Skip to content
zkmcu

Prior-art survey

Living documentLast updated 2026-04

Before zkmcu started I spent a week looking for existing no_std Rust ZK verifiers on Cortex-M, RISC-V, and similar 32-bit microcontrollers. The honest finding: none for Groth16 on no_std Rust at the time of writing, a couple for STARKs in non-Rust languages, lot’s of academic prototypes that never got open-sourced.

What’s in scope

Section titled “What’s in scope”
  • ZK verifiers (not provers) running on resource-constrained hardware (typically < 256 KB RAM, < 1 MB flash)
  • Open-source, reproducible builds preferred, closed-source vendors mentioned but lower-weight
  • Both classical (Groth16, PlonK) and post-quantum (STARKs, lattice-based) covered
  • Embedded means embedded, not “we ran it on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM”

Out of scope

Section titled “Out of scope”
  • Cloud-side or phone-side verifiers. There’s already a lot of work there.
  • Synthetic benchmarks without actual silicon measurements
  • Marketing pages with no code

Source

Section titled “Source”

The full survey, with citations, comparisons against zkmcu’s measured numbers, and table of MCU classes / RAM tiers / proof systems, lives in the repo as a Typst document. Compiled PDF goes here when published.

Headline finding

Section titled “Headline finding”

For no_std Rust Groth16 verifiers on Cortex-M33 specifically, the niche was open when zkmcu’s first benchmark landed in April 2026. zkmcu’s BN254 verifier at 988 ms baseline (later 551 ms after UMAAL asm + LTO placement gains) was the first published number I could find. If you know of an earlier one, tell me and I’ll update the survey.

For STARK verifiers, winterfell-based work existed on host but no no_std port targeting microcontroller-class memory was published. zkmcu’s 75 ms STARK verify was, as far as I can find, the first.

For BLS12-381 verifiers on embedded, Filecoin and Ethereum sync-committee proofs run on phones / servers but no MCU-class implementation existed in no_std Rust.

Section titled “Related work worth citing”

These are the closest neighbours I found, none of them directly competing:

  • Filecoin’s Forest has BLS12-381 verifiers but targets servers, not embedded
  • Aleo’s snarkOS is general-purpose, runs on desktops and up
  • Risc0 has STARK provers but the verifiers are also desktop-class
  • Plonky3 (vendored as a reference in the audit) is library-tier infrastructure, not deployed-on-hardware

Working on something in this niche? Ping the contact page.