Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines (ZKVMs) in Practice: A Technical Survey

**Executive summary:** This report provides an engineering-focused overview of zero-knowledge virtual machines (ZKVMs), detailing the end-to-end pipeline from lowering guest code (Rust/C++/Move) into a prover-friendly ISA, logging deterministic VM traces, compiling traces into an Algebraic Intermediate Representation (AIR), and using lookup/logup coprocessors and offline memory-checking to keep constraint growth linear; it also covers prover architecture techniques (sharding, recursion, and proof composition) used to scale proving performance while meeting latency and memory constraints.