Microsoft Research announced Magnetar on October 15 as a system designed to speed up proofs that ordinary programs ran. Its researchers say it supports code compiled from Rust, Go and C and was 10 to 39 times faster on average than certain comparable proving systems across their benchmarks. Verification took roughly 12 milliseconds in Microsoft’s tests.
Magnetar uses standard hash functions, a design intended to reduce reliance on cryptography vulnerable to future quantum attacks. The benchmark results do not guarantee the same gains in production rollups or every smart-contract workload; integration, hardware conditions and proof sizes also matter.
