International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The use of zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) and similar types of proofs has become increasingly popular as a solution for improving scalability, privacy, and interoperability of blockchain systems. However, even with the most advanced proving systems, verifying a single SNARK proof can require a significant amount of computational resources making it expensive to be performed on-chain. This becomes a noticeable bottleneck in scaling SNARK-based applications.

Further efficiency improvement to avoid this bottleneck lies in utilizing distributed recursive proof composition to aggregate multiple existing proofs into one that verifies all underlying proofs.

Building upon this concept, we present a new protocol for decentralized recursive proof aggregation allowing one unique proof to aggregate many input proofs to be efficiently verified on-chain, increasing the throughput and cost efficiency of SNARK-based blockchains. The protocol is designed for decentralized environments where independent actors (provers) can join and contribute to the proof generation process. We also present an incentive scheme for such actors. The protocol is abstract enough to be used with a variety of proving systems that support recursive aggregation.