The ZK story always sounds complicated because people fixate on the math.

But the math isn’t the blocker anymore.
The interface is.

Circuits were the reason ZK never broke out.
You had to think in algebra, rebuild control flow from scratch, and treat memory like a puzzle.
That’s not how normal developers build things.

zkVMs change the equation entirely.
You write code.
They turn the execution trace into something the prover can verify.
ZK stops being a cryptography project and becomes a compute environment.

Once you see ZK as compute, the landscape makes more sense:

🔸 STARK VMs: scale, transparency, bigger proofs
🔸 SNARK VMs: small proofs, trust assumptions
🔸 RISC-V: good tooling, instruction constraints
🔸 Custom ISAs: performance, specialization tradeoffs
🔸 Modular stacks: flexibility, overhead

No single design wins everything.
Different workloads push the architecture in different directions.

That’s why @brevis_zk stands out to me.
They’re not optimizing for one type of job.
They’re building a proving system that fits the whole spectrum:

🔸 Fast-response tasks (trading flows)
🔸 Heavy batch jobs (analytics)
🔸 Privacy-first tasks (ML inference)
🔸 Cross-chain verification

Most ZK teams pick one lane.
@brevis_zk is building a system that doesn’t collapse when workloads diverge.

The pivot here isn’t “better ZK.”
It’s ZK that works for more than one category of compute.
That’s how you get from niche tools to infrastructure.

The real unlock isn’t smaller proofs.
It’s a system broad enough that developers don’t have to think about proofs at all.