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Union just set a new record for zero-knowledge infrastructure. Its Groth16 trusted setup ceremony closed with 4,664 verified contributions — surpassing Manta Network’s 2023 record — and another 4,590 are still in the queue. This establishes the cryptographic foundation for validating consensus and cross-chain messages with succinct validity proofs.
Trusted setup ceremonies are crucial to zero-knowledge proving systems. Union enables it to act as a “blockchain of blockchains,” offering verifiable message passing and asset transfers across Ethereum, Cosmos, Arbitrum, Babylon and even Bitcoin L2s — all without relying on centralized actors.
Union Chief Technology Officer Cor Pruijs emphasized the significance: “Union’s circuit having the largest Groth16 trusted setup ceremony ever means that it has the smallest honesty assumption of all.”
“Honesty assumption” refers to the minimum number of participants who must act honestly (i.e. not leak or reuse their private randomness) for the resulting cryptographic parameters to remain secure.
Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony for the Proto-Danksharding upgrade used to scale rollups holds the record for most participants in any trusted setup. However, that ceremony’s computational demands were far lower, making Union’s scale even more impressive.
Despite the complexity of such cryptographic pipelines, contributors needed only to queue up and complete the computation when their turn came, with each result verified and added sequentially to the setup.
While Ethereum’s KZG setup was limited to data availability for rollups, Union’s underpins full cross-chain consensus verification. The design bears modular features:
- CometBLS, a modified CometBFT, is a rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank” node=”[object Object]”>Galois, generates zk proofs in under seven seconds.
- Voyager (a decentralized relayer system) moves proofs and state data between source and destination chains.
The result is trust-minimized interoperability that works across execution environments — be it EVM, CosmWasm, SVM or MoveVM. That’s a gamechanger for developers building across chains who want fast finality and unified liquidity without compromising on security.
For comparison, Wormhole relies on a multisig model governed by a fixed set of 19 “Guardians,” where messages are only valid if signed by a supermajority (13/19). Axelar uses a validator-based architecture secured by economic incentives, and requires its nodes to run full chain nodes for each connected network.
Union’s approach inherits core principles from the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol but effectively virtualizes IBC through zk proofs. This architecture removes reliance on whitelisting actors, and lets the interop layer scale horizontally across chains without replicating full node infrastructure, according to Union Labs CEO Karel Kubat.
“The key solution here is actually generating a [zero-knowledge proof] for your consensus updates instead of doing it in the contract itself…So if a network has 100 validators, 1000, or a million, it doesn’t really matter, because the ZKP has a constant cost associated with it,” Kubat said on the 0xResearch podcast earlier this year.
It also allows for permissionless solvers: Any participant can monitor chains, generate consensus proofs and submit them to the network.
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