ZisK v1.3.0-alpha release 🚀 ZisK is moving beyond arithmetic hashes with BLAKE3 strengthening security while outperforming our prior Poseidon1 version: ⚡ 7.43s p999 on 4×5090 ⚡ 5.14s p999 on 8×5090 🛡️ 128-bit provable security 🔐 Post-quantum secure This is a major step toward faster and safer proving. Release notes: github.com/0xPolygonHermez/z…

🔐 Security first This release also strengthens the soundness and completeness of ZisK with fixes across opcode mapping, register handling, trusted-key verification, DMA, FFI, proof wrapping, and public-value handling. We’ve also strengthened validation of ZisK artifacts. We’d like to thank everyone who contributed to this release through pull requests, issue reports, security research, and responsible disclosure. More details available in the release notes.

🛡️ BLAKE3-powered ZisK now uses BLAKE3-powered proving for STARK proofs, outperforming our previous Poseidon1 version. Upcoming releases will introduce BLAKE3 PLONK wrapper support, together with circuit optimizations to reduce proof sizes. See benchmarks:

📉 Optimized AIRs We prioritized fewer, larger AIR instances, reducing overhead and improving proving efficiency. Witness generation now supports variable-height AIRs with smarter AIR selection and includes optimisations in the witness computation of the most critical AIRS.

➕ More work per trace row Some AIRs now use lanes to pack more operations per row, reducing the number of instances needed per proof. Key improvements include better trace packing, parallel witness generation, optimized Keccak-f, and smarter execution planning and scheduling.

📈GPU prover boost Proof scheduling in the multi-GPU prover has been refactored to maximize GPU utilization. Traces are prefetched under the running proof, proofs are pipelined back to back, and recursion overlaps the tail of the basic proofs.

🔐 New precompiles We also added precompiles for Baby Jubjub, BLAKE3f, and BLAKE2s to reduce proving costs. Furthermore, all BLAKE-family operations now also share unified lookup infrastructure, eliminating duplicated work and keeping implementations consistent.

🧩 Native RISC-V Zba support ZisK now natively supports Zba, the RISC-V address-generation extension, with native sh1add, sh2add, sh3add, and slli.uw operations. Zba is now enabled by default, giving existing programs shorter traces and less to prove, no code changes needed.

🛠️ Distributed proving & developer tooling We've enhanced distributed proving with more robust coordinator/worker operations, added BLAKE3 setup support, and more consistent deployments. SDK & CLI supports the generation of PDF reports, CSV exports and improved diagnostics.

🔐 Stronger proof verification The SDK also enables verification against user supplied trusted setup and program keys instead of proof-supplied data. Public values are authoritative, proofs include hash-family info, and native verifiers support BLAKE3, Poseidon1, and Poseidon2.