Wormhole Foundation Awards Contributor Grant to Lurk Lab to Bring Trustless Transfers to Wormhole with ZK Proofs

The Wormhole Foundation, a research and development organization dedicated to cross-blockchain communication, is delighted to announce a Contributor Grant to Lurk Lab. This marks a pivotal advancement in the evolution of the Wormhole platform, which, in collaboration with Lurk’s engineering team, will be incorporating trustless verification of cross-chain messages leveraging ZK (zero-knowledge) technology.

Lurk Lab has distinguished itself with its innovative work in the field of zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology, particularly through its development of the Arecibo implementation of the Nova folding scheme and the Lurk programming language. Arecibo is the fastest implementation of Nova to-date, and includes advanced extensions for non-uniform IVC and parallelism. The Lurk language is a Turing-complete statically scoped dialect of Lisp, whose execution can be proved using zk-SNARKs and can directly integrate with zkDSLs such as Circom. Lurk allows developers to create succinct proofs that can attest to the correctness of a computation without revealing any other information about the computation, and without requiring specialized cryptographic expertise. Lurk presents a unique and world-class approach to verifiable computing applications​​​​ in that it combines the generality of a zero-knowledge virtual machine with the performance of low-level zero-knowledge circuits. This is crucial for verifiable computing applications which require high levels of security without sacrificing performance or ease of development.

The Wormhole protocol currently leverages the industry’s leading message verification system, the decentralized network of 19 Wormhole Guardian nodes. Lurk Lab's involvement in Wormhole's ecosystem now aids in introducing a new verification mechanism for any Wormhole message, leveraging zero knowledge proofs, as outlined in last week’s ZK Roadmap blog post. Lurk will focus initially on light clients for Aptos, Sui and Cosmos, and verifiers for Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, Aptos, Sui and Near. By leveraging ZK proofs, Wormhole will begin offering new cross-chain corridors fully verified by ZK proofs, thus removing any trust on centralized parties. This integration is expected to greatly benefit decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), governance, and various other applications that operate across multiple blockchains.

Wormhole Foundation Co-founder and COO, Dan Reecer, said, “the addition of Lurk Lab to the decentralized team of collaborators and the integration of Lurk's zero knowledge proof technology into the Wormhole platform is a major milestone for Wormhole. We are ecstatic to start offering our developer community trustless verification for their messages across several high volume cross-chain corridors," said Reecer. "Lurk-based zk-bridges will enable permissionless growth of Wormhole by enabling new platforms such as L1 blockchains to self-integrate into the network in a decentralized fashion.”

For inquiries and collaboration opportunities, please reach out to the Wormhole Foundation at [email protected].