Announcing Valida 0.8.0

We’re excited to unveil our first release of the year, featuring significant updates across the Valida zkVM stack. Here are the key highlights:

• Core WASM Support
• Speed Improvement with CPU Detection
• Valdia API
• Block Proving on the way

Core WASM Support

Building on the success of our C and Rust Compiler toolchain, we are happy to announce core WASM support. You can now compile WASM bytecode and generate zero-knowledge proofs directly with Valida zkVM.

Valida can now support any programming language that compiles to WASM, including Go, Python and many others. More on this soon.

As one of the most compiler-intensive zkVM teams, we are committed to continue expanding our language support for Valida. We want to make ZK technology accessible to as many builders as possible, allowing them to easily build ZK-powered applications without the need for writing custom circuits, while benefiting from industry leading proving speed and performance of our custom ISA.

CPU Runtime Detection

CPU Runtime Detection determines whether or not the machine the prover is running on supports AVX2 or not, and selecting an appropriate version of the prover, compiled to use AVX2 (or not).AVX2, when present, lets us prove faster by vectorizing operations, i.e., performing the same operation on multiple data points in a single instruction (SIMD). Bench inc.

‍Valida API

The Valida API will let users call the Valida prover, verifier, execution engine, and preprocessor from Rust programs as library functions.

Prior to this, developers needed to write code to run the Valida VM as a separate process, if they wanted to invoke the VM programmatically. The Valida API still invokes the VM as a separate process, but it abstracts the process of doing this for you, so you don’t need to think about it.

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Other Updates

• AVX-2 support for accelerated proving
• Increased VM heap size to 512MB
• Expanded standard I/O support for Rust and C
  • Read functions in Rust
  • printf in C
• Improvements to Valida command line interface (CLI)
• Added support for alloca.h C header file
• valida run writes to output file in real time instead of in batch mode

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What's next?

We are finalizing benchmarks and integrations for block proving with Valida.

Upcoming releases will feature continuations, a Keccak acceleration chip, and block prover for Ethereum block proving.

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Get started and full release notes on github: https://github.com/lita-xyz/valida-releases/releases/tag/v0.8.0-alpha