A universal ZK verification layer that could make L2 proof verification a lot cheaper - no trusted setup needed

With all the talk about L2 fragmentation this week (Ethereum Economic Zone announcement, Superchain, AggLayer), I wanted to share something I've been working on.

The problem in simple terms: every L2 rollup uses its own proof system to settle on Ethereum.
Each one needs its own verifier contract, each costs 200k+ gas, and many require a "trusted setup" - a ceremony where you have to trust that participants deleted their secret keys.

GLYPH is a verification layer that takes any proof

- regardless of which system generated it
- and verifies it through a single contract for less than 30k gas.

No trusted setup. Fully transparent (If the input proof is - *limitation*).

Why this matters:

- Gas savings: ~7.5x cheaper than Groth16 (the current most common verifier)

- Universality: supports all major proof systems
(Groth16, STARK, Plonk, Halo2, Nova, SP1, Binius, and more)

- Transparency: no trusted setup ceremony needed - everything is publicly verifiable

- Interop: different rollups using different proof systems can all settle through the same verifier

The code, paper, and formal soundness proofs are all open source under MIT license.
Tested on Ethereum testnets with reproducible benchmarks, no synthetic numbers.

Paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18792566

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Christopher-Schulze/glyph-zk

I would love to hear your feedback on this.