my-rusty-plonk: Experimental Rust implementation of core PLONK-inspired components

my-rusty-plonk is a small educational Rust project focused on a minimal subset of proving system building blocks.
It is intentionally scoped as a toy, not a full PLONK implementation because I just wanted to get a good grasp of the internals of the protocol.
The goal is to model core ideas cleanly and keep the code readable.

The active toy implementation is under src/my_plonk.

Purpose

I built this to better understand how proving system abstractions map to real code, because just by reading a professional implementation I couldn't get a good sense of what is being done and at the same time reading only a paper is not really useful for me. I prefer to build and learn this way.
It is also a way to practice implementing algebraic components in Rust and to explore the bridge between cryptographic theory and software structure.

Current scope

• Finite field arithmetic over a toy prime field (mod 101)
• Polynomial representation with evaluation, addition, scalar multiplication, and multiplication
• Tiny row-based constraints with two gate types: a + b = c and a * b = c
• Minimal toy proof/check flow: prove(circuit, witness) -> Proof and verify(circuit, proof) -> bool
• Runnable demo via cargo run using the my_plonk modules

Not built but could be good to have

• No polynomial commitments (KZG/FRI)
• No Fiat-Shamir transcript
• No PLONK permutation argument (this is a key part that I ommited)
• No lookup arguments
• No zero-knowledge masking/blinding (because of the small field 😃)
• No elliptic-curve cryptography in the toy version (altough could be a great future addition).

ark_plonk work in progress

The src/ark_plonk/ folder is kept as a separate, in progress implementation track aimed at a more protocol-accurate PLONK-style system over time.
That track is still under construction and is not the active path used by cargo run.

Running the project

cargo run

cargo test

Example

The demo circuit has two rows:

1. Add gate with witness (a, b, c) = (3, 4, 7) checks 3 + 4 = 7
2. Mul gate with witness (a, b, c) = (5, 6, 30) checks 5 * 6 = 30

The toy Proof stores row-wise evaluation artifacts and a simple checksum.
The verifier recomputes those values and rejects modified or inconsistent proof data.

Future work

• Commitment schemes
• Permutation checks
• Transcript logic
• Better circuit abstractions
• Stronger field and domain support
• Good elliptic curve usage

Credits

• RareSkills, for educational material (man I love the zkBook ❤)
• zkSecurity, for educational resources that informed the structure and learning path in this project