Understanding Verifiable Computation

The advent of blockchain technology has necessitated the development and use of verifiable off-chain computation: having an on-chain representation of certain computation off-chain that can be trustlessly verified. The ability to do so is advantageous in several contexts, such as ensuring the integrity of third-party compute, conferring data privacy and improving computing efficiency.

The precise definition of verifiable computation is ever-evolving. Traditionally, to verify some computation, one would simply run the computation again on another device to ensure that the same result is produced, but this is considered a redundancy. To eliminate the need to re-compute the same instructions, we can utilize one of the three common approaches to perform verifiable computation: secure enclaves, homomorphic encryption and validity proofs.