The post Union completes trusted setup to pave the way for trustless cross-chain DeFi appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. Union just set a new record for zero-knowledge infrastructure. Its Groth16 trusted setup ceremony closed with 4,664 verified contributions — surpassing Manta Network’s 2023 record — and another 4,590 are still in the queue. This establishes the cryptographic foundation for validating consensus and cross-chain messages with succinct validity proofs. Trusted setup ceremonies are crucial to zero-knowledge proving systems. Union enables it to act as a “blockchain of blockchains,” offering verifiable message passing and asset transfers across Ethereum, Cosmos, Arbitrum, Babylon and even Bitcoin L2s — all without relying on centralized actors. Union Chief Technology Officer Cor Pruijs emphasized the significance: “Union’s circuit having the largest Groth16 trusted setup ceremony ever means that it has the smallest honesty assumption of all.” “Honesty assumption” refers to the minimum number of participants who must act honestly (i.e. not leak or reuse their private randomness) for the resulting cryptographic parameters to remain secure. Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony for the Proto-Danksharding upgrade used to scale rollups holds the record for most participants in any trusted setup. However, that ceremony’s computational demands were far lower, making Union’s scale even more impressive. Despite the complexity of such cryptographic pipelines, contributors needed only to queue up and complete the computation when their turn came, with each result verified and added sequentially to the setup. While Ethereum’s KZG setup was limited to data availability for rollups, Union’s underpins full cross-chain consensus verification. The design bears modular features: CometBLS, a modified CometBFT, is a data-light consensus mechanism that aggregates validator signatures for efficient onchain verification. A permissionless prover network, Galois, generates zk proofs in under seven seconds. Voyager (a decentralized relayer system) moves proofs and state data between source and destination chains. The result is trust-minimized interoperability that…

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Filed under: News - @ June 9, 2025 5:25 pm