Original article: "How did Nil get a valuation of $220 million with its zero-knowledge circuit compiler zkLLVM?"

Author:Chloe

Nil, a ZK technology development company founded in 2018, completed a $22 million financing round with a valuation of $220 million, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from IOSG Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Starkware, Mina Protocol and others.

What is worth paying attention to is not only the amount of financing, but also the list of investors - Starkware and Mina Protocol, two technical players in the ZK ecosystem, also participated.

Chain Teahouse has previously introduced Starkware and Mina Protocol.

The Starkware team launched the proof system STARK, and accumulated relatively complete business logic technology in the subsequent technology outsourcing career, and finally launched StarkNet ("From DEX to Layer4, StarkWare's "building a strong fortress and fighting a stupid battle" idea is worth learning for all public chains").

Mina, a lightweight blockchain with only 22 KB, is also worthy of attention (Technical Principles and Ecological Development of Lightweight Privacy Public Chain Mina). The proof system it uses, zk-SNARK, can recursively reference itself to create proofs and keep the block size fixed.

Their investment in Nil can also be seen as a technical endorsement.

In particular, the Mina Foundation also gave Nil Foundation $1.2 million in funding to develop Snapp, which allows dapps on various public chains to be certified through Mina, thus having privacy protection functions based on data verification, effective proof of large amounts of calculations, and secure one-click login functions.

So what technologies does Nil Foundation have in the ZK field that are worth paying attention to?

Nil Foundation is a protocol developer founded in 2018. Initially, it only wanted to do research and development of database management systems and applied cryptography, but with the accumulation of technology in recent years, it wants to establish a complete set of technologies - allowing L1 and L2 blockchains and protocols to generate zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs on demand.

For example, on January 20, it was announced that the zkBridge bridge between Mina Protocol and Ethereum would be launched, allowing Mina to provide ZK proofs to Ethereum.

But the most noteworthy new technology of Nil Foundation is actually zkLLVM. LLVM is a "low-level virtual machine" that allows developers to build using mainstream programming languages ​​​​Rust and C++, thereby significantly reducing the workload. For example, Mikhail Komarov, founder of the zkEVM platform Scroll, said that they used a special software library developed in the Rust programming language to manually build circuits, helping the project save several months of time. (Recommended reading: "Detailed explanation of zkLLVM circuit compiler: In addition to building zkRollup, what else can it do?")

The key here is the zero-knowledge circuit, which is part of the construction of zkEVM (zkEVM is divided into three parts: execution environment, proof circuit and verifier contract) to complete the proof generation process.

Compiling zero-knowledge circuits often means involving niche programming languages, domain-specific software libraries, and a deep understanding of cryptography, so it is a complex and timely task.

The Nil Foundation built a mainstream language compiler based on LLVM, attempting to become the best tool for developers to compile zero-knowledge circuits.

Recently, it was announced that a ZK proof market would be created to help ZK teams share their work and outsource certain types of computation to third parties. The Nil Foundation has released the project on Github, and any developer is free to use or modify the code of zkLLVM.

Currently, most of the Nil Foundation team members are located in Europe, from Switzerland to the Russian Far East, and all of them work remotely.

Founder Mikhail Komarov is also an architect and software engineer at Cryptarithm, and previously worked as a senior software engineer at cyber•Fund.

However, if the zero-knowledge circuit is programmed incorrectly, it will cause irreversibility. Previously, an early version of the zkLLVM code base was leaked online, and some developers said at the time that they could not believe the circuit generation function of Nil Foundation.

Therefore, zkLLVM still has limitations in terms of wide application. These programs may be more complex and cannot be converted into zero-knowledge form.

But in any case, the current direction of the Nil Foundation is not wrong - focusing on the maturity of the zkLLVM code base, so that developers do not have to spend too much time on the details of ZK circuit construction, but instead focus on the application itself.