The Nexus zkVM

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The Nexus zkVM

Quick Start

Make sure you have a recent stable rust compiler with the RISC-V target. The RISC-V target can be installed using rustup:

rustup target add riscv32i-unknown-none-elf

Install the Nexus tools to get access to the cargo nexus, and the nexus-run commands.

cargo install --path tools

To start a new project use:

cargo nexus new

Note, you may get an authentication error. The current new command will attempt to add a dependency on this git repo for nexus-rt. Since this repo is private, you may need to tell cargo to use the git command to fetch the repo rather than using the built-in git library. This can be done by setting a parameter in .cargo/config:

net.git-fetch-with-cli = true

Alternatively, you can configure your SSH keys with cargo.

Also note that if your new project will live in this repo, it is best to change the Cargo.toml file to list a local path to runtime rather than the default git repo.

If successful, you can run the new project binary with cargo run.

Proving programs can be done with either locally or using the Nexus network. To prove using the nexus network, use the prove command.

cargo nexus prove -r    # prove release build
cargo nexus prove       # prove debug build

If your project contains multiple binaries, you may need to specify the binary to use:

cargo nexus prove --bin name

You can check on the status of your proof, and download the result using the query command:

cargo nexus query --hash e087116c0b13fb1a66af46d572b78e98b76c0bf814bd4f5df781469a3755fd33

If the proof is complete it will be saved to nexus-proof.json; this filename can be changed on the command line (see -h for help).

You can check a proof using the verify command:

cargo nexus verify

You may need to specify the input files on the command line:

cargo nexus verify --public-params nexus-public.zst -f nexus-proof.json

Local proofs can be done using the local-prove command:

cargo nexus local-prove --bin example