Stellar Development Foundation announces ZkVM, an experimental zero-knowledge virtual machine for scalable and confidential smart contracts. The research explores sidechain architectures to enhance Stellar with privacy features and flexible contract capabilities.
The Stellar Development Foundation has unveiled ZkVM, a zero-knowledge virtual machine designed as an experimental multi-asset blockchain architecture for scalable and confidential smart contracts. ZkVM uses a UTXO model with Bulletproofs zero-knowledge proofs to enable encrypted transactions and custom financial agreements on a shared ledger. Transactions are compact (1-1.5 KB), verify in 1-2 ms per CPU core, and support arbitrary arithmetic and boolean conditions without trusted setup. The research, developed under Project Slingshot, aims to bring privacy and protocol flexibility to Stellar while allowing rapid experimentation with decentralized applications outside the consensus layer.
