Chips — Plutus Halo2 Verifier

Dependency Hierarchy

Chips form a strict inclusion hierarchy. Including a chip implicitly includes all its dependencies. The effective profile is always one of the five below.

For instance, the Hash-to-curve chip depends on both Poseidon hash and Jubjub curve, both depending on the Native Arithmetic chip.

Hash-to-Curve ⊃ Poseidon + JubJub ⊃ Arith
Each level adds fixed columns (unless marked as shared), gates, and lookup tables on top of its dependencies.
Chip advice columns are merged by max-count (not summed) — JubJub's 9 cols absorb Native's 5.

Chip	Dependencies

Chip Comparison

Proof & VK Sizes

Number of columns and associated arguments for a chip, as well as the minimum expected proof and VK size when using a chip in isolation. When chips are combined the proof and VK size are not additive.

Chip	Adv cols	Fixed cols	Lookups	Trash	Proof size			VK size		Total
Chip	Adv cols	Fixed cols	Lookups	Trash	Com	Evals	Bytes	Com	Bytes	Bytes

Note on advice column merging: Chip advice columns use max-count merge, not summation. JubJub has 9 advice columns which absorb Native's 5 — the combined chip does not add 5+9=14, it uses 9 total. This is why JubJub and Hash-to-Curve share the same advice column count.

Verifier Operation Counts

Number of individual scalar expressions contributed by each chip, before batching into gate, lookup, and trashcan arguments.

Chip	Gate expr.	Lookup expr.	Trash expr.

Minimum number of scalar operations required per chip summed across gate, lookup, and trashcan arguments as well as number of operations for the Multi-Scalar Multiplications (MSMs).

Chip	Args					MSM
Chip	neg	add	sub	mul	from_int	add	mul	addG1	mulG1