Decentralized exchange Lighter said it has improved its validation system over the past month, reducing average block verification time from about 5.3 minutes to roughly 1 minute.
Two separate changes drove the speedup
Lighter said the gain came from two independent improvements.
The first was what it described as a "heavy/light decomposition." Under that design, validation circuits are split based on trade complexity, allowing simple trades, which account for more than 98% of the total, to pay a lower verification cost. Lighter said this change cut verification time in half.
The second came from a prover optimization competition held jointly with Eigen Labs. The work targeted the Plonky2 prover at the infrastructure layer, and the first batch of results went live on Aug. 23. Lighter said that deployment reduced verification time by more than half again.
Infrastructure setup and withdrawal timing
According to the team, its main validation infrastructure consists of a cluster of Apple Silicon Mac mini machines, supported by an elastic cloud overflow layer.
With higher validation throughput, use of that cloud overflow layer has dropped from several hours of daily runtime to nearly zero. The baseline time tied to withdrawal finality also fell from about 21-22 minutes to around 16-17 minutes.
Test environment results
Lighter added that, as the remaining outputs from the prover competition are gradually deployed, verification time for a 500-transaction block in a test environment has already dropped from about 187 seconds to under 30 seconds.
The team said overall performance is expected to improve by about 10x compared with mid-July, and that winners of the prover competition will be announced in the coming days.