PLONK and universal setups

PLONK broke the per-circuit trusted-setup curse. The structured reference string is universal and updatable, which means a single ceremony serves every circuit whose size fits under the SRS bound.

The core trick is a permutation argument over a trace table, turning copy constraints into a single grand-product check. On top of that came PLONKish arithmetization: custom gates, lookup arguments like Plookup and cq, and extensions that power UltraPlonk, HyperPlonk and Plonky2.

The prover still carries heavy FFT and MSM cost, but the universality is why PLONK derivatives dominate new zkEVM builds. When somebody says their proof system is PLONKish they mean a trace table plus grand product plus whatever custom gates they needed.