ZkEVM Merges Zero-Knowledge Proofs with Ethereum Virtual Machine

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) was designed to run smart contracts, but it wasn't meant for cryptographic proofs. Zero-knowledge proofs were created to verify computations privately and cheaply, without knowing what an opcode is. For years, these two concepts seemed incompatible.

Engineers finally figured out how to merge them, creating ZkEVM - a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine that can run EVM-compatible smart contracts and generate proof of their correctness without modifying a single line of code.

This was no easy feat. The EVM has 140-plus opcodes, gas accounting, complex memory layout, and edge cases accumulated over time. Zero-knowledge proof systems speak a narrow mathematical language, which makes it hard to reason about the EVM's operations.

Researchers called this mismatch the 'EVM incompatibility problem.' ZkEVM collapses that tradeoff by making existing Ethereum tooling compatible with zero-knowledge proofs.