The proving wall is real. Every major scaling vector—ZK-rollups, validity proofs for interop, and privacy-preserving applications—hits a computational ceiling on standard hardware.
venture-capital-trends-in-web3
Blog
The Future of Web3 Scale Lies in Specialized Proving Hardware
General-purpose compute is hitting a wall on ZK proof generation. This analysis argues that specialized hardware (ASICs, FPGAs) is the non-negotiable bottleneck for scaling Ethereum, L2s, and privacy chains, defining the next major infrastructure investment frontier.
introduction
THE BOTTLENECK
Introduction
General-purpose compute cannot scale zero-knowledge cryptography, creating a fundamental constraint for the next generation of blockchains.
General-purpose CPUs are inefficient. They waste >99% of transistor real estate on control logic and caching, not the massive parallel arithmetic required for elliptic curve operations and polynomial commitments.
Specialized hardware is inevitable. The performance gap between a CPU and an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for ZK proofs exceeds 1000x, mirroring Bitcoin's transition from CPUs to ASIC miners.
Evidence: A single Groth16 proof on a CPU takes seconds; a purpose-built prover from Ingonyama or Cysic generates proofs in milliseconds, unlocking sub-second finality for chains like zkSync and Starknet.
key-trends
THE ZK-FIRST INFRASTRUCTURE SHIFT
Executive Summary: The Hardware Imperative
General-purpose compute is failing the scaling trilemma; the next wave of web3 throughput will be built on dedicated silicon.
01
The Problem: The ZK Proving Bottleneck
Generating a zero-knowledge proof on a CPU can take minutes to hours, making real-time settlement impossible. This latency caps L2 throughput and makes on-chain gaming/DePIN non-viable.\n- ~30 second proof times stall rollup finality.\n- $0.50+ per proof cost destroys micro-transaction economics.
Minutes
CPU Proof Time
$0.50+
Cost Per Proof
02
The Solution: ASICs & FPGAs for ZK
Custom hardware like zkASICs (Ingonyama, Cysic) and FPGAs accelerate specific cryptographic operations (MSM, NTT) by orders of magnitude. This turns proofs from a bottleneck into a utility.\n- 100-1000x faster MSM operations vs. GPU.\n- Enables sub-second proof generation for real-time apps.
1000x
MSM Speedup
<1s
Target Proof Time
03
The New Stack: Prover Networks & Co-Processors
Decentralized prover networks (RiscZero, Succinct) and zkVM co-processors (Axiom, Brevis) abstract hardware complexity. Developers submit proof jobs to a marketplace of specialized hardware, paying for compute, not capital expenditure.\n- Market-based pricing for proof generation.\n- Enables trustless off-chain computation for L1s like Ethereum.
~500ms
Job Latency
-90%
Dev Cost Reduction
04
The Economic Flywheel: Proving as a Commodity
As demand for ZK proofs scales (rollups, interoperability, AI), dedicated hardware creates a high-margin, defensible infrastructure layer. Proof generation becomes a standardized, low-cost utility, similar to AWS EC2 instances.\n- $10B+ potential market for proof services.\n- Drives L2 transaction costs toward <$0.001.
$10B+
Service Market
<$0.001
Target TX Cost
05
The Security Primitive: Formal Verification on Silicon
Hardware-enforced security models (e.g., secure enclaves in TEEs) and formally verified circuits move trust from social consensus to physical and mathematical guarantees. This is critical for bridges (LayerZero, Across) and shared sequencers.\n- Eliminates multi-sig governance delays.\n- Provides continuous, real-time validity proofs for state.
Real-Time
Validity Proofs
0 Trust
Assumption Reduction
06
The Endgame: The Modular Proving Cloud
The future stack separates settlement, execution, and proving. Specialized proving clouds (potentially from AWS, Google Cloud) become the neutral, high-throughput engine for all chains, enabling atomic cross-chain composability via shared proofs.\n- Universal proof marketplace for all L1s/L2s.\n- Finalizes the shift from 'blockchain scaling' to 'world computer' throughput.
Universal
Proof Standard
Atomic
Cross-Chain Comp
thesis-statement
THE HARDWARE BOTTLENECK
The Core Argument: Moore's Law is Dead for General-Purpose ZK
General-purpose compute cannot scale zero-knowledge proofs to meet global demand, necessitating a shift to specialized hardware.
General-purpose CPUs and GPUs hit a performance wall for ZK proving. Their architectures are optimized for linear, sequential tasks, not the massively parallel, arithmetic-heavy operations of polynomial commitments and multi-scalar multiplications required by zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs.
The performance gap is exponential. A modern GPU proves a simple transaction in seconds; a purpose-built ZK Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) does it in milliseconds. This gap widens with proof complexity, making Ethereum-scale L2 state transitions infeasible on commodity hardware.
