Blockchain infrastructure firm Espresso, in collaboration with Succinct's Ron Rothblum and NYU scholar William Wang, has unveiled Flock, a SNARK prover claimed to be the fastest ever. Running on a consumer-grade Apple M4 Max laptop, Flock achieves 338,000 SHA-256 compression operations per second—roughly 9x faster than the previous leader Binius64. For Bitcoin, it proves a single block's signature hash in 2.5 seconds, tripling the benchmark set by Vitalik Buterin for Ethereum's post-quantum transition. Despite being a research prototype, Flock is open-sourced and was built with AI coding assistants (Claude Opus 4.7/4.8). The breakthrough significantly lowers the barrier for post-quantum cryptography adoption in blockchains.

Blockchain infrastructure firm Espresso, in collaboration with Succinct's Ron Rothblum and NYU scholar William Wang, has launched Flock, claimed to be the fastest SNARK prover to date. On a consumer-grade Apple M4 Max laptop, Flock achieves 661,000 Blake3 compressions per second and 338,000 SHA-256 compressions per second — roughly 14x faster than Binius64 on Blake3 and 9x faster on SHA-256. For Bitcoin, Flock can generate a signature hash proof for a single block in just 2.5 seconds, reaching 3x the performance baseline Vitalik Buterin set for Ethereum's post-quantum transition. The project remains a research prototype, has been open-sourced, and was developed with AI coding assistants (Claude Opus 4.7/4.8).