Basics

Binius is a state-of-the-art cryptographic proof system that allows fast and cheap verification of complex computations. The project comprises a high-performance, open-source Rust implementation and a documentation suite on this very website. It builds directly on theoretical protocols published in a sequence of recent technical manuscripts [DP23] [DP24]. This work is driven by Irreducible's research and development efforts.

In the world of cryptography, Binius is known as a succinct, noninteractive argument, or SNARK. Though Binius proofs today do not guarantee privacy, in the future, we plan to extend the system to provide zero knowledge proofs, making it a zk-SNARK. Because Binius uses binary fields as a foundational primitive, we also sometimes refer to it as a binary proof system¹.

Binius's cryptographic protocol operates natively over towers of binary fields, mathematical objects that possess several remarkable properties. Binary towers efficiently arithmetize natural problems of interest, like standard hash functions, and also admit extremely efficient software and hardware implementations. The Binius codebase contains, in addition to the core prover and verifier logic, various examples expressing computations of essential interest with Binius's arithmetization scheme.

In this area of the site, we collect basic resources, designed to jump-start those planning to build on Binius. Here, we mainly focus on Binius's API and on the arithmetization scheme we use to capture real-life statements and problems. We defer Binius's cryptographic inner-workings to our blueprint section.

Getting Started

For some general introductory content, start with our overview page.

Site Directory

Below, we sketch this site area's sections in slightly more detail. Here, we focus on usage and on basic concepts, deferring all cryptographic content to our blueprint.