Dev & Production Modes

The vlayer node is an HTTP server that acts as a prover and supports two proving modes:

  • FAKE: Used for development and testing. It executes code and verifies the correctness of execution but does not perform actual proving. In this mode, the Verifier contract can confirm computations, but a malicious Prover could exploit the system.
  • GROTH16: Intended for production and final testing, this mode performs real proving.

By default, the vlayer client SDK communicates with http://127.0.0.1:3000.

Running prover

Assuming vlayer is installed, you can start it in development mode with the following command:

vlayer serve

The vlayer prover server require urls of RPC node providers to query blockchain data. You can pass specific RPC URLs for each chain using the --rpc-url parameter:

vlayer serve --rpc-url <chain-id>:<url>

To configure multiple RPC URLs use --rpc-url parameter many times:

vlayer serve \
  --rpc-url 1:https://eth-mainnet.alchemyapi.io/v2/<alchemy_api_key> \
  --rpc-url 10:https://opt-mainnet.g.alchemy.com/v2/<optimism_api_key>

Note: By default, no RPC node providers are configured. You will need to specify them manually using the --rpc-url parameter to run the vlayer prover.

FAKE Mode

By default, it listens for JSON-RPC client requests on port 3000 in FAKE mode. You can also specify the --proof argument explicitly:

vlayer serve --proof fake

See the JSON-RPC API appendix for detailed specifications on API calls.

Note: FAKE mode is limited to test and dev chains to prevent accidental errors.

GROTH16 Mode

GROTH16 mode is slower than FAKE mode and requires significant computational resources.

To speed up proof generation, vlayer supports the use of infrastructure like the Bonsai (and eventually Boundless) to offload heavy computations to high-performance machines.

To run a vlayer node in production mode, use this command:

BONSAI_API_URL=https://api.bonsai.xyz/ \
BONSAI_API_KEY={api_key_goes_here} \
vlayer serve --proof groth16

You can request a BONSAI_API_KEY here.

Note: Protocols should be designed with proving execution times in mind, as it may take a few minutes to generate proof.