Skip to main content
Version: 0.20

Bonsai Overview

Bonsai enables boundless computation on any blockchain. With Bonsai, instead of generating proofs on your own hardware, you can upload the program you need proven and request that Bonsai generates proofs for you as needed.

Bonsai is highly parallelized, highly performant and can horizontally scale. To get a taste of what you can do with Bonsai, check out Zeth, our Governance Showcase, Bonsai Pay, and our twitter thread about using Bonsai as a zk coprocessor.

Whether you're looking to take heavy computations off-chain or need to generate proofs for your trustless, verifiable software, Bonsai can help. Check out our Bonsai Quick Start page, and start building!

Please note that Bonsai is still in development.
Request access here, and do not use Bonsai in production.

Bonsai overview

The diagram above shows a simplified overview of Bonsai. As a developer using Bonsai you'll write your guest program that can be used as part of:

  • A trustless, verifiable software
  • Some business logic of a smart contract

As a result, you'll get back a receipt proving the execution of your guest program as well as its public result in a journal.

Note that there are various ways to interact with Bonsai, outlined on the Bonsai Quick Start page.

How do I interact with Bonsai directly?​

Bonsai Ethereum

If you build a project with the cargo risczero tool, you can set environment variables to enable remote proving using Bonsai. Namely, when running your project, set BONSAI_API_KEY=<YOUR_API_KEY> and BONSAI_API_URL=<BONSAI_URL>.

Alternatively, you can use the Bonsai SDK or the Bonsai REST API.

How do I interact with Bonsai from other chains?​

Stay tuned!

Bonsai Building Blocks​

1. The RISC Zero zkVM: the proof engine behind Bonsai​

Under the hood, Bonsai uses the RISC Zero zkVM to prove your programs. With the zkVM, you have access to recursive proofs, proofs composition, a general-purpose circuit (with a bespoke circuit compiler), state continuations, and continuous improvements to the proving algorithm.

The zkVM is open source, and you can explore and contribute at github.com/risc0/risc0.

2. The Bonsai proving service, powered by the zkVM​

The Bonsai proving service can be used standalone or directly integrated with smart contracts and blockchains. If you're interested in Bonsai, learn more in our litepaper and talks.

Where we're headed​

We're building technology that allows anyone to generate highly performant zero-knowledge proofs for a variety of applications. We want to make zero-knowledge proof integration into Ethereum, L1 blockchains, Cosmos app chains, L2 rollups, and dApps possible with minimal development effort. To learn more, read our litepaper.