Paper 2026/258
Lightning, Field-Agnostic Super-Efficient Polynomial Commitment Scheme
Abstract
Polynomial commitment schemes (PCS) are a fundamental building block of modern zkSNARKs. In this paper, we propose Lightning, a new coding-based PCS that achieves state-of-the-art prover efficiency. Our main technical contribution is a new linear code family, the Lightning code, which can be instantiated from any base code with constant relative distance. Compared to the base code, Lightning code significantly reduces encoding cost by trading off relative distance. We integrate Lightning code into the standard coding-based PCS framework of Ligero and Brakedown. Experimental results show that Lightning PCS reduces prover commitment time by up to $2.7\times$ compared to the fastest prover configuration of Brakedown, at the cost of a $2.4\times$ increase in proof size. Overall, Lightning provides a practical mechanism for trading proof size for prover efficiency in coding-based PCS constructions.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- Keywords
- Polynomial Commitment SchemezkSNARK
- Contact author(s)
-
wen_jie_qu @ outlook com
guo yanpei @ u nus edu
jhzhang @ nus edu sg - History
- 2026-02-17: revised
- 2026-02-14: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2026/258
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/258,
author = {Wenjie Qu and Yanpei Guo and Jiaheng Zhang},
title = {Lightning, Field-Agnostic Super-Efficient Polynomial Commitment Scheme},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/258},
year = {2026},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/258}
}
