The Cost of Choosing a Proprietary ZK Stack

Proprietary stacks create a single point of failure and control. You become dependent on one team's roadmap, pricing, and continued existence.\n- Exit Costs: Migrating to another prover can require a full circuit rewrite, costing $1M+ and 6-12 months of engineering time.\n- Innovation Lag: You're stuck waiting for the vendor to implement new primitives (e.g., custom precompiles, faster recursion).

Closed-source circuits are inherently less secure. The community cannot formally verify the code, creating a permanent trust assumption.\n- Limited Scrutiny: Reliance on a single audit firm versus the global peer-review model of open-source (e.g., zkEVM circuits).\n- Hidden Bugs: Opaque code obscures subtle logic errors or backdoors that could lead to >$100M exploits, as seen in other opaque bridge and DeFi systems.

A niche, proprietary SDK severely limits your hiring pool and slows development velocity. You cannot leverage the broader ZK research community.\n- Recruiting Friction: You must train every new hire on an obscure stack instead of hiring experts in RISC Zero, SP1, or gnark.\n- Knowledge Silos: Critical system knowledge is concentrated in a few engineers, creating massive operational risk if they leave.

Value generated by your chain's activity (proving fees, sequencing) is captured by the proprietary stack's parent entity, not your token or community.\n- Revenue Siphon: Proving fees flow to a centralized service, mirroring the Infura dependency problem of early L1s.\n- No Shared Upside: You cannot benefit from ecosystem-wide improvements in open-source provers like Boojum (zkSync) that drive down costs for all users.

ZK proving is advancing at a ~6-month innovation cycle. A proprietary stack that falls behind becomes a legacy anchor.\n- Performance Decay: Your TPS and cost profile become uncompetitive versus chains using cutting-edge, open-source provers like Plonky2 or Nova.\n- Forking Impossibility: You cannot easily integrate breakthroughs from Ulvetanna, Ingonyama, or academic papers without vendor permission.

A custom ZKVM creates friction for cross-chain bridges, shared liquidity, and developer tooling. You are building an island.\n- Bridge Complexity: Trust-minimized bridges (e.g., using zkLightClient proofs) must build custom verifiers for your unique stack.\n- Tooling Gap: Ecosystem standards like Foundry and Hardhat will prioritize support for mainstream VMs (EVM, SVM, Move) over your proprietary environment.

Proprietary stacks create a hard dependency on a single vendor's roadmap and pricing. This kills your negotiating power and exposes you to existential risk if the vendor pivots or fails.

• Exit Cost: Migrating to another stack requires a full re-audit and re-implementation.
• Innovation Lag: You are locked to their release cycle, unable to integrate new proving schemes like Booleannet or Plonky3.

Closed-source cryptography is a red flag for security-conscious users and auditors. You cannot perform a true trust-minimized security review, forcing reliance on the vendor's reputation alone.

• Audit Surface: You can only audit the integration layer, not the core proving logic.
• Market Trust: Protocols like Aave and Uniswap will demand exhaustive, costly audits for any opaque component.

A niche, proprietary SDK has a shallow talent pool and minimal community tooling. You pay a premium for developers and miss out on the collective intelligence of open-source ecosystems like zkSync's ZK Stack or Polygon CDK.

• Hiring Friction: Engineers familiar with Circom, Halo2, or Noir cannot easily transfer skills.
• Tooling Gap: You forego battle-tested libraries, debuggers, and EVM equivalence layers built by the community.

Proprietary VMs and proof systems create friction with the broader Ethereum and L2 ecosystem. You become a silo, complicating integrations with cross-chain bridges like LayerZero or intents infrastructure like Across.

• Bridge Complexity: Custom state proofs require custom, unaudited trust assumptions for bridges.
• Composability Loss: Your dApps cannot be natively composed with major DeFi protocols on Arbitrum or Optimism.

The initial time-to-market gain evaporates when you need to upgrade or fix a critical bug. Without access to the source, you cannot fork and maintain the stack independently, a core ethos of decentralized systems.

• Upgrade Blocked: You are at the vendor's mercy for critical security patches.
• Protocol Risk: Contrast with OP Stack chains, which can fork and iterate freely, as seen with Base and Fraxtal.

Proprietary systems often have higher operational costs due to lack of competitive proving markets and inefficient proving architectures. Open ecosystems like Ethereum's L2s drive down costs through shared innovation.

• Proving Costs: No access to aggregated proving services or shared sequencer networks.
• Inefficient Tech: Likely missing optimizations like recursive proofs, leading to ~30% higher operational overhead.