Proof aggregation illustrates the chasm. Protocols like EigenDA and Polygon Avail rely on frequent proof batching for data availability. Doing this on AWS instances is cost-prohibitive; doing it on Ingonyama's ICICLE or Ulvetanna's chips changes the economic model.
Evidence: A zkEVM proof on an AWS c6i instance costs ~$0.20 and takes 2 minutes. The same proof on a next-gen ZK ASIC will cost <$0.01 and complete in under 10 seconds, unlocking 10,000+ TPS L2s.
HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE COMPARISON
The Proof Gap: Why General Compute Fails
Comparing the performance and economic viability of general-purpose CPUs/GPUs versus specialized hardware (ASICs, FPGAs) for generating zero-knowledge proofs.
| Key Metric | General Compute (CPU/GPU) | FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) | ZK-ASIC (Application-Specific IC) |
|---|---|---|---|
Proving Time for 1M EVM Gas |
| 2-5 sec | < 1 sec |
Energy per Proof (Joules) |
| ~1,000 J | < 100 J |
Hardware Cost per Unit | $5,000 - $15,000 | $15,000 - $50,000 | $50,000 - $200,000+ |
Proof Throughput (TPS equiv.) | 10-50 | 100-500 | 1,000-10,000 |
Flexibility (Supports new proof systems) | |||
Time-to-Market for New Circuit | Immediate | 3-6 months | 12-24 months |
Dominant Use Case | Development & Testing | Early Production (e.g., Polygon zkEVM) | Mass Scale (e.g., zkSync, StarkNet) |
Economic Viability at 100 TPS |
deep-dive
THE HARDWARE FRONTIER
The Silicon Stack: ASICs, FPGAs, and the New Prover Economy
General-purpose compute fails to scale zero-knowledge proofs, creating a multi-billion dollar market for specialized hardware.
ZK-Proof generation is computationally explosive. The core operations—polynomial commitments and multi-scalar multiplications—overwhelm CPUs and GPUs, creating a performance bottleneck for rollups like zkSync and StarkNet.
FPGAs are the immediate bridge. These field-programmable gate arrays offer a 10-100x speedup over GPUs for specific proof systems, allowing firms like Supranational to iterate on algorithms like Plonk and Groth16 before silicon finalization.
ASICs are the inevitable endgame. Custom Application-Specific Integrated Circuits, like those from Ingonyama, will deliver 1000x efficiency gains, commoditizing proof generation and enabling sub-cent transaction costs for monolithic chains.
The prover market will centralize. ASIC fabrication requires $50M+ capital, creating oligopolies similar to Bitcoin mining. Protocols must architect for prover decentralization or accept hardware-based trust assumptions.
Evidence: A single Ethereum block's ZK-SNARK proof takes ~2 minutes on a high-end GPU. An ASIC-optimized prover reduces this to seconds, unlocking real-time finality for thousands of rollups.
protocol-spotlight
THE HARDWARE ARMS RACE
Battlefield Map: Who's Building the Prover Stack
General-purpose CPUs are hitting a wall. The next order-of-magnitude scaling for ZK-Rollups and L2s requires purpose-built silicon.
01
The Problem: The CPU Bottleneck
ZK-proof generation on commodity hardware is slow and expensive, creating a centralizing force and capping L2 throughput.\n- Proving times for complex circuits can take minutes to hours on a server.\n- This creates high, volatile fees and limits real-time finality for applications like gaming or DEX arbitrage.\n- The computational demand acts as a natural validator monopoly, contradicting decentralization goals.
>10 min
Prove Time
$10+
Prover Cost
02
The Solution: Custom ASICs (Ingonyama, Cysic)
Application-Specific Integrated Circuits are hardwired for finite field arithmetic and MSM operations, the core of ZKPs.\n- Deliver 100-1000x speedups for specific proof systems (e.g., Groth16, Plonk).\n- Drastically reduce energy consumption per proof versus GPU farms.\n- Enable sub-second proof generation, making ZK-EVMs viable for high-frequency trading.
1000x
Faster MSM
-90%
Power Use
03
The Solution: GPU & FPGA Accelerators (Ulvetanna, Supranational)
Leverage parallelizable hardware (GPUs) or reconfigurable chips (FPGAs) for faster time-to-market and flexibility across proof systems.\n- Faster iteration than ASICs; can optimize for new ZK constructions (e.g., Nova, Boojum).\n- Cloud-native deployment allows prover services to scale elastically with L2 demand.\n- Critical for prover decentralization, lowering the capital barrier for independent operators.
50-100x
Speedup
Elastic
Scalability
04
The Meta-Solution: Shared Prover Networks (Espresso, Gevulot)
Decentralized networks that commoditize specialized hardware, creating a marketplace for proving power.\n- L2s rent proving capacity instead of building their own hardware stack.\n- Economic security via staking and slashing for prover nodes.\n- Creates a liquid market for proofs, driving costs toward marginal electricity + hardware depreciation.
