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Ethereum and Zero Knowledge: Key Highlights from 2025

Here at Aligned we’ve been publishing a weekly report covering news related to Ethereum and Zero Knowledge, delivered through what we’ve been calling ZK News.  Starting in 2026, ZK News will be rebranded to reflect a broader and more consistent view of the ecosystem, expanding into a weekly

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,

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

ZK Industry News: December 18th to 24th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK and Ethereum. Here's what happened from December 18th to 24th, 2025. The Ethereum Foundation shared an article on upcoming zkEVM Security Targets The article discusses the ongoing

ZK Industry News: December 11th to 17th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK and Ethereum. Here's what happened from December 11th to 17th, 2025. Ethrex is now live on Ethproofs The LambdaClass team has deployed its prover using ZisK on

ZK Industry News: December 4th to 10th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK and Ethereum. Here's what happened from December 4th to 10th, 2025. Federico Carrone and Roberto Catalan posted an article explaining how Ethereum is emerging as the new

Aligned Monthly Recap - November '2025

The past month has been busy but rewarding! Here's a recap of our highlights: ► Aligned at Devconnect ► The Aligned Milestones ► Alignment Sessions and X Spaces ► Ethrex - Aligned integration Demo ► Engineering updates ► Aligned at Devconnect A recap of Devconnect, including events such as Align n’ Dine, EthDay, ZKonnect,

ZK Industry News: November 27th to December 3rd, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK and Ethereum. Here's what happened from November 27th to December 3rd, 2025. LambdaClass is launching ethlambda, a minimalist lean Ethereum consensus client Just like with Ethrex, a

The year of zkVM real-time proving: milestones, present and future

Introduction Ethereum is a decentralized verifiable computer. The way in which we can achieve this verifiability is through re-execution of each computation, consensus and economic incentives. Nevertheless, this strategy suffers from one main drawback: all the nodes have to do the same work over and over again in order to

Aligned Engineering Updates: November, 2025

During November we ran the zk-arcade campaign, and delivered 33 PRs across both repositories that expanded platform capabilities and improved stability. Major highlights: * Ethereum Fusaka Fork migration: Migrated Aligned to support Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade with EIP-7594 blob sidecars * Mina verifier integration: Added support for Mina proof systems, expanding

ZK Industry News: November 20th to 26th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK and Ethereum. Here's what happened from November 20th to 26th, 2025. Aligned shared a recap of Devconnect, including events such as Align n’ Dine, EthDay, ZKonnect, and

ZK Industry News: November 13th to 19th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK and Ethereum. Here's what happened from November 13th to 19th, 2025. BoulderTech and LambdaClass unveiled BoulderLam to bring scalable, compliant blockchain infrastructure to LATAM Led by CEO

ZK Industry News: November 6th to 12th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from November 6th to 12th, 2025. Uniswap's founder, Hayden Adams, introduced the long-awaited UNIfication proposal, aiming to activate protocol fees, realign ecosystem

Aligned Engineering Updates: November 3rd to 7th, 2025

This week focused on fixing issues presented by users of ZK Arcade, enhancing user experience and operational efficiency across the platform. We also introduced improvements to our internal systems adding enhanced summaries of operational costs and earnings. We added support for Mina verifiers in Aligned staging, supporting the ongoing work

ZK Industry News: October 30th to November 5th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from October 30th to November 5th, 2025. The Sovra team joined Mexican government and ecosystem leaders to highlight the state’s role in advancing

Aligned Monthly Recap - October '2025

Another busy month in the books! Here's a recap of our highlights: ► ZK Arcade mainnet + early access ► Alignment Sessions ► Aligned Guests ► Blog posts ► ZK Arcade goes live on mainnet ZK Arcade is now live! 700 users with exclusive early access can experience ZK tech on Ethereum through two

ZK Industry News: October 23rd to 29th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from October 23rd to 29th, 2025. Introducing a New Cryptography & Distributed Systems Research Center, a collaboration between LambdaClass, FIUBA, and Exactas UBA Research

ZK Arcade: Now Live On Mainnet

ZK Arcade is a new platform built on Aligned that lets player prove their results in games and verify them onchain using Aligned's Proof Verification Layer.

