Ever sent a screenshot to prove you paid someone, and they still didn’t believe you?

Screenshots can lie. So can spreadsheets, logs, even code.

But what if you could prove something happened on your computer, mathematically,** and no one could fake it or dispute it?

That’s what zero-knowledge proofs make possible.

And RISC Zero is making them usable.

TL;DR

RISC Zero is building a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) that lets anyone prove they’ve run a program correctly, without revealing what the program was or what it did. It’s like getting a proof of computation that can be verified anywhere, anytime.

It’s designed for developers building secure, privacy-preserving apps, chains that want scalable verification, and frankly, any system that needs to prove something happened… without redoing the work.

1. So, What Is RISC Zero, and Why Was It Built?

Let’s simplify.

Blockchains are public, transparent systems. But they’re slow. And revealing everything all the time isn’t always ideal (think about voting, or verifying models in AI).

RISC Zero steps in to offer a better way to prove things: through zero-knowledge proofs.

But instead of making developers learn complex math or rewrite everything from scratch, RISC Zero gives them a virtual machine that feels familiar. You write normal Rust code, the machine runs it, and then it outputs a ZK proof showing that the computation was done correctly.

It's built for:

• 🧑‍💻 Developers who want to build privacy-preserving or verifiable apps.
• 🧠 AI and off-chain compute teams who need proof their models ran honestly.
• 🔗 Other chains that want to verify computations without running them natively.

2. The Problem It’s Trying to Solve

Here’s the tension in blockchains today:

They either:

• Run everything on-chain → secure but slow and expensive.