What is the Prover, and where does its code run?

The vlayer Prover is a special program written as a Solidity smart contract. It handles large, private calculations off-chain (outside of the main blockchain).

The Prover’s code runs on the vlayer zkEVM system, which currently works on cloud servers or on a user’s computer.

The result of this calculation is called a "proof". Only this result gets sent to the blockchain, while the inputs and actual steps in the calculation stay private.