ZK Industry News: October 16th to 22nd, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from October 16th to 22nd, 2025. Vitalik Buterin published an article outlining the GKR Protocol This protocol is behind several proof systems and enables

ZK Industry News: October 9th to 15th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from October 9th to 15th, 2025. Aligned has entered the final stage of the whitelist process for early access to ZK Arcade ZK Arcade,

Win early access to ZK Arcade through our partners and operators!

ZK Arcade, powered by Aligned, is launching soon. Enter raffles by our partners to win early access to our platform.

ZK Industry News: October 2nd to 8th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from October 2nd to 8th, 2025. Succinct introduced Private Proving, enabling privacy at scale through its zkVM, SP1, and TEE technology Developers can now

ZK Industry News: September 25th to October 1st, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from September 25th to October 1st, 2025. Ethereum's Holesky testnet has been successfully upgraded to Fusaka This upgrade went live on Holesky

ZK Arcade: coming soon

ZK Arcade is a new platform built on Aligned that lets player prove their results in games and verify them onchain using Aligned's Proof Verification Layer.

Aligned Monthly Recap - September '2025

The past month has been busy but rewarding! Here's a recap of our highlights: ► ZK Arcade Ticket NFT Announcement. ► Alignment Sessions. ► A new partnership. ► Events. Lots of them. ► Blog posts. ► The ZK Arcade Ticket NFT is your access pass for ZK Arcade It grants exclusive early access to

ZK Industry News: September 18th to 24th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from September 18th-24th, 2025. The Fusaka upgrade has been tentatively targeted for Ethereum's mainnet activation on December 3, 2025 Ethereum core developers

ZK Industry News: September 11th to 17th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from September 11th-17th, 2025. The Ethereum Foundation is launching the dAI Team to make Ethereum the go-to platform for AI and the machine economy.

ZK Industry News: September 4th to 10th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from September 4th-10th, 2025. StarkWare has set a record proving the entire Bitcoin block header chain in just 6.5 hours for only $13.

zkVMs, Circuits, and the Optimization Game

Mauro Toscano, Aligned co-founder and CTO, explores the engineering tradeoffs between ZK circuits and zkVMs and how to think about designing and building these systems

Announcing our new strategic partnership with 4Mica

Announcing a new strategic partnership between Aligned and 4Mica, a financial infrastructure that enables sub-second value exchange across any blockchain. 

ZK Industry News: August 28th to September 3rd, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from August 28th to September 3rd, 2025. Pol Finance, LambdaClass, and Levenue released the Loom Finance whitepaper, a protocol that enables the tokenization of

Aligned Engineering Updates: August 25th - 29th, 2025

This week focused on network deployments and enhanced gaming experiences. We successfully deployed new networks on Sepolia and Hoodi, while delivering significant improvements to the ZK Arcade platform including a new game called Parity and better user interface elements. The Sepolia network is now being used to test the integration

Aligned Monthly Recap - August '2025

The past month has been busy and exciting — check out this thread for a recap of our highlights! ► Partnership Announcement. ► Alignment Sessions. ► Aligned Guests, X Space, Podcast. ► Blog posts / Articles. ► Engineering updates. ► Alignment Sessions Each week on X, our team shares live updates on engineering and product progress. Tune in

ZK Industry News: August 21st to 27th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from August 21st-27th, 2025. LambdaClass published two blog posts on the basics and optimization of the Sumcheck protocol The first one describes the fundamentals

Aligned Engineering Updates: August 18th - 22nd, 2025

This week brought significant improvements to both the Aligned infrastructure and the ZK Arcade gaming experience. Key focus areas included batcher performance optimizations, enhanced user interfaces, expanded ZK Arcade features, and improved cross-platform support. Summary Total PRs merged: 25 (8 from aligned_layer, 17 from zk_arcade) aligned_layer Repository

