Universal Setup and cheaper prover time in SNARKs

Current proofs in the Filecoin protocol use the Groth16 SNARK in the trusted setup. This requires writing the computation being proven as a circuit and then feed it into the SNARK process. The main limiting factors in this approach are the size of the structured common reference string CRS (which is linear in the size of the circuit) and proving time (which is quasilinear in the size of the circuit).

Goal

To reduce proving time and reference string size.

Steps: Evaluate various approaches to determine the concrete improvements in the context of Filecoin Proofs.

Expected Completion

End of Q1 or early Q2.

Timeline

March 15/30, 2022: most of implementation done

March 30/April 15, 2022: evaluation of testing results

People

Rosario Gennaro (DRI), Matteo Campanelli, Nicolas Gailly, Justin Thaler (Advisor)