THE CASE FOR FUNDING THIS

A small, real STARK-based zkVM: an interpreter, a from-scratch AIR (arithmetization) binding a proof to one exact program and its actual execution — including which branch it took and which register it touched — and a prover/verifier on Winterfell. Not a wrapper around an existing zkVM (SP1, RISC Zero) and not a simulation of one: the AIR, the constraint system, and the soundness argument are original work in this repo, with negative tests that confirm tampering with a proof's claimed program, result, control flow, or register access is rejected.

Most public zkVM writeups either (a) claim more than the code does, or (b) are research papers with no runnable artifact. This project's discipline is the opposite: every doc in docs/ states plainly what's real versus what a much larger business-strategy document it grew out of aspires to, including a Roadmap section titled "What's explicitly NOT here yet" and a Threat Model that names the on-chain verifier's actual trust assumption (an attested bridge, not a cryptographic verifier) instead of glossing over it. An SP1 integration was investigated and explicitly declined, with the concrete reasons written down, rather than either building it badly or silently dropping the idea.

That discipline is the asset: a small, correct, honestly-scoped base that funding can extend without first having to untangle inflated claims.

In the order the Roadmap already lays out, most validation-per-effort first:

1. Loops — a dynamically-sized execution trace (bounded, padded/truncated by actual run length) so JZ/JNZ can jump backward. The current fixed-length, forward-only trace is the main practical limitation on what .zkasm programs can express.
2. Addressable memory — dynamic addresses (LD r0, [r1]), distinct from today's four static register slots. Open research question already flagged in Recursion: whether this system's "verifier re-executes and asserts everything" soundness trick still holds once addresses are runtime-computed, or whether a real lookup/permutation argument becomes necessary.
3. Recursive proof compression — required for genuinely trustless on-chain verification (today's AttestedVerifier is an explicit trust bridge, not a cryptographic verifier). The Recursion page is currently a scoped literature-review, not an implementation; turning it into one is a real research-and-engineering undertaking.
4. External review — no formal verification, fuzzing, or third-party audit exists yet. The only soundness evidence today is this repo's own unit test suite.

Not funding for a token, a proving marketplace, or a decentralized prover network — none of that has a code artifact here, and none of it is in scope. The ask is engineering time against the four items above, nothing broader.

Budget depends on the program and the scope it wants to fund (a single milestone above vs. several) — happy to scope a specific number against a specific program's format on request. Reach out at codesbyfebin@gmail.com.