Pay-per-Proof
Model
Decentralized
Provers
05
The Vertical Integrator: Polygon zkEVM & Their Prover
The full-stack approach: control the L2, the proving software (Plonky2), and partner on custom hardware (via Ulvetanna).\n- Tight integration eliminates coordination overhead between L2 client and prover.\n- Protocol-level optimizations (e.g., proof aggregation) can be hardware-aware.\n- Sets a precedent for other major L2s (zkSync, Scroll) to follow suit or risk competitive disadvantage.
E2E Control
Stack
< $0.001
Target Cost
06
The Endgame: Proof Commoditization & New Primitives
When proving becomes cheap and fast, it ceases to be a bottleneck and becomes a fundamental building block.\n- Enables ZK-based interoperability (like layerzero) without trust assumptions.\n- Makes privacy-preserving proofs (zk-SNARKs) viable for mainstream dApp logic.\n- Unlocks fully on-chain games and AI where state transitions are proven, not just asserted.
~$0.0001
Proof Cost
< 1 sec
Finality
counter-argument
THE HARDWARE FALLACY
The Optimist's Rebuttal (And Why It's Wrong)
Specialized proving hardware is a necessary but insufficient condition for scaling; the real bottleneck is architectural.
Hardware is a commodity. The performance gains from ASICs and GPUs for ZK-provers are real, but they follow a predictable price/performance curve. The market will commoditize them, just as it did with Bitcoin mining rigs. The competitive moat for a rollup like zkSync or Starknet will not be its prover hardware, but its developer ecosystem and fee market efficiency.
The bottleneck is data availability. A prover can generate a proof in seconds, but the chain must still post that proof's data. Ethereum's blob space is the ultimate constraint, not proving speed. This is why Celestia and EigenDA are foundational; they decouple data from execution, making proving hardware a downstream concern.
Architecture dictates economics. A monolithic chain with a fast prover still fails if its state growth is unbounded. Solana's parallel execution and Fuel's UTXO model demonstrate that scaling requires rethinking state access, not just accelerating one component. Hardware optimizes a process; architecture defines the process itself.
risk-analysis
THE HARDWARE TRAP
The Bear Case: Hardware Pitfalls and Centralization Risks
Specialized proving hardware is essential for scaling ZK-Rollups, but it creates new bottlenecks and centralization vectors that threaten decentralization.
01
The Problem: GPU Proving is a Bottleneck
General-purpose GPUs are inefficient for ZK proving, creating a throughput ceiling. This limits the scalability of Starknet, zkSync, and Polygon zkEVM, capping TPS and inflating user costs.
- Proving Latency: ~10-30 seconds for complex transactions.
- Cost Structure: Proving can be >50% of a rollup's operational expense.
- Market Capture: NVIDIA's dominance creates a single point of failure.
>50%
Of OpEx
~30s
Prove Time
02
The Solution: ASICs & FPGAs (Ingonyama, Cysic)
Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer 100-1000x efficiency gains over GPUs for ZK proofs. Startups like Ingonyama and Cysic are building this specialized hardware to break the bottleneck.
- Throughput: Target >10,000 TPS per prover cluster.
- Cost Reduction: Aim for ~90% lower proving costs versus GPUs.
- Risk: Creates a new, highly centralized hardware oligopoly.
100-1000x
Efficiency Gain
~90%
Cost Target
03
The Risk: Prover Centralization & MEV
High capital costs for ASIC/FPGA farms will concentrate proving power among a few entities (e.g., Espresso Systems, Astria). This creates a new layer for Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) extraction and censorship.
- Validator Dilemma: Who controls the provers controls the chain's liveness.
- MEV Surface: Provers can reorder or censor transactions before proof generation.
- Regulatory Target: Centralized proving clusters are easy points of enforcement.
Oligopoly
Risk
New MEV
Vector
04
The Mitigation: Proof Markets & Distributed Networks
Protocols like Succinct, RiscZero, and Geometric Energy Corp are building decentralized proof markets. These networks allow any hardware owner to sell proving compute, creating competition and redundancy.
- Economic Security: $1B+ in staked assets could secure proof networks.
- Fault Tolerance: No single hardware failure can halt the chain.
- Challenge: Achieving low-latency consensus in a distributed market is unsolved.
$1B+
Stake Target
Distributed
Architecture
05
The Economic Model: Prover Extractable Value (PEV)
Provers will capture value beyond fees, creating Prover Extractable Value (PEV). This mirrors MEV at the L1 level but is concentrated at the proving layer. It will fund hardware but distort incentives.
- Revenue Stream: PEV could be 2-5x larger than base proving fees.
- Incentive Misalignment: Provers may prioritize high-PEV batches over user experience.
