Jieyi Long | Theta Network@jieyilong
Excited to share that my research work “Interstellar: Efficient GKR-based IVC Scheme with Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Folding” conducted at Theta Labs @Theta_Network has recently been accepted to PKC 2026! PKC (Public-Key Cryptography Conference) is one of the premier cryptography venues organized by the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research, iacr.org). IACR conferences represent the gold standard of academic cryptography research, so it’s a big honor to have this work accepted. This is also my first first-authored paper accepted at a major cryptography conference!
The paper introduces Interstellar, a new framework for folding schemes and Incrementally Verifiable Computation (IVC) — a key primitive that that has recently attracted significant attention from researchers and is beginning to see widespread adoption in modern recursive zkSNARK systems for scalable blockchains and verifiable computing. Check it out:
eprint.iacr.org/2025/1294
Key idea
Most modern folding-based IVC systems (Nova, HyperNova, Protostar, etc.) operate on constraint systems and require commitments to the entire execution trace of a circuit.
This leads to expensive prover costs dominated by large vector commitments and MSM operations. Interstellar takes a different approach. Instead of committing to the full trace, it works directly with circuit satisfiability and combines a new technique called circuit interpolation and the GKR protocol for circuit verification. This allows the prover to commit only to the actual witness inputs, avoiding commitments to the full computation trace and eliminating cross-term vectors used in many prior folding schemes.
Result
Because vector commitments are the main cost in folding-based IVC, reducing them yields substantial speedups. Across representative workloads:
1.59× – 6.74× prover speedup per folding round for parallel workloads (e.g., matrix multiplication)
up to 2.93× speedup for serialized workloads (e.g., MiMC hash chains)
Additional features
Interstellar also supports several capabilities needed for real-world zk systems:
high-degree gates
lookup gates
multi-instance folding
efficient non-uniform IVC (important for zkVMs and zkML)
A new primitive: Collaborative Folding / IVC
The paper also introduces a novel cryptography primitive called Collaborative Folding/IVC, which allows multiple provers with disjoint private witnesses to jointly generate recursive proofs without revealing their private inputs. This enables new settings such as:
privacy-preserving distributed computation
multi-party recursive proof generation
federated or cross-organization verifiable computation
Why this matters
Recursive proof systems are becoming foundational infrastructure for zkVMs, rollups, verifiable AI / zkML, and scalable blockchain verification. Interstellar provides a new design option in the folding-IVC landscape that significantly reduces prover cost while enabling distributed proof generation. If you’re interested in folding schemes, recursive SNARKs, or verifiable computation, I’d love to hear feedback from the cryptography and blockchain community!
