Say hello to Boojum 👋: zkSync Era’s new high-performance proof system for radical decentralization. Boojum is an upgrade that will transition zkSync Era to a STARK-powered proof system, providing world-class performance on consumer-grade hardware.

💡 Learn more: https://zksync.mirror.xyz/HJ2Pj45EJkRdt5Pau-ZXwkV2ctPx8qFL19STM5jdYhc

TL;DR 👇

Boojum is the name of our Rust-based cryptographic library, which we use to implement the upgraded version of the ZK circuits for zkSync Era and the ZK Stack.

The name Boojum was inspired by Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark," where the Boojum represents the most fearsome kind of Snark.

We intentionally designed zkSync Era in a way that cryptographic upgrades can be made without a regenesis, meaning that the Boojum upgrade won’t cause any user disruptions.

Why Boojum❓

From day one, zkSync’s mission is to advance personal freedom for all — making digital self-ownership universally accessible by building a blockchain network that is trustless, secure, permissionless, affordable, easy to use, resilient and limitlessly scalable. Boojum plays an important role in advancing this mission by delivering:

1. World-class performance

zkSync Era’s current SNARK-based proof system is effective today, but it won’t scale to the volume that we envision for hyperchains. zkSync Era’s sequencer can already process over 100 TPS; Boojum orders of magnitude improvements to performance complements this well.

2. Reduced hardware requirements for decentralization

Our long-term goal is to enable user-powered, decentralized proof generation. Boojum represents a breakthrough in this direction — with the prover running on consumer-grade GPUs requiring only 16 GB GPU RAM.

Boojum’s Journey to Mainnet 🚴🏽‍♀️

Boojum is now live on Mainnet, generating and verifying ‘shadow proofs’ today with real production data so that we can carefully test the system ahead of fully migrating.

Today, we’re also open-sourcing the repo; if you’d like to take a look, you can find it here 👇

https://github.com/matter-labs/era-boojum

This is the first of a series of posts on Boojum. We will provide updates on our progress, including more details on implementation, security, and performance.

Watch here for more, anon ∎

https://twitter.com/zksync/status/1680820952991408129?s=20