PLONK

PLONK (Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge) is a universal zk-SNARK proving system that requires only a single, circuit-agnostic trusted setup (a universal SRS), eliminating the need for per-circuit ceremonies required by systems like Groth16, while producing proofs that are slightly larger but allow circuits to be updated or added without new ceremonies. PLONK-based systems (including its variants Turbo-PLONK and Ultra-PLONK used by protocols like Aztec) support custom gates and lookup tables, enabling more efficient encoding of operations like range checks and hash functions in arithmetic circuits. On Solana, PLONK is less commonly deployed for on-chain verification than Groth16 because verification is more compute-intensive, but it is used off-chain in toolchains and protocol designs targeting future SVM upgrades with broader syscall support.