Prover redundancy is a tax on throughput. Every optimistic or zk-rollup today must fund multiple, independent prover networks like EigenDA or Espresso Systems to ensure liveness, which duplicates the most expensive part of the stack.
zk-rollups-the-endgame-for-scaling
Blog
The Unsustainable Cost of Prover Redundancy
An analysis of how the liveness requirement for ZK-Rollups forces protocols to maintain multiple, expensive proving systems, replicating capital and operational costs and threatening long-term economic viability.
introduction
THE COST
Introduction
The current model of running multiple, competing provers for the same computation is economically unsustainable.
This creates a direct conflict between security and scalability. Adding more provers for censorship resistance, as seen in Arbitrum's BOLD design, linearly increases the system's total computational overhead without increasing useful transaction capacity.
The economic model is broken. Provers compete for a fixed fee pool from sequencer revenue, creating a race to the bottom on costs that degrades hardware quality and centralizes proving to the lowest-cost operators, undermining the decentralization goal.
thesis-statement
THE COST MULTIPLIER
The Core Argument: Redundancy Replicates Cost, Not Just Compute
Redundant proving architectures create a linear cost model that scales with usage, not a fixed-cost security model.
Redundant proving is linear cost. Every transaction requires multiple, independent validity proofs from different prover networks like RiscZero, Succinct, or Jolt. This replicates the most expensive computational component for every single state update.
This is not fault tolerance. Systems like AWS achieve resilience with idle, hot-standby resources. In proving, every prover in a set like EigenLayer AVS must perform the full, expensive computation simultaneously to reach consensus on validity.
The cost model fails at scale. A network processing 1,000 TPS with 5x redundancy pays for 5,000 TPS worth of compute. This creates a per-transaction cost floor that makes microtransactions and high-throughput dApps economically impossible.
Evidence: A zkVM proof for a simple Uniswap swap can cost $0.05-$0.10. With 5x redundancy, the base settlement cost for that swap is $0.25-$0.50 before any sequencer or L1 gas fees are applied.
key-trends
THE UNSUSTAINABLE COST OF PROVER REDUNDANCY
The Redundancy Mandate: How Protocols Are Boxed In
To achieve credible neutrality and liveness, protocols are forced to run multiple, expensive proving backends, creating a massive operational tax.
01
The Liveness Tax: Paying for Idle Capacity
Protocols like Starknet and zkSync must maintain multiple prover implementations (e.g., Stone, RISC Zero) to avoid single points of failure. This means paying for 2-3x the infrastructure to secure against a single vendor's downtime, a cost passed to users via sequencer fees.
- Cost Multiplier: Infrastructure and R&D costs scale linearly with redundancy.
- Operational Bloat: Teams must manage and audit multiple, complex proving stacks.
2-3x
Infra Cost
100%
Idle Capacity
02
The Vendor Lock-In Paradox
Even with multiple provers, protocols are locked into specific proof systems (e.g., SNARKs, STARKs). Switching costs are prohibitive, stifling innovation. A new, faster proof system from a startup like Succinct or Risc0 can't be adopted without a full, risky migration.
- Innovation Lag: Protocol upgrades are gated by the slowest, most entrenched prover vendor.
- Centralization Risk: Redundancy creates an illusion of choice while cementing a small oligopoly of prover firms.
$10M+
Migration Cost
12-18mo
Upgrade Cycle
03
The Fragmented Security Model
Running Polygon zkEVM, Scroll, and Linea provers in parallel doesn't create additive security; it creates a weakest-link model. An exploit in one prover's trusted setup or circuit logic can compromise the entire system's economic finality.
- Audit Surface: Security review burden multiplies across different codebases and cryptographic assumptions.
- False Sense of Security: Redundancy addresses liveness, not the correctness of the underlying state transition.
N^2
Audit Complexity
1 Weak Link
Security Ceiling
04
The Solution: A Universal Proving Layer
The endgame is a decentralized marketplace for proof generation, like Espresso Systems for sequencing or EigenLayer for restaking. A single, canonical state commitment can be proven by a competitive network of provers using any compatible system.
- Cost Efficiency: Market dynamics drive proving costs toward marginal electricity + hardware.
- Agile Upgrades: New proof systems (e.g., Plonky3, Boojum) can compete on performance without protocol forks.
- Unified Security: The economic security of the proving network backs all state transitions.
