Risc Zero

RISC Zero is a verifiable computing platform that lets developers write ordinary programs and generate cryptographic proofs that those programs ran correctly—without disclosing the underlying inputs. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Seattle, the company has grown from a niche cryptography project into one of the leading general-purpose zero-knowledge infrastructure layers, anchored by an open-source zkVM and the Boundless decentralized proof marketplace.

How the zkVM Works

The core product is a zero-knowledge virtual machine that emulates a RISC-V computer. Because RISC-V is an open, widely-used instruction set architecture, any program that compiles to it—Rust, C, or C++—can run inside the zkVM and produce a verifiable proof of correct execution.

The system uses a Guest-Host model. Guest code runs inside the isolated zkVM environment, while Host code orchestrates the prover from the outside. Execution produces a Receipt: a Journal (the public outputs of the computation) paired with a cryptographic Seal. Anyone holding a Receipt can verify in a fraction of the original computation time that the program ran faithfully without learning anything about the private inputs.

The proof system is a three-layer recursive construction combining zk-STARK and Groth16 protocols, providing 98 bits of conjectured security. In April 2025 RISC Zero shipped R0VM 2.0, which cut Ethereum block-proving time from 35 minutes to 44 seconds, reduced costs by up to 5x, expanded user memory to 3 GB, and added BN254 and BLS12-381 precompiles for mainstream blockchain compatibility. The team also integrated formal verification into the 2.0 stack to harden security guarantees.

Key Products

Bonsai is the hosted Prover-as-a-Service offering from RISC Zero. Developers submit workloads through an API and receive Receipts back, without needing to provision GPU hardware. It serves as the managed proving path for teams that want reliability without operating their own prover infrastructure.

Steel is a ZK coprocessor for EVM chains. It lets Solidity contracts offload computationally expensive logic off-chain—such as complex financial calculations or historical state queries—then verify the results on-chain using a ZK proof. Steel 2.0 added event-driven logic, historical state access spanning any storage slot since Dencun, and cross-block batch computations, all at fixed on-chain verification cost.

Boundless is a decentralized marketplace for ZK proofs. Developers submit proving requests; prover nodes around the world evaluate and bid competitively; complex tasks are subdivided and recursively aggregated into a single succinct proof. Boundless launched its incentivized Mainnet Beta on the Base network from Coinbase in July 2025, backed by early integrators including the Ethereum Foundation, Wormhole, and EigenLayer. The full mainnet followed in September 2025. By August 2025, the network had processed 542.7 trillion cumulative compute cycles, completed 399,000 orders, and maintained a 98–100% fulfillment rate with unit compute costs approaching near-zero per cycle.

The Signal is an open-source ZK consensus client that compresses Ethereum Beacon Chain finality events into a single verifiable proof, enabling trust-minimized cross-chain interoperability without relying on multisigs or oracles.

OP Kailua is a ZK upgrade path for OP Stack chains. It supports a hybrid mode—ZK Fraud Proofs that reduce dispute finality to roughly three hours—and a full validity mode with sub-one-hour finality.

Token: ZKC

The ZKC token is the native asset of the Boundless network. Total supply is capped at 1 billion tokens, with an initial minting rate of 7% per year that declines to 3% by year eight, governed on-chain by tokenholders.

Token distribution: 49% to Ecosystem Growth, 23.5% to Core Team and Contributors, 21.5% to Investors, and approximately 6% to the Community. Provers stake ZKC as collateral (typically 10x the maximum request fee) and receive 75% of token rewards proportional to their proved compute output. Protocol stakers receive the remaining 25%. Provers who fail delivery have a portion of their stake slashed and destroyed, introducing deflationary pressure.

The reward mechanism—called Proof of Verifiable Work (PoVW)—ties token issuance directly to measurable computational output rather than to block production. This means token supply expands only when real economic demand for proofs exists.

Security and Audits

The RISC Zero zkVM achieves 98 bits of conjectured security through its zk-STARK and Groth16 proof combination. R0VM 2.0 incorporated formal verification to add machine-checked guarantees to the cryptographic stack. The project runs an active bug bounty program through HackenProof.

Team and Funding

RISC Zero was co-founded in 2021 by Brian Retford, Jeremy Bruestle, and Frank Laub—three engineers who had previously built and sold companies together, most recently an AI optimization and compilation firm acquired by Intel. Brian Retford served as the initial CEO; Jeremy Bruestle, the Chief Cryptographer, later transitioned into the CEO role. Frank Laub, who architected numerous compiler and deep-learning systems at Intel Labs and Movidius, serves as CTO. Shiv Shankar, a fintech veteran, joined to lead Boundless as CEO in 2025, and Joe Restivo, a serial entrepreneur with two exits acquired by Accenture and GitLab, serves as COO.

The company raised a $12 million seed round in August 2022 led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from D1 Ventures, Geometry, and Cota Capital. In July 2023 the company closed a $40 million Series A led by Blockchain Capital, with additional backing from Delphi Ventures, Galaxy Digital, IOSG Ventures, RockawayX, and Maven 11.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Boundless is explicitly chain-agnostic: prover nodes settle on any supported network, and the proof format is designed to be portable across chains. Academic research on zero-knowledge extensions for Solana categorizes RISC Zero in the off-chain execution / on-chain verification pattern, where a program runs inside the zkVM off-chain and the resulting Receipt is verified at the Solana L1 layer. This means Solana programs or cross-chain bridges can rely on RISC Zero proofs to verify computations that are too expensive to run on-chain—whether proving financial compliance, compressing cross-chain finality events, or enabling privacy-preserving data verification—without trusting any intermediate party other than the underlying mathematics.

As ZK computation shifts from a curiosity toward infrastructure, the combination of a general-purpose zkVM, a managed proving service, and a competitive open proof market positions RISC Zero as a foundational layer for developers building verifiable applications on Solana and across the broader multi-chain landscape.