Aligned Engineering Updates: August 4th - 15th, 2025

The last two weeks focused on improving the user experience for ZK Arcade with enhanced UI/UX features, better proof submission flows, and user guidance. The Proof Verification Layer continued to see performance optimizations and stability improvements. Below, you can find a demo of ZK Arcade, shared by RJ, that

ZK Industry News: August 14th to 20th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from August 14th-20th, 2025. A 6x speedup for Jolt, the zkVM from a16z crypto, has been achieved by fully integrating the new Twist and

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

ZK Industry News: August 7th to 13th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from August 7th-13th, 2025. Giacomo Fenzi and Yuwen Zhang shared new research on compressing hash-based SNARKs. A new paper from Giacomo Fenzi and Yuwen

ZK Industry News: July 31st to August 6th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from July 31st to August 6th, 2025. The Succinct Prover Network is now live on mainnet. This marketplace is a protocol on Ethereum that

Aligned’s Proof Verification Layer and Proof Aggregation Service: two options for making ZK on Ethereum fast, affordable, and scalable.

Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are at the heart of Ethereum’s future. It’s the technology chosen to scale the EVM by 1000x without sacrificing decentralization, and is also being used to improve the efficiency and security of Ethereum’s consensus layer (detailed in the lean roadmap). 1 gigagas/sec (10K

Aligned Engineering Updates: July 28th - August 1st, 2025

Last week we finished a complete version of the ZK Arcade and ran a playtest with external users. This feedback is now being used to improve the user experience. The Proof Verification Layer has also been improved with some minor upgrades related to developer experience and reliability. See below for

Aligned Monthly Recap - July '2025

The past month has been busy and exciting — check out this thread for a recap of our highlights! ► Partnership Announcement. ► Alignment Sessions. ► Aligned Guests, X Space, Podcast. ► Blog posts / Articles. ► Engineering updates. ► Partnership Announcement We announced our partnership with Sovra providing the infrastructure to support their Digital Identity Stack for

ZK Industry News: July 24th to 30th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from July 24th to 30th, 2025. Ethereum, The World Computer, celebrates 10 years Ethereum has been online for 10 years with zero downtime. This

Aligned & Sovra Partner to Power Digital Trust in Latin America

We’re excited to announce our strategic partnership with Sovra, equipping them with the  infrastructure needed to power their Digital Identity Stack for governments, institutions, and citizens. What Is Sovra? Sovra enables institutions and individuals to issue, verify, and use digital identity credentials with sovereignty and privacy. Sovra’s technology

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

Aligned Engineering Updates - July 21st - 25th, 2025

During the last week, we focused on enhancing zk arcade's usability and documentation while gathering valuable user feedback to drive continuous improvements. We also updated the testnet version of Risc0 to ensure compatibility with the latest features and performance enhancements. Closed PRs from last week 1. #73 – feat:

ZK Industry News: July 17th to 23rd, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from July 17th to 23rd, 2025. The Ethereum Foundation is hosting a Livestream to celebrate 10 years of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin & Joseph Lubin

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

Aligned Engineering Updates - July 14th - 18th, 2025

Update: * Risc0 code for Aligned is being updated to its latest version, and will be deployed on mainnet soon. * #2020 * zk-arcade MVP has been finished, with work now continuing to make it more reliable and easier to use * #46 – fix(web): update favicon * #45 – feat(beast): indicate where the proof

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

ZK Industry News: July 10th to 16th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from July 10th to 16th, 2025. Boundless Mainnet Beta is Live With the launch, they introduced The Signal—an open-source ZK consensus client designed

ZK Industry News: July 3rd to 9th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from July 3rd to 9th, 2025. RJ and Diego Fernandez, from Aligned and Sovra, discussed the use of Ethereum for digital identity on The

ZK Industry News: June 26th to July 2nd, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from June 26th to July 2nd, 2025. Sovra showcased its Digital Trust Stack for governments and institutions Sovra enables seamless, secure identity verification, privacy,

Aligned Monthly Recap - June '2025

The past month has been busy and exciting — check out this thread for a recap of our highlights! ► Aligned Suite of Products. ► Alignment Sessions. ► Aligned Guests. ► Blog posts. ► Engineering updates. ► Aligned Suite of Products We presented our full stack of vertically integrated infrastructure to simplify launching, operating, and scaling on

