Kakarot | Lightweight and modular ZK-EVM

Core Principles

ZK by design

Kakarot follows first principles: it was built on an intermediary zkVM, Cairo. This offers a strong edge to us core ZK infrastructure builders: separate cryptography and engineering. More recently, SP1, Jolt and Risc-Zero offer similar possibilities.
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Kakarot stands to natively benefit all the improvements to the Cairo stack: parallelization, native paymaster and DA modularity.

EVM Compatible, and more

Kakarot zkEVM is fully compatible with Ethereum. Developing on Kakarot and interacting with Kakarot dApps feels the same as on Ethereum.
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Because of its architecture, Kakarot is the only zkEVM rollup that’ll able to follow and even front-run upgrades to the Ethereum protocol!

New EIPs? Newest EVM features? They’ll always land first in Kakarot.

Built on the shoulder of giants

Under the hood, Kakarot zkEVM relies on the Starknet stack (CairoVM + StarknetOS runtime). It is the most battle-tested and innovative stack for provable execution: >$1Bn volume secured on DyDx on Starkex, 3 years of STARKs - invented by Starkware - running in production.

Kakarot and Starkware compose together to make ZK the norm.

Understanding Kakarot

Currently, Kakarot is designed in a modular way: transactions are executed on the Kakarot core EVM, which runs on a CairoVM-powered client. It interacts with the outside world using the Ethereum-compatible Kakarot RPC layer. Cairo execution traces (in our case, blocks) are first pulled by a Cairo prover, then used to generate a STARK validity proof, and lastly submitted to Ethereum L1.

Kakarot is an implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), developed using the Cairo programming language. It can be compared to Geth's EVM, which is written in Golang. The main differentiating factor for an EVM written in Cairo is that its transactions are provable. This capability is achieved by utilizing the CairoVM, a Turing-complete provable CPU architecture, which serves as the underlying layer for Kakarot. A zkEVM, or zero-knowledge EVM, is essentially an EVM where transactions can be proven and verified.