Future L2 Fees Will Be Dictated by Prover Economics, Not Gas

Today's L2 fees are a derivative of Ethereum's volatile gas prices, creating unpredictable costs and limiting scalability. The sequencer's primary job is to batch and post data, a process inherently constrained by L1 block space.

• Cost Volatility: User fees swing with L1 congestion, breaking UX.
• Throughput Ceiling: Limited by L1's ~80KB per block data availability.
• Inefficient Pricing: Users pay for data, not for the core computational work (proofs).

Future L2 fees will be set by a competitive market for proof generation (ZK) or fraud proof arbitration (Optimistic). The cost to prove a batch of transactions becomes the new base fee.

• Direct Cost Driver: Fees reflect prover hardware (GPU/ASIC) and electricity, not L1 gas auctions.
• Predictable Pricing: Prover costs are stable and trend downward with hardware advances.
• New Actors: Specialized prover networks like RiscZero, Succinct, and Ingonyama become critical infrastructure.

The core optimization shifts from compressing calldata (via EIP-4844 blobs) to compressing computational integrity proofs. Efficiency is measured in proof cycles per dollar, not bytes per gas.

• New Metric: Proofs-Per-Joule becomes the key efficiency benchmark.
• Hardware Race: ASICs for PLONK or STARK proofs will dominate, similar to Bitcoin mining.
• Protocol Design: L2s like zkSync, Starknet, and Polygon zkEVM compete on prover performance, not just data pricing.

A single, centralized prover is a fee oracle. It dictates the price of L2 settlement with zero market competition, turning L2s into high-margin SaaS businesses for their operators.\n- No Fee Discovery: Users pay what the sequencer/prover cartel demands.\n- Security Subsidy: Centralized provers rely on the base layer's security, creating a free-rider problem.\n- Protocol Capture: Value accrues to the prover entity, not the L2's token or community.

Decouple proof generation from sequencing. Let a competitive market of specialized provers (e.g., RiscZero, Succinct) bid for the work, driving costs toward hardware marginal cost.\n- Cost Discovery: Provers compete on price and speed in real-time.\n- Specialization: GPU/ASIC farms optimize for specific proof systems (STARKs, SNARKs).\n- L2 as a True Marketplace: The protocol becomes a coordinator, capturing value via fees from the proving auction.

EigenLayer's restaking model creates a cryptoeconomic security pool for decentralized prover networks. Prover services become Actively Validated Services (AVSs), slashed for malfeasance.\n- Security as a Commodity: Provers lease security from Ethereum stakers, lowering capital barriers.\n- Unified Slashing: A single corruption attempt risks the prover's entire restaked capital across all AVSs.\n- Rapid Bootstrapping: New proof systems (e.g., zkVM) can instantly tap into a $10B+ security pool.

Sequencer decentralization (via Espresso, Astria) forces L2s to become prover-agnostic. The sequencer posts batches, and any prover can generate the validity proof, breaking the integrated monopoly.\n- Unbundled Stack: Sequencing, Execution, Proving become separate, competitive markets.\n- Proof-of-Correctness: The first valid proof gets the fee, not the only prover.\n- Interop Leverage: Shared sequencers natively enable cross-rollup proofs, a killer app for zk-bridges.

The most efficient L2s won't run provers. They will aggregate proofs from thousands of micro-chains (rollups, app-chains) and submit a single aggregated proof to Ethereum, amortizing cost.\n- Proof Compression: A single STARK can verify millions of transactions across disparate chains.\n- Ultra-Low Fees: Settlement cost per transaction approaches zero.\n- Modular Dominance: The winning L2 stack is the one with the most efficient proof aggregation market, not the best VM.

A competitive prover market introduces new MEV vectors. The first prover to generate a validity proof for a profitable batch captures the fee. This leads to: \n- Proof Frontrunning: Provers with faster hardware or proprietary algorithms extract timing rents.\n- Batch Censorship: Provers may refuse to prove batches with unprofitable or sanctioned transactions.\n- Centralization Pressure: The race for sub-second proofs favors well-capitalized, centralized prover farms, recreating the problem.

Today's L2 fees are dominated by L1 data posting costs (e.g., ~80% on Optimism). This is a temporary artifact of early-stage scaling. As data availability shifts to cheaper layers like EigenDA and Celestia, the dominant cost center becomes the prover's compute and capital.

• Key Insight: Final fee = (DA Cost) + (Prover Profit Margin). DA cost is commoditizing to near-zero.
• Implication: Comparing L2s on today's gas fees is like judging cars by their ashtrays.

Decoupling execution from proof generation creates a competitive marketplace. Projects like RiscZero, Succinct, and Georli are building infrastructure for this. The winning L2 will have the most efficient prover auction.

• Key Benefit: Dynamic fee discovery based on prover competition, not a fixed overhead.
• Key Benefit: Specialized hardware (GPUs, ASICs) can be leveraged without the L2 team owning it, driving costs down.

L2s that vertically integrate their prover stack (e.g., building a bespoke prover team) take on massive technical risk and fixed cost. The winning model is modular: L2s focus on execution environment and user acquisition, while sourcing proofs from a competitive market.

• Watch For: L2s adopting zkVM standards (RISC-V, SP1) for prover portability.
• Red Flag: Teams boasting about in-house prover efficiency—it's a cost center, not a moat.

Networks like Espresso, Astria, and Radius are creating neutral sequencing layers. The next step is integrating a proof marketplace. This creates a unified liquidity and security layer for modular rollups.

• Key Benefit: Cross-rollup atomic composability enabled by shared sequencing, with proofs settled to L1.
• Key Benefit: Economies of scale for provers serving hundreds of rollups, not just one.

Forget $ per transaction. The new fundamental unit is the cost to cryptographically verify a state update on L1. This is a function of proof system (SNARK, STARK), hardware, and market liquidity.

• Benchmark: Compare zkSync, Starknet, and Polygon zkEVM on this basis, not UX gas fees.
• Driver: Proof recursion and aggregation (e.g., via Nebra) will collapse this cost for high-throughput chains.

When the prover market is liquid and DA is a commodity, launching an L2 becomes a software deployment. The value accrues to the execution client (like Geth today) and the shared sequencing/proving network. Think Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) from Conduit, Caldera, AltLayer.

• Implication: Massive fragmentation of the rollup space, with winners being infrastructure providers, not individual L2 "chains."
• Action: Invest in the picks and shovels, not the individual gold mines.