Aligned Engineering Updates - June 23rd - 27th, 2025

This week, the majority of the engineering team's efforts were dedicated to preparing for the release of a new version of Aligned, v0.17.0. Key tasks included updating the version of RISC Zero and integrating Circom into our supported verifiers. These changes have already been merged into

Aligned Yol Haritasındaki Yeni Ürün: Rollup-as-a-Service

Yakında, Ethereum üzerinde bir rollup başlatmak, bir web uygulaması deploy etmek kadar kolay olacak. Yeni Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) platformumuz, tek tıkla ZK-rollup deploy ederek bunu mümkün kılıyor. LambdaClass tarafından geliştirilen Ethrex üzerine kurulu ve ZK Doğrulama Katmanımız (ZK Verification Layer) ile yaklaşan meta-proving servisi, cüzdan servisi ve interoperability protokolüyle doğrudan entegre

ZK Industry News: June 19th to 25th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from June 19th to 25th, 2025. StarkWare x Giza: Powering LuminAIR with S-two for Verifiable Machine Learning They announced the integration of StarkWare’s

Aligned Engineering Updates - June 16th - 20th, 2025

Most of the work this week has been on continuing with the experiments of building games and applications on top of Aligned. We are developing 2 categories of apps. Simpler ones that can be run on the browser, and more complex ones that need to be run locally. For browser

ZK Industry News: June 12th to 18th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from June 12th to 18th, 2025. We shared an article outlining our new Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform With a single click, users will be able

Ethereum as the Unstoppable World Machine: An Interview with Tim Clancy

On this episode of Aligned Guests, host Boris sits down with Tim Clancy to dive deep into what makes Ethereum unique, the rollup-centric roadmap, and why Tim is building Sigil: a rollup that’s prioritizing having an exit window. Boris: Tim, great to finally have you on the podcast. For

Introducing Aligned’s Rollup-as-a-Service Platform

We believe launching an Ethereum rollup should be as simple as deploying a web app. Our new Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform makes that a reality with one-click ZK-rollup deployment. Built with Ethrex, zkVMs, and our integrated ZK infra stack.

Aligned Engineering Updates - June 9th - 13th, 2025

Most of the engineering work this week has been on making new examples for Aligned, where the user can interact with or where the technologies are more novel. We are now finishing examples of ZK sudoku and another simple puzzle game, where a server generates proofs on behalf of the

ZK Industry News: June 5th to 11th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from June 5th to 11th, 2025. The Ethereum Foundation invites you to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Ethereum's genesis block Participate in

Aligned Engineering Updates - June 2nd - 6th, 2025

This week we upgraded the fast mode protocol on Testnet to its latest version, bringing some reliability upgrades and upgrading the verifiers libraries to their latest version. We also worked on improving the aggregation mode all across the board, from reliability, to performance and a better integration with the current

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

ZK Industry News: May 29th to June 4th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from May 29th to 4th, 2025. The Ethereum Foundation introduced Protocol, a new structure for its R&D teams The initiative focuses on

Aligned Monthly Recap - May '2025

The past month has been busy and exciting — check out this thread for a recap of our highlights! ► Alignment Sessions. ► Aligned Guests. ► Engineering updates. ► Special announcement: We shared our first demo of a full Ethrex <> Aligned integration This work was made possible thanks to the collaboration with LambdaClass

Aligned Engineering Updates - May 26th - 30th, 2025

Welcome to our weekly engineering updates post which details the latest improvements, features, and fixes. We have finished and merged the PRs for: 1. Scaling the aggregation mode through proofs of aggregation of aggregated proofs. 2. The full flow example for the aggregation mode. We are also doing some work

ZK Industry News: May 22nd to 28th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from May 22nd to 28th, 2025. Ethrex, the new Rust execution client for Ethereum built by LambdaClass has made progress towards based sequencing by

