Hazync Cracks 27ms Validation Barrier, But Completing Full Proof Will Take 17 Years of Compute Power

Hazync, a research prototype that uses RISC Zero's zero-knowledge virtual machine to make Bitcoin validation reusable, has achieved a significant milestone. According to its developer, a 1.7 MB standalone verifier checked a 226,434-byte cryptographic receipt covering the first 1,789 blocks of Bitcoin in just 27 milliseconds.

This achievement is impressive, but it's not without limitations. The receipt only covers an early stretch of Bitcoin's history and requires a significant amount of computational power to generate. In fact, the developer estimates that creating a complete genesis-to-tip proof would require approximately 17 GPU-years.

So why does Hazync need so much compute power? The answer lies in the way it works. While verification is relatively cheap and can be done quickly, proof generation is an expensive process. This is because Hazync's design concentrates proof generation among provers and leaves receipt verification to a larger population.

The developer notes that archive operators still retain historic witness and signature bytes, which are necessary for future guest revisions to prove the chain again. Additionally, best-chain selection remains with Bitcoin's most-work rule, and an archive bridge can potentially waste prover resources.