- Solution Needed: Fair ordering protocols must be integrated at the proof layer.
2-5x
Fee Multiplier
PEV
New Incentive
06
The Endgame: Vertical Integration by L2s
Major rollups (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync) will vertically integrate into hardware to control their destiny. This leads to walled garden ecosystems where scale is captive, replicating cloud provider dynamics.
- Strategic Control: Ensures proving capacity and cost predictability.
- Ecosystem Lock-in: Developers choose chains based on hardware performance.
- Result: The decentralization vs. scale trade-off becomes a core business decision.
Walled Garden
Risk
Vertical
Integration
investment-thesis
THE INFRASTRUCTURE PLAY
Capital Allocation: Betting on the Pickaxes
The next wave of web3 scaling will be won by specialized hardware, not general-purpose software.
General-purpose compute fails for zero-knowledge proofs. Proving a zkEVM circuit on an AWS c6i instance is 100x slower and 50x more expensive than on a dedicated FPGA or ASIC. This cost asymmetry defines the scaling bottleneck.
The pickaxe thesis dominates. Capital flows to the infrastructure layer enabling the application gold rush. Investors are backing Risc Zero, Ingonyama, and Cysic to build the specialized proving hardware that protocols like zkSync and Starknet will depend on.
Proof markets will commoditize execution. Layer 2s will become proof aggregation and settlement layers, outsourcing the heavy proving work to a decentralized network of specialized hardware operators. This mirrors how AWS commoditized server hardware for web2.
Evidence: Ingonyama's ICICLE library demonstrates a 10-100x speedup for NTT operations on GPUs, a core ZK primitive. This performance gap is the investment thesis.
takeaways
SPECIALIZED HARDWARE IS THE BOTTLENECK
TL;DR: The Hard Truth About Soft Scaling
General-purpose CPUs are hitting a wall. The next order-of-magnitude gains in ZK proving speed and cost require purpose-built silicon.
01
The Problem: The ZK Proving Wall
Generating a ZK proof for a large transaction batch can take minutes on a high-end CPU, creating unacceptable latency for DeFi and gaming. The computational cost is the primary barrier to ZK-Rollup dominance.
- ~30-60 second proving times for complex ops
- $0.10+ per proof cost at scale
- Limits ZK-EVM throughput to ~100 TPS
60s+
Prove Time
$0.10+
Cost/Proof
02
The Solution: ASICs & Custom Silicon
Companies like Ingonyama, Cysic, and Ulvetanna are building hardware accelerators specifically for ZK primitives (MSM, NTT). This is the Moore's Law jump for zero-knowledge cryptography.
- 100-1000x faster MSM operations
- Enables sub-second proof generation
- Drives cost toward <$0.01 per proof
1000x
Faster MSM
<$0.01
Target Cost
03
The Consequence: Prover Markets & Decentralization
Cheap, fast hardware enables a competitive prover marketplace, breaking the centralization risk of a single sequencer-prover. Protocols like Espresso Systems and RiscZero are architecting for this future.
- Permissionless proving for any rollup
- Real-time settlement for intents (UniswapX)
- Hardware diversity as a security primitive
Permissionless
Prover Access
Real-Time
Settlement
04
The New Stack: Hardware-Aware ZK VMs
ZK Virtual Machines are being redesigned for hardware. RiscZero's zkVM uses a RISC-V base for efficient verification. Succinct's SP1 and Polygon zkEVM are optimizing instruction sets for GPU/ASIC pipelines.
- Instruction sets optimized for parallel hardware
- Proof aggregation becomes trivial
- Unlocks ZK-Coprocessors for on-chain AI
RISC-V
Base ISA
Parallel
Optimized
05
The Economic Shift: From Gas to Proof Subsidies
With proving costs near-zero, the economic model flips. Rollups will subsidize proofs to capture order flow, similar to MEV rebates. The battle moves to sequencer margins and prover efficiency.
- Near-zero marginal cost for L2 inclusion
- Prover rewards become a fixed infrastructure cost
- User experience becomes the primary moat
~$0
Marginal Cost
Fixed Cost
Prover Rewards
06
The Endgame: ZK for Everything
Specialized hardware makes ZK proofs cheap enough for per-transaction privacy, light client verification, and cross-chain messaging. This erodes the security assumptions of optimistic rollups and multi-chain bridges like LayerZero.
- ZK-light clients replace trusted oracles
- Private DeFi becomes default
- Intent-based architectures (Across, CowSwap) execute with cryptographic guarantees
Default Privacy
Possible
Trustless Bridges
Enabled
ENQUIRY
Get In Touch
today.
Our experts will offer a free quote and a 30min call to discuss your project.
NDA Protected
Confidentiality24h Response
Time to ValueDirectly to Engineering Team
No Sales Fluff10+
Protocols Shipped
$20M+
TVL Overall