Part II: zkVM Internals

Note. Section under construction.

• in this second part of the book, we introduce the basic concepts that underlie the construction of zkVMs

• that is, we answer the question “How do zkVMs work internally?”

• of course, each zkVM team made different design decisions and the different zkVMs work in different ways

• however, there are some shared core principles underlying their design, and we want to explain those briefly, and link to more detailed explanations of those

• the goal is not that the reader learns exactly how a specific zkVM works, but rather that the reader gets a basic understanding (without much detail) of the basic concepts and can later dive deeper into details of a specific zkVM (which is not in the scope of this book)

• we expand on this doc by Cody here (or in an overview subsection)