proving - Action Report¶

Project: /home/user/git/proving Created: 2026-08-17

proving monorepo evaluated — production Circle STARK engine for NeXuS ZK stack (2026-08-17 06:06)¶

Status: 🔵 DESIGNED — engine identified, AIRs to write. What: Evaluated StarkWare's unified proving monorepo as the production ZK engine for NeXuS, superseding Winterfell as primary prover. Why: stwo-cairo and proving deliver production-grade Circle STARKs running live on Starknet SHARP infrastructure — not research. E6520 compute concern resolved by M31 field (32-bit SIMD-native). How: Read CLAUDE.md and crate structure. Five crate groups: stwo (core M31 Circle STARK), stwo-cairo (Cairo CPU AIR — reference), stwo-circuits (circuit DSL — write NeXuS logic here), proving-utils (recursive proof tree: N blocks → 1 root proof, privacy prove CLI), stwo-air-infra (AIR code generation). Key findings: (1) Recursive binary fold tree: ceil(log2(N)) layers, canonical circuit shape, all proofs have same shape so multiverifier is homogeneous. (2) ensure-verifier-no_std: bare-metal verifier, no runtime, no allocator — goes in every .sfs image. (3) Wasm32/64 targets verified in CI — browser verifier nodes. (4) Sandy Bridge AVX (not AVX2): reference backend, 4-8x off benchmark numbers — workable for per-transaction proving, not continuous rollup-style. Development moved from stwo-cairo to proving as of 2026-07-31. Files: ~/git/proving (repo), no files created — evaluation only.