Releasing OpenVM v1.0.0 to Production

Yi Sun

• 4 min read
Releasing OpenVM v1.0.0 to Production

We are excited to announce the first production v1.0.0 release of OpenVM. OpenVM is now recommended for production after a competitive audit by Cantina and an internal audit by the Axiom team. OpenVM can prove Ethereum mainnet blocks for $0.0015 per transaction and under 3 minutes on CPU, a 5x+ improvement over the v0.1 release. You can read more about detailed feature and performance updates in the new OpenVM whitepaper and OpenVM v1.0.0 announcement.

Since OpenVM launched in December 2024, we’ve been working with early developers to power ZK-enabled applications and infrastructure with OpenVM. The first of these use cases to reach production is Scroll’s upcoming mainnet upgrade, which uses OpenVM to upgrade to a Type 1 zkEVM, support EIP-7702 and RIP-7212, and substantially reduce transaction costs while increasing development velocity. 

With this v1.0.0 release, we are expanding our work with teams across the ecosystem to unlock the power of ZK with OpenVM by offering priority support, custom features, and the new Axiom Proving API. Specifically:

  • We are partnering with a small number of application and infrastructure teams on development support and custom VM extension development to best optimize OpenVM for their use case.
  • We are announcing the Axiom Proving API, a hosted API for developers to deploy OpenVM programs and generate proofs on Axiom’s reliable and cost-efficient cloud infrastructure. The private alpha release is now live and available for early access – reach out to get an API key.

If the above sounds exciting to you, get in touch about becoming an early partner, or read on to learn more!

What’s New in OpenVM v1.0.0

Since the v0.1 release, our contributions to OpenVM have focused on optimizing performance, adding to the feature-rich default VM extensions shipping with OpenVM, and improving security.

Our performance and feature work has driven a 5x+ improvement, dropping the cost of proving Ethereum mainnet blocks to ~$0.0015 per transaction on CPU. Detailed benchmarks are available at the OpenVM announcement. The new additions include:

  • Program-specific circuits: We modified the native VM extension to add several opcodes tailored to the recursion program, removing substantial VM memory overhead from our recursion and aggregation.
  • Direct hinting: We added direct hinting, which allows developers to use private witness data in circuits without IO overhead, dramatically reducing recursion cost.
  • SHA2-256 and secp256r1 support: We added support for general short Weierstrass curves (including secp256r1) to the ECC extension and created a new VM extension for SHA2-256.

The standard production security process for OpenVM involved a competitive audit by Cantina as well as a formalization of the OpenVM specifications in a new whitepaper and more detailed specifications. In conjunction with these efforts, we conducted a systematic internal audit and are now comfortable releasing OpenVM for production use.

Announcing the Axiom Proving API

While working with teams using OpenVM over the last few months, we heard from developers about the infrastructure challenges of deploying ZK. Issues like building reproducibly, managing cost-effective proving hardware, and ensuring uptime and reliability are critical to performance and security, but can be a distraction for developers focused on building their protocols.

We are announcing the Axiom Proving API to solve these problems. Using the Axiom Proving API, developers are able to:

  • Deploy OpenVM Programs: Build OpenVM programs reproducibly and manage cryptographic artifacts necessary to securely integrate them into onchain systems.
  • Generate and Verify Proofs: Access Axiom’s cloud infrastructure to generate proofs at a cheaper cost and lower latency without setting up or maintaining cloud configurations for the specialized ZK workload.

We currently support CPU proving through the API and expect to release support for GPU proving in the coming months – more here soon!

The Axiom Proving API is currently in private alpha, and we are giving early access to interested partners. If you are an application or infrastructure developer interested in using OpenVM to generate ZK proofs using the Axiom Proving API, get in touch.

Collaborate with Us

We envision powering the next generation of ambitious ZK-enabled applications and infrastructure with OpenVM’s modular and open approach. To make this a reality, we would like to work with teams testing the limits of current ZK capabilities on two fronts:

  • Optimizing performance for their workloads with the modular OpenVM framework.
    • Rollups can configure OpenVM with custom VM extensions to rapidly support new state commitment formats like Verkle tries or EVM precompiles with new cryptography like Scroll’s addition of RIP-7212 using secp256r1 support in the OpenVM ECC extension.
    • Users of offchain cryptography like TEEs, JWTs, or DKIM signatures can build OpenVM extensions for them and integrate into OpenVM without forking or upstreaming.
    • Verifiable AI applications can integrate AI-focused extensions to seamlessly verify ML inference alongside more traditional computations for pre- and post-processing.
  • Informing feature additions to OpenVM for their use case.
    • Adding prover modalities: OpenVM’s modular architecture and hardware abstraction layer supports diverse prover backends. We’d like to collaborate on adding support for proving on browser, mobile, or HW accelerators.
    • Adding verification targets: OpenVM currently supports optimized verification in Rust or EVM. We would be excited to work with teams to support verifying in execution environments like the SVM, Move, or others.
    • Increasing ISA diversity: OpenVM currently supports VM extensions focused on 32-bit RISC-V and native proof recursion. We’d be interested in support for ISAs like WebAssembly, 64-bit RISC-V, or others.

We aim to partner closely to make sure OpenVM evolves to meet ecosystem needs by establishing tight feedback loops and even enabling new teams to build substantive modules into OpenVM. If this vision resonates with you, please fill out this contact form.

What’s Next

Over the last year, OpenVM has matured from a prototype to a full-featured and performant zkVM framework ready for production. At Axiom, we are excited to support production deployments of OpenVM v1.0.0 and to continue expanding the role of ZK in onchain applications. 

With this release, we will continue contributing to OpenVM by pushing on performance, adding prover modalities, and adding proof system backends. In addition, we are building new ZK-enabled products on top of OpenVM tailored for application domains like rollups, interoperability, and offchain cryptography and adding features to the Axiom Proving API including GPU acceleration. We will have more to share here in the coming months.

In the meantime, check out the developer book and Github to try out OpenVM, learn more from the whitepaper and specs, and join the developer chat on Telegram for technical discussion. If you’re interested in hands-on support from Axiom to integrate OpenVM or in using the Axiom Proving API, get in touch here. We’re excited to keep driving progress in ZK across the ecosystem.