A nice thing about watching Olympic swimming is that it's not too complicated to determine who's the fastest. Everyone dives into the same pool, there's some paddling, and at the end of the final lap, one person touches the wall first.

The same can't be said for blockchains, where engineers are always releasing ever more powerful, speedier systems, and use-cases and transaction types vary from project to project, as do tools and methods for measuring performance. The dilemma extends to designers of cryptographic tools, and the myriad ways of reporting hashes per second.

Such was the backdrop as Polyhedra Network, a team building a crucial blockchain component known as a cryptographic "prover," set out to develop a just-released platform called "Proof Arena" that's designed to serve as, well, a proving ground.

Just a few months ago, the Polyhedra team released an open-source zero-knowledge proof system – used in many setups for auxiliary blockchains known as "layer 2s" – that was "nearly 2x faster than alternatives." But how did they really know?

Eric Vreeland, Polyhedra's chief strategy officer, said the team decided to develop Proof Arena so developers could test various provers in a controlled environment – "people evaluating the performance of various proof systems for a particular proof generation task."

"Proof Arena will allow ZK-proof system creators to compare their systems against others in a clear and scientific manner while ensuring that all controllable variables are held constant," according to a press release Wednesday.

Outputs from the testing system include proof generation time, memory peak and setup time, according to Vreeland. Here's what that might look like in a hypothetical scenario:

Hypothetical table of results from a test run on Proof Arena comparing different provers (Polyhedra)

Builders of the provers can also submit their systems "for inclusion in the arena," Vreeland said.

Initially, the project will be set up to generate benchmarks for Polyhedra's own "Expander" ZK-proof system, Polygon's Plonky3, StarkWare's Stwo and Linea's Gnark.

"The team plans to support all open-source proof systems and will provide benchmarks for frequent ZK tasks like Keccak and Poseidon hash verification run on a variety of machine configurations," according to the press release.

That might all sound like gibberish, but for cryptographers, it's what they care about.

And the pros might like the chance to prove their worth.

Cryptography Zero-Knowledge Proofs ZK rollups Layer 2s Polygon Starkware

Bradley Keoun

Bradley Keoun is CoinDesk's managing editor of tech & protocols, where he oversees a team of reporters covering blockchain technology, and previously ran the global crypto markets team. A two-time Loeb Awards finalist, he previously was chief global finance and economic correspondent for TheStreet and before that worked as an editor and reporter for Bloomberg News in New York and Mexico City, reporting on Wall Street, emerging markets and the energy industry. He started out as a police-beat reporter for the Gainesville Sun in Florida and later worked as a general-assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, he double-majored in electrical engineering and classical studies as an undergraduate at Duke University and later obtained a master's in journalism from the University of Florida. He is currently based in Austin, Texas, and in his spare time plays guitar, sings in a choir and hikes in the Texas Hill Country. He owns less than $1,000 each of several cryptocurrencies.