Overview

Vest is a trustless, composable financial ecosystem built on top of zkRisk - a zero-knowledge, unified risk engine.

Applications built on top of the zkRisk Engine share a unified risk framework such that they are able to understand and price risk across the entire Vest ecosystem by referencing a global risk metric without having access to individual positioning, balances, or other user data. This allows applications like Vest Exchange to more precisely and efficiently price risk, unlocking capital efficiency while preventing hidden tail risks and protecting user funds.

This trustless and transparent unified risk engine is possible due to zkRisk, which uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to gain on-chain assurance of fair pricing and solvency, while sensitive position data remains protected. ZKPs enable this by proving the validity of complex risk computations, such as ICA and GARCH-based volatility forecasts, portfolio risk calculations using EVaR, and pricing of trades through AMM state transitions. Computations are verified without revealing the underlying user data, using succinct, verifiable proofs embedded directly on-chain.

Computing & Validating ZKPs

Vest bypasses the bottleneck of blockchain consensus algorithms and instead computes and validates ZKPs across a set of validators. By utilizing zkSNARKs, Vest is able to verify solvency and fair pricing using only compact proofs of correct execution, which is vastly more efficient than employing blockchain consensus algorithms. zkRisk is a fully on-chain risk engine, and validators in the Vest ecosystem (1) verify that off-chain calculations of premia and funding adhere precisely to risk-indifference formulas and (2) certify that liquidation solutions are mathematically optimized to prevent cascades.

Execution & State

Vest uses a hybrid execution model that separates performance-critical components from state-critical components.

• On-chain:

  • User balances and margin requirements

  • Commitments to open positions and liquidation thresholds

  • Risk proofs submitted by validators (i.e. premia, funding, solvency)

• Off-chain:

  • Order placement, cancellation, and matching

  • Price updates and real-time risk scoring

  • Execution queue management

Throughput & Latency

Vest’s exchange infrastructure is designed for high-performance trading with measurable throughput and latency characteristics. Below are the current performance metrics, along with industry benchmarks for context.

• Throughput Capacity:

  • Sustains 1,000 orders/transactions per second (txn/s) under typical load

• End-to-End Latency:

  • ~1 second (frontend request → protocol response)

  • ~500ms (API submission → order execution)