Introduction

The ZK Coprocessor for Ethereum.

Axiom is the first ZK coprocessor scaling data-rich applications on Ethereum which provides smart contracts trustless access to all on-chain data and arbitrary expressive compute over it. For the first time, developers can build rich on-chain applications without imposing additional trust assumptions.

Developers query historic data from Ethereum via Axiom, and Axiom trustlessly fulfills ZK-verified results on-chain. Developers can then operate on the results in their smart contracts, enabling a new class of data-rich applications.

These docs are for Axiom V1, which launched on Ethereum mainnet in July 2023 and was deprecated as of January 22, 2024.

If you are looking for the Axiom V2 docs, see here.

Overview

To fulfill queries, Axiom performs three steps:

• Read: Axiom uses ZK proofs to trustlessly read from block headers, states, transactions, and receipts in any historical Ethereum block. All Ethereum on-chain data is encoded in one of these forms, meaning that Axiom can access anything an archive node can.

• Compute: Once data has been ingested, Axiom applies verified compute primitives on top. This includes diverse operations from basic analytics (sum, count, max, min) to cryptography (signature verification, key aggregation) and machine learning (decision trees, linear regression, neural network inference). The validity of each computation is verified in a ZK proof.

• Verify: Axiom accompanies each query result with a ZK validity proof that (1) the input data was correctly fetched from the chain and (2) the compute was correctly applied. This ZK proof is verified on-chain in the Axiom smart contract, and the final result is then trustlessly available for use in your smart contract.

Because they are verified by a ZK proof, results from Axiom have security cryptographically equivalent to that of Ethereum and make no assumptions about crypto-economics, incentives, or game theory. We believe this offers the highest possible level of guarantee for smart contract applications.

Integrating Axiom

To integrate Axiom into your application:

• Use our alpha release live on mainnet today to trustlessly query historic Ethereum block headers, accounts, and account storage from your smart contract.

• Fill out the early partner form to use trustless compute primitives over this verified data. Self-serve compute is coming soon!

To learn more about integrating Axiom, see our developer guide:

pageAxiom for Developers

How Axiom Works

Check out Architecture Overview to understand how Axiom's architecture gives smart contracts access to more data and more compute, trustlessly. You can also learn more about the settings we used for deployment in KZG Trusted Setup and zero-knowledge proofs in general in Introduction to ZK.

Get in Touch

If you have questions, ideas, or would just like to chat, join the discussion in our Discord or the technical discussion on Telegram. Our circuit and smart contract code is open-source and available at our GitHub.