The post StarkWare launches new consumer-grade hardware ZK prover appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. More than a year after its initial announcement, StarkWare is today launching S-two (STARK Two) in public alpha. S-two is a next-generation zero-knowledge STARK prover fast enough to run natively on consumer hardware. Developers will be able to start building with S-two today. According to a press statement, S-two will be able to generate STARK proofs “directly on phones, laptops and browsers…enabling smooth mobile experiences, fast browser-based apps and new classes of client-side privacy and AI applications.” A full Starknet integration is slated for later this year. Various teams such as Kakarot, Nexus, ZAN, Giza, Herodotus and more have begun building with S-two. Based on the team’s own benchmark tests, S-two claims to generate proofs up to 39x faster than Succinct’s SP1 and 28x faster than Risc Zero’s R0VM on specific workloads. The history of zk proving In the context of blockchains, a prover is the entity in a zero-knowledge system that produces the mathematical proof that transactions are executed correctly and in compliance with protocol rules. Historically, proof generation was an expensive bottleneck. Rollups had to batch thousands of transactions into a single proof, accepting a delay of several minutes or hours before publishing the result to Ethereum. To users, this meant limitations of cross-chain composability (a.k.a. synchronous composability) and a withdrawal time delay capped by proof-generation times.  Recent breakthroughs in zk tech enable what Ethereum devs typically refer to as “real-time proving,” or the ability to compress proof-generation latency to mere seconds. Specifically, below 12 seconds — Ethereum’s block interval. With real-time proving, rollups can finalize blocks at near-L1 speeds while still enjoying the quick throughput and cheaper fees of an L2. Source: RISC Zero S-two’s client-side proving will also mean users/rollups no longer have…

---

Filed under: News - @ May 27, 2025 5:25 pm