Gevulot raises $6M seed round for decentralized prover network
Devnet launching in March with support from P2P.org, Supranational and more
TL;DR
Gevulot is a decentralized compute network optimized exclusively for zero-knowledge proof generation and verification.
Gevulot boasts a veteran team of builders who have previously worked on Starknet, Solana, Aleo, Avail, and other major projects.
Devnet is launching March 25th. Sign up here.
We are incredibly excited to announce that we have raised a $6M Seed round led by Variant with participation from 11 investors including RockawayX, Volt Capital, Staking Facilities, and notable angels like Marc Boiron (CEO of Polygon Labs) and Shumo Chu (founder of Manta Network & NEBRA).
This funding is an important step on our journey to building an internet scale compute network for zero-knowledge proof generation and verification. As part of that mission, we are launching our devnet in collaboration with P2P.org, Supranational, Staking Facilities and RockawayX Infrastructure.
We are onboarding projects starting in February. Read the devnet announcement for more information.
The Proving Problem
Zero-knowledge proofs are revolutionizing the blockchain industry by facilitating succinctness (e.g. recursive blockchains), scaling (e.g. validity rollups, bridges, off-chain compute) and privacy (e.g. Aleo, Aztec, Zcash). As these applications get more usage, the demand for proof generation is increasing rapidly.
However, almost all proving infrastructure today is permissioned and many applications rely on a single prover. This undermines the ecosystem’s core value propositions of credible neutrality and censorship resistance. We are on the precipice of unlocking near limitless compute capacity on blockchains with zero-knowledge proofs. But for blockchains to retain these core value propositions, we believe proving must be decentralized. This is the world we want to bring about with Gevulot.
What is Gevulot?
Gevulot (pronounced “gev-you-lot”) is a decentralized compute network optimized exclusively for zero-knowledge proof generation and verification. Users can permissionlessly deploy any prover and offload compute to a network of sophisticated hardware operators.
Gevulot is designed to aggregate proving workloads from across the blockchain industry, leading to improved economics for all participants, unlocking previously unimaginable usecases.
Key Benefits of Gevulot:
Cheap - Gevulot aggregates proving workloads from across the industry to better utilize the hardware resources in the network, thus improving the cost-structure for all participants.
Performant - Gevulot is exclusively optimized for the job of proving and verification. By removing all blockchain features that don’t serve this purpose, we achieve performance that is equivalent to centralized alternatives for many types of workloads.
Flexible - Gevulot supports permissionless deployment of arbitrary provers. Provers can be written in a variety of languages, such as Rust or C++ and can utilize optimizations familiar from centralized setups, like multi-threading and GPU proving.
History
We started designing Gevulot at Equilibrium Group, which builds core technology for the likes of Starknet, Aleo, ZkSync, Celestia and others. Working with these projects gave us a front-row seat to the struggles of launching zk-based systems such as rollups. We also realized that decentralized proving was years away, and was mostly not even mentioned on roadmaps.
Fearing that the proving market might be irreversibly centralized by the time anybody started thinking about, we decided to take matters into our own hands. We built an MVP and in late 2023, we spun out Gevulot into an independent entity. Since then the team has grown and is charging ahead to bring the final missing piece of the modular rollup stack to market.
Devnet
The Gevulot Devnet, our first major release, will be a permissioned network for testing the proof generation pipeline and other core functionality—including deployment, proving, verifying, networking, and orchestration.
The devnet offers the following functionality:
Deploy arbitrary provers and verifiers
Run proving workloads to generate and verify proofs
Track workload status, cancel, and retrieve outputs via an API.
Store proofs
Check out the devnet announcement or see the Gevulot docs for more details on the above functionality and instructions on integrating provers/verifiers.
Devnet prover nodes will be operated by the following teams:
The Devnet will be free to use for registered users, but protections will be in place to protect against spam and other malicious behavior.
If you’d like to participate in the Gevulot devnet, sign up here.
Stay tuned for more from Gevulot.
Learn more about Gevulot here.
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