Introducing Valida zkVM 1.0: A Foundation for Verifiable Applications

We’re excited to announce the 1.0.0 release of Valida zkVM — our first major release, and a milestone that represents both stability and maturity in the Valida stack. With this release, Valida becomes faster, more secure, and more developer-friendly than ever before.

This version is the result of deep work across the proving system and the compiler toolchain, and the diligence and attention to correctness that underlie everything we build.

zkVM: Parallelism, Speed, and Soundness

Parallel proving for multi-segment proofs

Valida now supports proving multiple proof segments in parallel. For workloads that can be segmented, this means substantial speedups and better utilization of modern multi-core hardware. Developers can configure the number of segments to prove in parallel, making performance tunable for different environments.

Fast-run mode improvements

We fixed key issues in the fast-run option, making quick iteration and benchmarking significantly smoother.

Stronger correctness checks

• Boolean constraints have been added for opcode flags in the CPU trace.
  
• Program trace consistency checks now ensure opcode flags align with execution.
  
• A regression around final instructions has been resolved — the VM now enforces that the last instruction is always STOP.

These changes strengthen the soundness of Valida’s proofs. While there are no major, easily exploitable soundness issues in Valida so far as we at Lita know, we caution that soundness review on Valida is ongoing and it should not be considered production ready software.

Compiler Toolchain: Debugging and Smarter Codegen

LLDB debugger support

Developers can now use LLDB directly when debugging programs compiled to Valida, making low-level introspection practical and efficient.

Codegen optimizations

• Smarter branching when checking for equality.
  
• Operand folding extended across basic block boundaries, improving compiled code efficiency and shrinking proof overhead.
  
  

The result: compiled programs that run faster in the VM, generate smaller proofs, and are easier to debug in development.

Acknowledgements

We’d like to extend special thanks to Hideaki Takahashi (Columbia University), who identified and fixed three critical soundness bugs in this release. His contributions strengthened opcode flag checks, program consistency validation, and the STOP-instruction enforcement.

This is exactly the spirit of Valida — an open research and engineering collaboration to push forward the state of verifiable computing.

Looking Ahead

Valida 1.0.0 is more than just a version bump: it marks the beginning of a stable foundation that developers, researchers, and ecosystems can build upon. From here, we’ll continue expanding Valida’s performance, extending language and tooling support, and scaling towards new classes of applications.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll build with it.

👉 Get started with Valida 1.0.0 on GitHub

👉 Read the docs

‍