The Future of Proving is Client-Side and Browser-Based

Centralized proving services like zkSync Era and StarkNet create a single point of failure and rent extraction. This undermines decentralization and creates a $1B+ annual market for sequencer/prover profits controlled by a few entities.

• Centralized Control: A handful of nodes control finality for millions of users.
• Cost Opaqueness: Users pay a hidden tax for proof generation with no competitive market.
• Censorship Vector: A malicious prover can stall or censor transactions.

Move proof verification to the user's browser via WebAssembly (WASM) and WebGPU. This turns every client into a light client capable of verifying zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs locally, inspired by Jolt's approach to client-side proving.

• Trust Minimization: Users verify chain state directly, eliminating reliance on third-party RPCs.
• Sub-Second Latency: Local verification in ~100-500ms, faster than network round-trips.
• Universal Access: No specialized hardware; runs on any modern browser.

Protocols like Succinct, RISC Zero, and Lasso are building the primitives for portable, efficient proving. They enable SP1-style zkVMs to compile to WASM, making complex proofs executable client-side.

• Proof Portability: A single proof can be verified across chains and environments.
• Developer UX: Write circuits once, deploy proofs anywhere—browser, mobile, server.
• Cost Collapse: Shifts economics from pay-per-proof to fixed-cost software distribution.

Browser-based verification enables truly trustless cross-chain interactions. Projects like Across and Chainlink CCIP rely on off-chain committees; client-side proofs remove this assumption.

• Instant Finality: Verify the source chain's validity proof in your wallet before signing.
• No Oracles Required: Direct state verification eliminates oracle manipulation risks.
• Composable Security: Enables UniswapX-style intents with cryptographic guarantees, not social consensus.

Even with efficient verification, downloading multi-megabyte proofs for every interaction is impractical. Solutions require recursive proofs (like Nova) and proof aggregation to compress state updates.

• Bandwidth Tax: A 2MB proof costs more in data than the transaction fee itself.
• Storage Overhead: Light clients cannot store entire chain histories.
• Solution Path: Incremental verifiability and peer-to-proof networks like The Graph for zk.

This culminates in a paradigm where validity is a personal property, not a service. Wallets like Rabby and MetaMask become validity clients, enabling a new class of intent-based applications that are secure by default.

• Sovereign Security: Your security perimeter is your device, not a staking pool.
• Protocol Agnosticism: Interact with any L1/L2/L3 without trusting its infrastructure.
• Regulatory Arbitrage: Compliance shifts to application layer; base layer is pure math.

Browser-based proving assumes consumer hardware can keep pace with specialized ASICs. The reality is a trade-off triangle between proof time, cost, and security level.\n- ~30-60 second proof times on a laptop render many DeFi interactions non-viable.\n- Users on older devices become second-class citizens, fracturing network accessibility.\n- The push for speed risks compromising proof security parameters or moving complexity back to centralized sequencers.

Client-side proving creates a massive opportunity for RPC/Infura-level centralization. Users will not run complex proving software; they will delegate it to a trusted service.\n- A few major wallets (e.g., MetaMask, Rabby) or infrastructure providers will become the de facto proving layer.\n- This recreates the trusted intermediary problem that ZK tech aimed to solve, creating a single point of censorship and failure.\n- The economic model for decentralized prover networks remains unproven at scale.

Putting a prover in every browser exponentially increases the attack surface. Malicious proofs and resource exhaustion become trivial to weaponize.\n- Griefing Attacks: Spamming networks with invalid proof generation requests to cripple client devices.\n- Supply Chain Attacks: Compromising a widely-used SDK (like ZK-Kit or SnarkJS) could poison thousands of proofs.\n- Data Availability Reliance: Client proofs are only as good as their data source, creating a weak link back to Celestia or EigenDA.

The vision of seamless, invisible proving collides with browser limitations and user behavior. Consent, resource management, and failure states break the magic.\n- Permission Fatigue: Users will reject constant requests for high CPU usage, killing session continuity.\n- Battery & Data Drain: Mobile proving could drain a phone battery in ~1 hour, making it a non-starter.\n- Silent Failures: A failed proof in the background leads to stuck transactions, creating a worse UX than today's clear MetaMask rejections.

Without standardization, each application or L2 (zkSync, Starknet, Scroll) will ship its own proving WASM, leading to bloat and insecurity.\n- Browser Bloat: Users may need 10+ different proving backends active, each a security liability.\n- No Shared Security: Isolated proving stacks prevent the network effects and shared security seen in Ethereum's execution layer.\n- Innovation Lock-in: New proof systems (like Binius or Jolt) face a multi-year adoption cycle to reach users.

The business case for decentralized proving is untested. Prover rewards must cover hardware costs, but users expect free transactions.\n- Who Pays?: If users pay proving fees, it reintroduces gas-like friction. If apps subsidize, it's a centralized cost center.\n- Prover Extractable Value (PEV): The race for MEV will replicate inside the proving network, adding complexity and risk.\n- Tokenomics Dependence: The system likely relies on an inflationary native token, creating Filecoin-style sustainability questions.

Relying on a few trusted servers for proof generation creates a single point of failure, censorship risk, and high latency. This negates the decentralized ethos of the applications they serve.\n- Security Risk: A compromised prover can forge proofs.\n- Censorship Vector: Operators can deny service.\n- Latency Overhead: Adds ~500-2000ms for round-trip to a server.

Libraries like SnarkJS and ZK-WASM enable proof generation directly in the browser using WebAssembly. The user's device becomes the prover, with the application serving only as a verifier.\n- Trust Minimization: User cryptographically proves state transitions locally.\n- Uncensorable: No central service to block.\n- Native UX: Enables instant, client-side actions for gaming, identity, and trading.

Projects like Succinct, RISC Zero, and Lasso are pioneering a future where any chain or application can request and verify a ZK proof of arbitrary computation. The browser is the execution and proving engine.\n- Interoperability: Prove state from Chain A to Chain B without a new bridge.\n- Scalability: Offload heavy computation to clients, not the base layer.\n- Composability: Proofs become portable data assets (like zkSNARKs for Twitter proofs).

Client-side proving enables new primitives for seamless onboarding and privacy. zkLogin (Sui) uses ZK proofs for OAuth logins. Privy and Dynamic abstract wallet creation, with client-side proofs as a future path for privacy.\n- Mass Adoption: Login with Google, prove you own the account, without exposing your graph.\n- Key Management: Social recovery schemes powered by MPC and local proofs.\n- Regulatory Clarity: Selective disclosure proofs for compliance (e.g., proof-of-human, proof-of-jurisdiction).

Browser-based proving is not yet instant. Proof generation for complex circuits can take 5-30 seconds on a modern laptop. The frontier is WebGPU integration and dedicated co-processors.\n- Current Limit: WASM in browsers is slower than native.\n- Next Frontier: WebGPU for GPU acceleration of MSM/FFT operations.\n- Hardware Endgame: Phones with NPU/TPU support for sub-second proofs.

Why lock assets in a bridge contract when you can prove ownership of them on another chain? Client-side proofs enable intent-based, atomic cross-chain swaps without canonical bridges. This disrupts models from LayerZero to Wormhole.\n- Capital Efficiency: No locked liquidity in bridge pools.\n- Security: No $2B+ hack target.\n- UX: Swap from Chain A to Chain B in one signature, proven locally.