This repository provides instructions for benchmarking four zkVMs: RISC0, OpenVM, SP1, and Pico.
Our initial benchmarks - detailed in our blog post - compare all zkVMs under identical conditions: the same hardware (r7a.x48large), the same Rust program, and execution without compiler acceleration or custom parameters. This ensures a fair, apple-to-apple comparison, including for Pico.
Recognizing that teams may favor optimized settings, we also provide benchmarks tuned to each zkVM’s strengths. RISC0 and SP1 use configurations from their zkvm-perf repository, while OpenVM uses settings from the openvm-reth-benchmark repository, enabling each to achieve its best possible CPU performance.
Initialize the git sub-modules:
git submodule update --init --recursive- AWS:
r7a.48xlarge(192 CPUs) - OS:
ubuntu-24.04-amd64-server
- To benchmark RISC0, please follow instructions in risc0/README
- To benchmark OpenVM, please follow instructions in openvm/README
- To benchmark SP1, please follow instructions in sp1/README
- To benchmark Pico, please follow instructions in pico/README
The aforementioned process will lead to the following results for various zkVMs.
