Whirlaway 🐎

A hash-based SNARK with lightweight proofs, powered by the Whir Polynomial Commitment Scheme.

Proving System

The protocol is detailed in Whirlaway.pdf

The core argument builds upon SuperSpartan (Srinath Setty, Justin Thaler, Riad Wahby), with AIR-specific optimizations developed by William Borgeaud in A simple multivariate AIR argument inspired by SuperSpartan.

Key techniques:

• AIR table committed as a single multilinear polynomial
• Sumcheck + "Univariate Skip" from Some Improvements for the PIOP for ZeroCheck (Angus Gruen)

Poseidon2 Benchmark

RUSTFLAGS='-C target-cpu=native' cargo run --release

CPU: 75K poseidon2 / s (i9-12900H) -> easy 100K with Ring Switching / Univariate Skip in WHIR

GPU: 1M poseidon2 / s (RTX 4090) -> switch to branch gpu

Credits

• Plonky3 for its finite field crates and poseidon2 AIR arithmetization (src/examples/poseidon2_koala_bear).
• whir-p3: a Plonky3-compatible WHIR implementation