Aligned Engineering Updates - May 19th - 23rd, 2025

Latest PRs merged Refactor sdk modules https://github.com/yetanotherco/aligned_layer/pull/1941 Refactor SDK modules so they have less indirection and are more structured. Verify aggregated proof on chain https://github.com/yetanotherco/aligned_layer/pull/1915 It adds missing functions for users to integrate an application with

ZK Industry News: May 15th to 21st, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from May 15th to 21st, 2025. Succinct announced SP1 Hypercube, the latest version of their zkVM, which is capable of proving Ethereum blocks in

Aligned Engineering Updates - May 12th - 16th, 2025

Latest PRs merged into our repository. Add more Events and functions on Agg Contract (#1930) https://github.com/yetanotherco/aligned_layer/pull/1930 * Adds functions to set the Risc0 verifier address and additional events on the agg contract. Update EigenLayer Contracts for Devnet (#1932) https://github.com/yetanotherco/aligned_layer/

ZK Industry News: May 8th to 14th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from May 8th to 14th, 2025. Irreducible team has revealed a preview of PetraVM, in collaboration with Polygon PetraVM is a general-purpose virtual machine

ZK Industry News: May 1st to 7th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from May 1st to 7th, 2025. Pectra upgrade is live on Ethereum! It provides enhanced smart wallet UX, 2x L2 scaling blobs, and improved

Aligned Monthly Recap - April '2025

The past month has been busy and exciting — check out this thread for a recap of our highlights! ► Technical content. ► Educational content. ► Podcast. ► Alignment sessions. ► Community calls. ► Technical content. We shared an updated roadmap for Aligned and explain our vision and plans for the coming years. ALIGNED ROADMAP UPDATED. We’

ZK Industry News: April 24th to 30th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from April 24th to 30th, 2025. Miden announced their $25 million seed fundraise and shared a technical overview of how they're building

Aligned's Proof Aggregation Service: now live on the Ethereum Holesky Testnet

Verifying zero-knowledge proofs on Ethereum is expensive.  With Aggregation Mode, Aligned introduces a scalable solution: compressing multiple proofs into one using recursion, drastically reducing verification costs while maintaining Ethereum-level security. This is our second major product, following the Proof Verification Layer, and is designed to give developers flexible, cost-efficient infrastructure

ZK Industry News: April 17th to 23rd, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from April 17th to 23rd, 2025. The RISC Zero team published paper presenting the Boundless protocol It introduces Proof of Verifiable Work, a new

ZK Industry News: April 10th to 16th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from April 10th to 16th, 2025. Vitalik Buterin published an article on the importance of privacy He highlighted that ensuring privacy with open-source, universal,

The Aligned Roadmap: Ethereum as a financial backend

After a year of work and the delivery of our first product, the scope of our mission is now expanding. In this post, we share an updated roadmap for Aligned and explain our vision and plans for the coming years. We started building a very specialized piece of infrastructure to

ZK Industry News: April 3rd to 9th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from April 3rd to 9th, 2025. Updates from Aligned (1/2): We have released our updated roadmap! We are excited to share our latest

ZK Industry News: March 27th to April 2nd, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from March 27th to April 2nd, 2025. Ingonyama published a new blog post about Hardware-friendliness of HyperPlonk The article is an extension of a

Aligned Monthly Recap - March '2025

The past month has been busy and exciting — check out this thread for a recap of our highlights! ✅ Aligned by Numbers. ✅ Educational content and blog posts. ✅ Events. ✅ Alignment Sessions. ✅ Community Calls. ✅ Aligned by Numbers: Brief summary Learn about our partnerships, operators, number of verified proofs, details about the Aligned Builders

What is a zkVM and why should you care about them?

