Why the 'Virtual Machine' Itself Needs a Redesign

The EVM's sequential, stateful design and complex opcodes are inherently expensive to prove. Projects like Scroll and Polygon zkEVM have made heroic engineering efforts, but they're optimizing a fundamentally suboptimal substrate.\n- Key Constraint: Proving cost dominated by non-arithmetic operations (e.g., keccak, storage access).\n- Key Consequence: ~10-100x higher proving costs vs. ZK-native operations, limiting scalability.

These are not EVM-equivalent; they are ZK-first instruction sets. Cairo and zkSync's custom VM treat computation as polynomial constraints from the start, making them inherently provable.\n- Key Benefit: ~90% cheaper proving for complex logic by eliminating cryptographic overhead.\n- Key Benefit: Enables novel primitives like account abstraction and parallel proof generation natively.

ZK-native design isn't just about the instruction set; it's about the execution model. Architectures like FuelVM decouple state access, enabling parallel transaction processing that is then aggregated into a single ZK proof.\n- Key Benefit: Theoretical linear scaling with cores, breaking the single-threaded EVM bottleneck.\n- Key Benefit: Ultra-low latency for users, with settlement deferred to the proof.

ZK-native VMs sacrifice full EVM equivalence, creating a new ecosystem fragmentation layer. While Warp (Solidity→Cairo) and LLVM-based transpilers help, they introduce toolchain risk.\n- Key Constraint: $10B+ EVM-native DeFi liquidity is not automatically portable.\n- Key Consequence: Forces a strategic choice: optimize for provability or for immediate ecosystem compatibility.

EVM's stack-based architecture and complex opcodes create massive proof overhead. Proving a simple SLOAD costs ~20k constraints vs. ~100 for a RISC-V ADD. This is the core reason for high ZK-rollup costs.

• Problem: Legacy design optimized for 2015 hardware, not 2025 proof systems.
• Solution: New VMs like RISC Zero and Jolt use RISC-V/SuperSimplicity for 10-100x fewer constraints per opcode.

ZK provers are massively parallel machines (GPUs, ASICs), but the EVM is stubbornly sequential. This creates a fundamental hardware/software mismatch, capping throughput.

• Problem: Sequential execution wastes >95% of prover compute capacity.
• Solution: VMs like zkVM and Succinct SP1 are designed with parallel proving as a first-class citizen, enabling linear scaling with prover hardware.

A monolithic VM forces all apps to pay for generality they don't need. The future is a constellation of application-specific VMs (ASVMs) with minimal, provable instruction sets.

• Problem: One-size-fits-all VM inflates proof size and time for simple logic (e.g., DEX swaps).
• Solution: Projects like Polygon Miden (for trading) and Aztec (for privacy) demonstrate order-of-magnitude efficiency gains by tailoring the VM to the application domain.

Accessing a large, unstructured Merkle tree for every state read/write dominates proof cost. The VM must be co-designed with the state model to minimize this overhead.

• Problem: Naive SLOAD/STORE operations require proving entire tree paths, costing ~0.1M constraints.
• Solution: Architectures like Fuel's UTXO model and RISC Zero's continuations localize state, reducing proof work by batching or eliminating global access.

Developer adoption requires seamless tooling. A new ZKVM that forces developers to write low-level proof circuits or a custom language will fail.

• Problem: Writing Circom or Halo2 circuits has a >6 month learning curve and is error-prone.
• Solution: Next-gen VMs like Jolt (using Lasso & Snarktor) and RISC Zero allow developers to write in Rust or C++, with the VM automatically generating optimal proofs.

A fragmented landscape of incompatible ZKVMs is a dead end. The winning architecture will enable seamless, provable communication between specialized execution environments.

• Problem: Isolated VMs recreate the multi-chain liquidity fragmentation problem at the VM layer.
• Solution: Designs emphasizing shared proof systems (like Polygon's AggLayer or Succinct's interoperability layer) allow different ZKVMs to settle to a shared, verified state root.

Bundling execution, settlement, and data availability into a single state machine creates a massive attack surface. A single bug can jeopardize $10B+ TVL. The solution is modular separation of concerns, as pioneered by Celestia and EigenDA.

• Key Benefit 1: Fault isolation limits blast radius of exploits.
• Key Benefit 2: Enables specialized, auditable security for each layer.

Legacy VMs process transactions sequentially, creating artificial congestion and high fees during peak demand. The fix is parallel execution engines, as demonstrated by Solana's Sealevel and Sui's Move.

• Key Benefit 1: Enables ~50k TPS by resolving non-conflicting tx concurrently.
• Key Benefit 2: Predictable latency and cost, decoupled from network activity.

Rigid, general-purpose opcodes force developers into inefficient patterns, bloating gas costs. Modern solutions are application-specific VMs (FuelVM, MoveVM) and high-level languages that compile to zero-knowledge proofs (Cairo, Noir).

• Key Benefit 1: ~10x gas efficiency for specialized operations (e.g., swaps, trades).
• Key Benefit 2: Enables novel primitives like native account abstraction and privacy.

Unbounded state bloat forces nodes into centralization, undermining decentralization guarantees. The required redesign incorporates statelessness, state expiry (EIP-4444), and verifiable storage proofs.

• Key Benefit 1: Enables light clients with ~10MB storage requirements.
• Key Benefit 2: Makes running a full node viable on consumer hardware, preserving decentralization.