International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We propose UniPlonK, a modification of the PlonK protocol that uniformizes the Verifier’s work for families of circuits. Specifically, a single fixed-cost “Universal Verifier” can check proofs for circuits of different: sizes, public input lengths, selector polynomials, copy constraints, and even different custom gate sets. UniPlonK therefore extends the universality of PlonK beyond the SRS; it enables a single “Universal Verifier Circuit” capable of verifying proofs from different PlonK circuits.

The Universal Verifier’s marginal cost over the ordinary Plonk verifier is small: for circuits using only the vanilla Plonk gate, the Universal Verifier performs a number of additional field multiplications proportional to the logarithm of the maximum supported circuit size; it incurs no additional elliptic curve operations. For circuits using custom gates, the Universal Verifier incurs additional elliptic curve arithmetic only when verifying proofs from circuits that do not use all supported gate types. For circuits that use all supported gates, the Universal Verifier’s additional cost consists only of field multiplications proportional to the logarithm of the maximum supported circuit size, the number of custom gate types, and the number of witness variables used by these gates. In both settings (vanilla-only and custom gates) the marginal cost to the prover is a fixed-base MSM of size ℓ, the length of the public input vector.