Paper 2025/1653 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1653 ↗

Distributed SNARK via folding schemes

Abstract

Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge(SNARKs) have gained widespread application due to their succinct proof size and efficient verification. However, they face significant scalability limitations in proof generation for large-scale circuits. To address this challenge, distributing the prover's computation across multiple nodes has emerged as a promising solution. Existing distributed SNARK constructions rely on distributed polynomial commitments, requiring each prover to perform computationally intensive group operations during the polynomial commitment opening phase. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed SNARK system constructed by compiling distributed PIOP with additively homomorphic polynomial commitment, rather than distributed polynomial commitment. The core technical component is distributed SumFold, which folds multiple sum-check instances into one. After the folding process, only one prover is required to perform polynomial commitment openings. It facilitates compilation with SamaritanPCS, which is a recently proposed additively homomorphic multilinear polynomial commitment scheme. The resulting SNARK system is specifically optimized for data-parallel circuits. Compared to prior HyperPlonk-based distributed proof systems (e.g., Hyperpianist and Cirrus), our construction achieves improvements in both proof size and prover time. We implement our protocol and conduct a comprehensive comparison with HyperPianist with 8 machines. Our system achieves shorter proof and 4.1~4.9× speedup in prover time, while maintaining comparable verification efficiency.