We’re delighted to announce the release of the new version of Circom, the zero-knowledge circuit compiler.
Jordi Baylina developed the first version, which he released in 2018. It was one of the first toolkits of zero-knowledge technology, and it has been successfully used in projects like Tornado Cash, Dark Forest, Polygon Hermez, Zkopru, Semaphore, TrustCommunity and many others, including of course iden3.
This new version of Circom is the result of an initiative started one year ago to build from scratch a new set of tools and libraries written in Rust language, in collaboration with a team from the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) and with the support of a grant from the Ethereum Foundation.
The new Circom 2.0 version is improving dramatically the speed of compilation of circuits (up to 10x in some cases), and it has been strongly tested during the last three months.
As an example, the circuits of the Polygon Hermez have been compiled with the previous version of Circom (now renamed 0.5) and with the beta version of Circom 2.0. The output results were the same, but were compiled ten times faster.
There are improvements also in code format limitations to guide better the development of circuits and avoid errors and security issues.
The current release replaces the Circom 0.5 version while maintaining the same functionality. In the coming months, we’ll be including new features.
You can check the Circom documentation here. It’s possible that changing to the new version could cause broken links, or some public information to be outdated.
Any feedback from the community will be very much appreciated so we can improve the documentation and the libraries.
Don’t miss the chance to join the next ZK Hack event, where we are sponsoring and hosting a workshop on November the 2nd to present this new version of Circom.
The main channel to get in contact with the Iden3/Circom team is our Telegram group.