Powering Lighter EVM with OpenVM

We are excited to announce a collaboration with Lighter to build Lighter EVM using OpenVM. Lighter EVM is an EVM-equivalent rollup which can natively access the liquidity of Lighter’s perps and spot markets. By adding an OpenVM-based sidecar to the existing Lighter custom circuits, Lighter EVM allows developers to compose general purpose applications with the existing liquidity and markets on Lighter, backed by the verifiable security of zero-knowledge proofs.

As Lighter continues to build verifiable financial primitives backed by the security and composability of Ethereum, partnering with Axiom enables an extension of their custom ZK circuit infrastructure to a hybrid system which combines highly efficient core financial primitives with flexible general purpose extensions. Lighter EVM will be verified with OpenVM 2.0, which brings real-time performance and provable soundness to offer users lower cost without compromising security.

What OpenVM brings to Lighter

Lighter EVM adds a smart contract environment composing with the highly optimized Lighter system while maintaining verifiability. Supporting this in ZK requires a system which is performant to prove general-purpose business logic efficiently and customizable to interoperate with the existing Lighter ZK system. The modular and extensible OpenVM approach provides exactly this for Lighter EVM.

A core challenge in designing Lighter EVM is the need to interoperate between OpenVM and the battle-tested custom circuits verifying Lighter perps and spot markets. To make this performant, we are implementing custom OpenVM extensions adapted to the Plonky2 proof system used by Lighter. This facilitates performant recursive aggregation of existing Lighter proofs within OpenVM, allowing a joint ZK verification of the unified state transition of Lighter EVM and Lighter.

For performance, OpenVM 2.0 is now proving Ethereum mainnet in real time. By using our new high-performance proof system SWIRL to verify Lighter EVM execution, Lighter users will experience cheap and high-throughput EVM execution, while maintaining native composability with perps and spot trading on Lighter.

As Lighter continues to develop, we envision a seamless coupling between specialized exchange logic verified by ultra-high performance custom ZK circuits and general programmable business logic verified flexibly by the OpenVM zkVM in the Lighter EVM sidecar. We designed OpenVM to be extensible and modular specifically for this class of application, and we look forward to using this design to deliver rich verifiable applications to Lighter users.

What’s Next

Stay tuned for more updates as we build towards an initial public release. In the meantime, to learn more about OpenVM, check out the developer docs and Github and read more about the recent OpenVM 2.0 release here.