Aligned Testnet 3: Our first EigenLayer AVS open to external operators

Carlos Lira

Oct 20, 2024 — 4 min read

We are excited to announce the launch of our third testnet, marking a significant advancement in the adoption of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs on Ethereum. This is our first public testnet open to third party operators for our EigenLayer AVS. We invite you to work with us towards our goal of accelerating the Ethereum roadmap by making the implementation of ZK proofs both easy and economical.

By reducing the complexity and cost of verification, Aligned will establish ZK as the default solution for building provable and secure applications.

With the Aligned EigenLayer testnet, developers can immediately start verifying various types of proofs and posting the results for 10% of the usual cost on Ethereum.

The goal of this testnet is to battle-test the features that Aligned will introduce and to better understand developer needs. Your feedback will allow us to iterate quickly upon our work, bringing us closer to our mainnet release.

What is Aligned?

Aligned is a decentralized ZK proof verification layer. With Aligned, developers can verify proofs for less than 10% of their previous cost, paving the way for the widespread adoption of ZK technology. Aligned offers two modes to developers: fast mode and a proof aggregation mode.

The fast mode is built as an EigenLayer Actively Validated Service (AVS), Aligned borrows economic security from Ethereum through restaking to ensure that proofs are correctly verified and settled on Ethereum. This novel design allows Aligned to offer unmatched throughput and cost reduction. The current testnet only supports fast mode.

The proof aggregation mode allows developers to amortize costs by aggregating the verification of multiple proofs into a single verifiable proof on-chain. This service will inherit the full security of Ethereum. To offer verification for multiple proving systems, Aligned has designed a general prover that proves the verification of the execution of the rust verifiers and then recursively proves the verification of all these proofs.

Aligned provides high throughput while reducing costs, all while offering developers maximum flexibility with regards to their choice of proving system.

Currently, proof verification is a bottleneck in the proof supply chain. Aligned is removing this limitation in order to enable new services and applications. As a new layer in the modular stack, Aligned unlocks new ways to design decentralized systems that can meet novel use cases.

Features of this testnet

High throughput: over 1000 proofs per second.

Multiple proof systems supported: Halo2, SP1, and Gnark (Groth16 and Plonk + KZG).

Cost reduction: Over 90% reduction for all proof system supported.

Performance

Aligned’s operators only need to run the verification code on bare metal. This has multiple advantages compared to running it on the EVM:

1: The code can be optimized for speed, not gas consumption.

2: We can leverage parallelization to increase throughput.

3: Since the gas limit does not constrain us we can verify proof systems that are too expensive for Ethereum (e.g. Kimchi or Binius).

4: Adding new proof systems is straightforward. Preliminary results show that Aligned can verify more than 1000 proofs per second using our fast mode architecture, over two orders of magnitude greater than the EVM at full capacity. Using effective batching techniques, we can split the task creation and verification costs between thousands of proofs, reducing costs by over 90%.

Testnet

For developers, interacting with Aligned is extremely simple. Your first interaction will take no more than 3 minutes. Simply follow these steps to send your first SP1 proofs and verify them with Aligned.

Step one:

Download and install Aligned to send proofs in the testnet:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yetanotherco/aligned_layer/main/batcher/aligned/install_aligned.sh | bash

Step two:

Run the source command that should appear in the shell.

Step Three:

Download the example SP1 proof file together with the ELF file of the proved program using:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yetanotherco/aligned_layer/main/batcher/aligned/get_proof_test_files.sh | bash

Step four:

Send the proof to be verified in Aligned with:

rm -rf ~/.aligned/aligned_verification_data/ &&
aligned submit \
--proving_system SP1 \
--proof ~/.aligned/test_files/sp1_fibonacci.proof \
--vm_program ~/.aligned/test_files/sp1_fibonacci.elf \
--aligned_verification_data_path ~/.aligned/aligned_verification_data \
--batcher_url wss://batcher.alignedlayer.com \
--network holesky \
--rpc_url https://ethereum-holesky-rpc.publicnode.com

Step five:

You should get a response like this:

[2024-07-01T19:17:54Z WARN  aligned] Missing keystore used for payment. This proof will not be included if sent to Eth Mainnet
[2024-07-01T19:17:54Z INFO  aligned] Submitting proofs to the Aligned batcher...
[2024-07-01T19:19:18Z INFO  aligned] Batch inclusion data written into ./aligned_verification_data/e367d76e_0.json
[2024-07-01T19:19:18Z INFO  aligned] Proofs submitted to aligned. See the batch in the explorer:
[2024-07-01T19:19:18Z INFO  aligned] https://explorer.alignedlayer.com/batches/0xe367d76e832edec893d3a9027b3c231b2e3994c47acfac2e67197c13c9be0c4c

Use the link in the response to check the status of your transaction in the Aligned explorer.

Step six:

After three Ethereum blocks, you should be able to check if it has been verified with the CLI using:

aligned verify-proof-onchain \
--aligned-verification-data ~/.aligned/aligned_verification_data/*.json \
--rpc_url https://ethereum-holesky-rpc.publicnode.com \
--network holesky

This is reading the result of the proof verification in Ethereum.

Step seven:

You should get this result:

[2024-06-17T21:58:43Z INFO  aligned] Your proof was verified in Aligned and included in the batch!

If the proof wasn't verified, you should get this result:

[2024-06-17T21:59:09Z INFO  aligned] Your proof was not included in the batch.

If you want to know more about Aligned or send another types of proof, read our docs.

Show proof of alignment: Tweet the link to your batch verification with #aligned ✅

Don’t forget to tag @alignedlayer

Congratulations. You are now aligned. ✅

Community involvement

This is not an incentivised testnet. The testnet is for operators and developers. For our wider community members, we are running a Galxe quest to help learn and spread the word about our project. In the near future, we will run an incentivised light client which will be open to the public.

This is just the beginning. We will soon have even more ways for you to participate in Aligned and help us to accelerate Ethereum.

About us

Aligned provides the necessary infrastructure for you to create the future of Ethereum. Get aligned with our ZK verification network. Aligned was created and spun off by the cryptographic experts at LambdaClass.

We invite you to meet the team at Lambda Hack Week in Brussels on July 6 - July 9.

We will have bounties, tutorials and a lot of activities to allow you to build on top of Aligned. If you want to contribute to the future of Ethereum, don't hesitate to sign up to this hackathon. It's made by nerds for nerds. The team will be there to guide you and help you to become Aligned. Aligned has been open-source from day one. You can see our Github here.