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TL;DR: Microsoft Research says its Magnetar system makes proofs of ordinary program execution faster while relying on standard hash-based cryptography.
Zero-knowledge systems promise that a computation can be checked without trusting the machine that performed it. One reason they remain difficult to deploy is the cost of generating those proofs. Microsoft Research’s October 15 Magnetar announcement tackles that bottleneck using a virtual machine designed to prove ordinary programmes.
The researchers say Magnetar supports code compiled from Rust, Go and C and performs between 10 and 39 times faster on average than certain comparable proving systems across their benchmarks. Verification takes roughly 12 milliseconds, according to Microsoft’s tests. The system is built around standard hash functions, a design intended to reduce reliance on cryptography vulnerable to future quantum attacks.
For blockchains, lower proving costs could make verifiable offchain computation and complex application logic easier to use. But benchmark figures are not a guarantee of equivalent improvements inside production rollups or every smart-contract workload. Integration, hardware conditions and proof sizes all matter.
There is also a broader potential use case: institutions and AI agents could produce verifiable evidence that software followed specified instructions without exposing underlying private data. The research suggests a future in which cryptographic proofs are attached to more ordinary computer operations, although that future will depend on implementation outside the laboratory.
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