10 million users in Latin America. Loom Finance is building an L2 for revenue-backed financing, bringing real-world yield onchain while benefiting from Aligned’s low-cost, secure ZK verification infrastructure.
As always, thank you for following our work and being part of the Aligned journey. We’re excited to keep pushing forward on infrastructure, research, and tooling that move the ecosystem closer to scalable, verifiable, and open systems. More updates coming soon.
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