You've probably heard the term zkVM buzzing around lately, especially in the context of ZK-rollups and scaling Ethereum. This guide is meant to demystify them so you can understand what they are, how they work (at a high level), why you should care about them, and what their

ZK Industry News: March 20th to 26th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from March 20th to 26th, 2025. StarkWare published an article outlining the importance of incentivized integrity and public verifiability in the development of social

Alternatives to re-execution

The goal of blockchains Blockchain technology has emerged to provide a decentralized and secure way to record and verify transactions across a distributed network of participants. The main objective is to eliminate the need for intermediaries, by enabling peer-to-peer transactions. This is achieved through cryptographic techniques that ensure the integrity

Neutral, standardized benchmarking of zkVM proving times

Zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) are virtual machines that let you write and execute code in common languages like Rust or C and generate proofs demonstrating the integrity of computations. This makes building with ZK much more accessible to developers, and is a key part of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap. While

ZK Industry News: March 13th to 19th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from March 13th to 19th, 2025. Ingonyama released ICICLE-Snark, offering enhanced performance for ZK applications ICICLE-Snark outperforms other implementations in Groth16 benchmarks, pushing the

Bridge Over Troubled Fiats: Zk-Setu On & Off Ramp Solution Cuts Out the Middleman

Bridging fiat and crypto can often feel like navigating a maze of intermediaries, hidden fees, and potential censorship. Zk-Setu, a project built by Gautam, Shivansh & Ayush for the Aligned hackathon, breaks through these barriers by offering a trustless, zero-knowledge-proof-based P2P escrow platform for fiat-to-crypto exchanges. With Aligned enabling cost-effective

Hackathon Spotlight Vol. 04: Vote Like No One’s Watching: AGYSO ZK-DAO-VOTE Privacy-Preserving DAO Voting

On-chain voting has always promised transparency—but what happens when that transparency undermines privacy? Bribery, social pressure, and herd behavior can distort results, making DAOs less democratic than intended. AGYSO ZK-DAO-VOTE sets out to change that, offering a protocol that keeps votes secret while ensuring every vote is valid and

ZK Industry News: March 7th to 12th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from March 7th to 12th, 2025. Starknet posted its vision & plan to become the first Layer 2 to settle on both Bitcoin &

ZK Industry News: February 24th to March 6th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from February 24th to March 6th, 2025. Starknet v0.13.4 is now live on Starknet Testnet This version includes Cairo Native, a compiler

Aligned Monthly Recap - February '2025

The last month has been full of exciting updates for Aligned! Check out this thread for a recap of our highlights! ✅ Educational content and blog posts. ✅ Alignment Sessions. ✅ Podcasts. ✅ Community Calls. ✅ Educational content We posted a major thread promoting educational content, focusing on advanced blockchain topics like SNARKs and the

ZK Industry News: February 17th to 23rd, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from February 17th to 23rd, 2025. Justin Drake and Federico Carrone discussed Ethereum's Native Rollup Roadmap on The Rollup Podcast The episode,

ZK Industry News: February 10th to 16th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ We're bringing you industry highlights each week so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from February 10th to 16th, 2025. Brevis introduces Pico: A Modular and Performant zkVM It outperforms RISC0, SP1, and OpenVM by 70%–150% on

Hackathon Spotlight Vol. 03: Building Trust in Vector Spaces with Verifiable Nearest-Neighbor Search

How can we be sure that a vector database returns the truly best match? This hackathon project by Erhan uses verifiable computation and zero-knowledge proofs to mathematically guarantee the accuracy of nearest neighbor searches, enabling more transparent and trustworthy AI-powered applications. The Semantic Revolution Semantic generally refers to the meaning

ZK Industry News: February 3rd to 9th, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ Each week, we're bringing you industry highlights so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from February 3rd to 9th, 2025. Mina releases a zkML Library zkML allows AI models to function on-chain with full privacy and verification, opening

Aligned Hackathon Spotlight Vol. 02: Spectre ZK Light Client Re-implementation and Integration with Aligned

Welcome to the second post in our series showcasing the winners of the inaugural Aligned Builders Hackathon. Each article will highlight innovative use cases for ZK technology enabled by Aligned's Proof Verification Layer. You can see the first post, which discusses ZK use cases in gaming, here. Aligned

ZK Industry News: January 27th to February 2nd, 2025

✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨ Each week, we're bringing you industry highlights so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK. Here's what happened from January 27th to February 2nd, 2025. Mina offers an update on the status of bridges in the Mina Protocol ecosystem This update includes