unionlabs/galois-benchmark

This project measures how fast a specialized system can generate cryptographic proofs for blockchain consensus. Specifically, it benchmarks "Galois," a prover that creates zero-knowledge proofs for CometBLS circuits. The practical goal is to understand how long it takes for a client to send a request to a server, have that server generate a proof, and receive the result back, across networks with different numbers of validators. The benchmark works by testing the prover under increasing loads. It runs through scenarios with 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 maximum validators, measuring the full round-trip time for each. Along with timing, it extracts details about the underlying circuit, like how many constraints it has, the size of the inputs, and other characteristics that affect performance. Results are compiled into an HTML report. This tool is built for teams working on Union's blockchain infrastructure or similar zero-knowledge proof systems. For example, a protocol engineer deciding whether their network can scale to 128 validators needs to know if proof generation stays fast enough at that size. The published results, run on a specific AWS instance type with 128 CPUs and 256GB of RAM, give concrete data points to inform those decisions. A project manager or founder evaluating ZK proof systems could also use these numbers to compare performance against alternatives. Running the benchmark yourself requires a specific setup. It uses Nix, a package manager that ensures the environment is identical across machines, and you need a GitHub access token to pull the necessary code. The project maintains benchmark results from three versions of the prover, so you can see how performance has improved over time without running anything yourself.