Performance Overview: Flock Outpaces Existing Solutions
Espresso, a blockchain infrastructure company, has teamed up with Succinct's Ron Rothblum and NYU's William Wang to release Flock, a SNARK prover that sets a new speed record. According to benchmark data on a consumer Apple M4 Max laptop, Flock can perform 661,000 Blake3 compression operations per second and 338,000 SHA-256 compression operations per second. Compared to the previous fastest prover, Binius64, Flock delivers approximately 9x faster performance on SHA-256 and 14x faster on Blake3. It also outperforms Plonky3 by roughly 14x on Blake3. These results demonstrate that high-end server hardware is no longer a prerequisite for achieving high-throughput SNARK proving; consumer-grade devices can now handle demanding cryptographic proofs.
Vitalik's Baseline and Bitcoin Implications
Vitalik Buterin had proposed a performance benchmark for Ethereum's post-quantum transition. Flock's actual performance reaches about 3x that baseline. For Bitcoin, Flock can generate a signature hash proof for an individual block in 2.5 seconds. This is a critical milestone for blockchain post-quantum cryptography migration: as quantum computing threats loom, networks need to verify aggregated signature proofs quickly. Flock's efficiency makes low-latency post-quantum verification feasible on existing hardware. The findings also suggest that the efficiency bottleneck of SNARK provers is gradually being broken, accelerating the path toward practical deployment.
Open Source and AI-Assisted Development
The team emphasized that Flock is still a research prototype and has not undergone production-level security audits. During development, AI coding assistants such as Claude Opus 4.7 and 4.8 were used to assist with code generation and optimization. Flock has been open-sourced on GitHub, enabling the community to reproduce and experiment with it. Espresso stated that the modular design and novel architecture of Flock could lay the groundwork for even more efficient SNARK provers in the future. Next steps include enhancing security and exploring integration with additional blockchains.