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SoK: Understanding zk-SNARKs: The Gap Between Research and Practice (Liang et al. 2025)

Last modified: 2026-10-27
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.02387 ยท URL: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/172

Summary

Systematizes zk-SNARKs from theory to practice: a "master recipe" for turning a program into a zk-SNARK (front end, arithmetization, information-theoretic protocol, commitment compiler), a classification of existing schemes by key technique, and an evaluation of open-source implementations and toolchains. Its benchmarks illustrate how much circuit and backend choices matter, e.g. a SHA-256 preimage circuit spans roughly 27k to 600k constraints and 0.28 s to 556 s prover time. Cited by BL26-SoK-AnonCreds as the reference overview of zk-SNARK trade-offs.