Flock Prover Debuts with Record-Breaking Speed
Blockchain infrastructure provider Espresso, together with zero-knowledge proof experts Ron Rothblum (Succinct) and NYU researcher William Wang, has announced Flock—a new SNARK prover that Espresso calls the fastest in existence. Its performance is approximately three times the baseline that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin previously laid out for Ethereum's post-quantum transition. Specifically for Bitcoin, Flock can complete a signature hash proof for a single block in just 2.5 seconds, dramatically accelerating the on-chain verification of post-quantum signature schemes such as Lamport or Winternitz signatures.
Benchmarks and Architecture Advantages
According to Espresso's published benchmarks running on a consumer laptop equipped with an Apple M4 Max chip, Flock handles 661,000 Blake3 compression operations per second and 338,000 SHA-256 compression operations per second. In the SHA-256 hash function, Flock is approximately 9 times faster than the previous fastest solution, Binius64. For Blake3, it outperforms both Binius64 and Plonky3 by about 14 times. These figures represent an order-of-magnitude leap in general-purpose prover performance, making it feasible to generate post-quantum signature proofs in real time on standard hardware.
Open Source and Development Details
The team emphasized that Flock remains a research prototype rather than a production-ready product. During development, they leveraged AI coding assistants including Claude Opus 4.7 and 4.8. The prover has been open-sourced, allowing community inspection and contribution. Espresso stated that Flock's architecture is designed to support both Ethereum's and Bitcoin's future post-quantum upgrade paths, though further optimization is needed to reduce memory overhead and handle more complex circuits. This breakthrough carries significant implications for the crypto industry's preparedness against quantum computing threats, particularly by offering a viable acceleration path for signature verification on both Bitcoin and Ethereum in the post-quantum era.