ZKsync Airbender
zkVM (RISC-V)
ZKsync Airbender: zkVM (RISC-V). Kind: zkVM (RISC-V). Arithmetisation / backend: STARK over Mersenne-31 + wrapper. Setup: Wrapper only. Maintained by: Matter Labs (ZKsync). Licence: Apache-2.0 / MIT. Status: Production on ZKsync mainnet; published GPU benchmarks. Choose it when: Teams for whom raw proving cost on commodity GPUs is the deciding constraint and who can absorb a less mature developer surface.
What it is
A RISC-V zkVM and STARK prover over the Mersenne-31 field, built to prove ZKsync OS and, by extension, any program compiled to RISC-V 32I+M. Its distinguishing claim is single-GPU throughput: published figures show a full Ethereum block proved on one GPU, with reproducible benchmarks in the repository.
Strengths and tradeoffs
- Among the fastest published RISC-V provers, with the benchmark harness in the open rather than in a blog post
- Deployed in production on ZKsync mainnet since the Atlas upgrade, so the operational path exists
- Permissive dual licence and an active, well-funded maintainer
- Younger than the three longest-running RISC-V zkVMs, with correspondingly thinner third-party assurance evidence and a smaller precompile catalogue
- Designed around ZKsync's own needs; the general-purpose SDK and documentation lag the prover
- Settlement still relies on a pairing-based wrapper with a trusted setup — see §04
Choose it whenTeams for whom raw proving cost on commodity GPUs is the deciding constraint and who can absorb a less mature developer surface.
Related pages
Sources cited on this page · 1
All 45 sources for §02 are listed on the section page →
Cite this page
MarketComp (2026). ZKsync Airbender. The ZK Field Manual (Version 1.3). MarketComp. https://zkpick.com/frameworks/airbender/
@misc{zkfieldmanual-zksync-airbender,
title = {ZKsync Airbender — The ZK Field Manual},
author = {MarketComp},
year = {2026},
version = {1.3},
howpublished = {\url{https://zkpick.com/frameworks/airbender/}},
note = {Accessed: YYYY-MM-DD}
}