Investing in Gevulot: Embracing Privacy & Core Crypto Values

At Staking Facilities, we fancy ourselves of upholding and defending native crypto values such as decentralization, censorship resistance, and permissionlessness. Our recent investment in Gevulot reflects our dedication to supporting projects that align with these core principles.

Gevulot, a permissionless layer 1 blockchain, embodies decentralization by empowering users to seamlessly deploy proof systems. Its innovative approach to proof generation, leveraging unikernels for optimal performance, resonates with our commitment to pushing the boundaries of technology within the crypto space by supporting teams building at the edge of technology.

What sets Gevulot apart is its versatility across use cases, addressing the diverse needs of our industry, from validity rollups to privacy rollups, zkVMs, bridges, and ZK mining. We are impressed by Gevulot's user-centric design, ensuring high liveness, fast proving, predictable fees, and easy program deployment. We could convince ourselves from their approach firsthand.

Our investment rationale extends beyond financial considerations; it's a strategic move to contribute to decentralizing proof systems. Gevulot's are true product people, and degens at heart. We’re stoked that we are able to support their team both financially, and with our bare metal hardware. We’re so ready for testnet.

What is Gevulot & what is good for?

Gevulot is designed to revolutionize decentralized proof generation. Developed by the Equilibrium Group, the platform aims to address the centralized nature of current proof systems, providing a permissionless and programmable solution for deploying on-chain proof systems. Decentralization matters across the whole tech stack and shouldn’t be plain marketing lingo.

Key Features

1. Performance Comparable to Centralized Provers:

• Gevulot utilizes unikernels, lightweight operating systems optimized for single-process execution, ensuring a balance between performance and security.
• The Nanos unikernel, running in a KVM hypervisor or on Google Cloud, facilitates multi-threading, GPU support, and efficient orchestration. Tl;dr: it puts the machines to work.

2. Easy and Permissionless Program Deployment:

• Gevulot allows anyone to deploy programs in a permissionless manner. That’s true crypto my frens.
• Nanos supports a range of languages, including C, C++, Go, Java, Node.js, Python, Rust, Ruby, PHP, and more, simplifying program deployment and simplicity of use.

3. High Liveness and Predictable Fees:

• Proving workloads are distributed to small groups of provers using a Verifiable Random Function (VRF), ensuring high liveness.
• Predictable fee structures in Gevulot help users set maximum fees based on the estimated number of cycles, fostering cost forecasting.

Use Cases

Gevulot is versatile, catering to various applications and networks relying on zero-knowledge proofs. This opens the floodgates to a ton of use cases, some are:

Validity Rollups:

Gevulot enables projects using ZK proofs for correctness in validity rollups to outsource proof generation, avoiding the complexities of creating prover networks or managing heavy computational loads. This frees up dev and cap ex resources for teams building in that space.

Privacy Rollups:

While Gevulot can't generate privacy-preserving proofs, it excels in aggregating private proofs for privacy rollups, maintaining user privacy during the process.

ZkVMs:

Various zkVM implementations, such as CairoVM, Risc0, zkWASM, zkBPF, and zkEVMs, can be seamlessly deployed on Gevulot as standalone environments.

Bridges:

ZK-bridges like Succinct Labs' Telepathy, relying on Proof-of-Consensus, can be deployed to Gevulot as a proof system, minimizing additional hardware requirements.

ZK Mining:

Gevulot finds application in ZK mining scenarios, such as computing the coinbase puzzle for Aleo or Filecoin Storage provider SNARKs.

Fee Structure and Prover Rewards

Fees are what makes the (crypto) world go round and Gevulot introduces a novel fee structure and prover reward system:

• Cycles as Fee Measure: Gevulot employs cycles as a fixed measure of blocks, allowing users to set a maximum fee for their program based on the estimated number of cycles needed for proof generation.
• Refund Mechanism: Users paying for excessive cycles receive a refund for unused cycles, promoting cost-effectiveness.
• Prover Rewards: Provers receive rewards from both the Gevulot network and user-paid fees in the native token. Network rewards are distributed based on speed, with the fastest prover receiving the majority.

Find more detailed information here: https://www.gevulot.com/introducing-gevulot/

In a nutshell

Gevulot represents a paradigm shift in decentralized proof generation. With the growing significance of zero-knowledge proofs in future applications in mind, Gevulot offers a viable solution to the challenges of current proof systems, which are still centralized and permissioned. By providing a layer 1 blockchain with permissionless deployment, high liveness, predictable fees, and competitive performance, Gevulot aims to simplify and enhance the user and developer experience in deploying and interacting with proof systems. The platform's versatility extends to various use cases, from validity rollups to zkVMs and privacy rollups. Gevulot's fee structure, based on cycles, and its innovative prover reward system make us quite bullish on the whole thing to say the least.

Detailed information about Gevulot's implementation can be explored on their GitHub repository for those interested in a deeper technical understanding. The Gevulot team actively engages with the community and shares updates on X/Twitter, contributing to the broader conversation on decentralizing provers - go give them a follow. Exciting times ahead, fens!

Let's do this ... together

As we embark on this exciting journey with Gevulot, we invite fellow enthusiasts, developers, and visionaries to join hands in shaping the future of decentralization. Whether you're passionate about blockchain innovation, intrigued by the potential of zero-knowledge proofs, or simply eager to be part of a community-driven initiative, we welcome your collaboration.

Together, we can contribute to the advancement of web3, fostering an environment where creativity, inclusivity, and groundbreaking ideas don’t just remain ideas. If you share our commitment to these values and believe in the transformative power of projects like Gevulot, we encourage you to reach out, share your insights, and be a part of this dynamic journey.

Let's build a future where decentralized solutions empower individuals and communities. Reach out to us on X, Telegram, eMail. Also connect with Gevulot directly if you want to learn more about them, they’re quite friendly and usually don’t bite. Your ideas, expertise, and enthusiasm are vital in propelling us toward a better tomorrow. The revolution will not be centralized.

‍

‍