Tooling for building zkEVM: PIL and Circom
summary
Polygon Hermez builds a zkEVM prover that models full EVM state transitions as polynomials instead of R1CS, using PIL to declare state, permutation and lookup relations and pilcom + pilestark to produce STARKs and verifier circuits. Circom handles binary-heavy pieces like Keccak as custom gates and is exported into the polynomial workflow. Current prototype proves ~500k gas blocks (STARK with ~600–700 columns, ~223 rows) and runs a proof on a 64‑core AWS box for about $2.5; compatibility tests jump from ~25% to ~60% in a week, and the system works but needs heavy audits.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Start
- 4:42Hello World: Fibonacci Series
- 6:05Polynomial Identities. State Machine
- 15:11Permutation Checks
- 16:06A more complex Permutation Check
- 18:25Connection Check (Copy constraints)
- 20:24PLONK EXAMPLE
- 29:46Recursive STARK
- 40:15Testing