-90%
Proving Cost
Instant
Tech Adoption
PROVER ARCHITECTURE
The Redundancy Tax: A Comparative Cost Matrix
A direct comparison of the economic and performance costs of different prover redundancy models in ZK-rollups.
| Cost & Performance Metric | Single Prover (Status Quo) | Multi-Prover w/ Redundancy | Shared Sequencing w/ ZK Proof |
|---|---|---|---|
Prover Hardware Capex per Chain | $500k - $2M | $2M - $8M (4x) | $0 (Shared Infrastructure) |
Monthly Prover OpEx per Chain | $50k - $200k | $200k - $800k (4x) | Usage-based, ~$10k - $50k |
Economic Security Assumption | 1-of-N Honest | K-of-N Honest (e.g., 2-of-4) | 1-of-N Honest + Cryptoeconomic Slashing |
Proving Latency (Time to Finality) | 5 min - 20 min | 5 min - 20 min (No Improvement) | < 1 min (via Pre-Confirmations) |
Liveness Risk During Prover Failure | Chain Halts | Chain Continues (Redundant Node) | Chain Continues (Pool Re-routes) |
Trusted Setup Ceremony Overhead | Per Chain | Per Chain (Multiplied) | Once for Shared Network |
Example Implementations / Analogy | Early Optimism, Arbitrum Nitro | Polygon zkEVM, zkSync Era | Espresso Systems, Astria, Shared Sequencer Networks |
deep-dive
THE COST CURVE
The Slippery Slope: From Redundancy to Insolvency
The economic model of prover redundancy, while securing networks like Polygon zkEVM and zkSync, creates a direct path to unsustainable operational costs.
Redundancy is a cost center. Every duplicate prover in a network like Polygon zkEVM consumes computational resources without generating direct revenue, turning security into a pure expense.
The economic model is inverted. Unlike validators in PoS networks who earn fees, redundant provers are a cost of doing business, creating a perpetual subsidy requirement from the protocol treasury.
This scales with adoption. Higher transaction volume demands more proving power, increasing the capital expenditure burden on the network operator, not distributing it across participants.
Evidence: A network processing 100 TPS with 5x redundancy requires 5x the proving infrastructure of a single-prover system, a cost that grows linearly with usage and provides zero marginal utility.
counter-argument
THE ECONOMIC INCENTIVE
The Bull Case: Can Markets Solve This?
A competitive market for proof generation will commoditize hardware and drive costs toward marginal expense.
Proof generation is a commodity. The computational work of a ZK-SNARK prover is standardized and verifiable. This creates a perfect market where the lowest-cost provider wins, mirroring the evolution of AWS for general compute.
Redundancy becomes a feature. A decentralized network of provers, like the relayers in Across Protocol, creates liveness guarantees and censorship resistance. Users pay for security, not just computation.
Specialized hardware wins. Just as mining pools optimized with ASICs, prover networks will adopt FPGAs and custom ASICs. This specialization drives the marginal cost of a proof toward electricity, not R&D.
Evidence: Espresso Systems' marketplace model shows demand for cheaper, faster proofs. Their integration with rollups like Arbitrum Nova demonstrates that cost competition is already a rollup priority.
risk-analysis
THE UNSUSTAINABLE COST OF PROVER REDUNDANCY
The Bear Case: Failure Modes
Redundant proving is the industry's security crutch, but its economic model is fundamentally broken.
01
The Economic Inefficiency of N-of-N
Current multi-prover models require all N provers to generate proofs for every block, creating massive redundant compute costs. This is a linear cost model for a logarithmic security benefit.
- Costs scale with prover count, not security.
- >90% of compute is wasted on identical work.
- Creates a perverse incentive for prover centralization to cut costs.
>90%
Wasted Compute
Linear O(N)
Cost Scaling
02
The Liveness-Security Trade-Off
To avoid downtime, systems like EigenDA and AltLayer rely on multiple prover sets. This substitutes capital efficiency for liveness, creating a fragile equilibrium.
- High redundancy inflates operational costs by 3-5x.
- Creates a single point of failure in the economic subsidy model.
- Security becomes a function of VC funding, not cryptographic guarantees.
3-5x
Cost Inflation
VC-Dependent
Security Model
03
The Data Availability Bottleneck
Redundant proving exacerbates the core DA problem. Every prover must independently fetch and process the same ~2MB per block from a DA layer like Celestia or EigenDA, multiplying bandwidth costs and latency.
- Bandwidth costs scale linearly with prover count.
- Increases time-to-finality as the slowest prover dictates pace.
- Makes proof aggregation economically unviable.
~2MB/block
DA Load
Linear
Bandwidth Cost
04
The Solution: Proof Aggregation Nets
The endgame is a peer-to-peer network of provers using recursive proof aggregation (e.g., Nebra, Succinct). A single proof is generated, then efficiently verified and aggregated by the network.
- Costs become sub-linear O(log N).
- Security scales with decentralized participation.
- Enables real-time proof markets and cost discovery.
O(log N)
Cost Scaling
P2P Network
Architecture
05
The Solution: Economic Security via Slashing
Replace redundant work with cryptographic economic security. A single, randomly selected prover generates the proof, backed by a cryptoeconomic slashing game akin to Ethereum's consensus.
- Eliminates >90% of compute waste.
- Security derived from stake-at-risk, not work duplicated.
- Aligns with restaking primitive from EigenLayer.
>90%
Waste Eliminated
Stake-at-Risk
Security Basis
06
The Solution: Specialized Prover Markets
Fragment the proving stack into specialized markets for DA attestation, execution proof, and settlement proof. This creates competitive, efficient layers instead of monolithic redundancy.
- Introduces market pricing for each proof component.
- Allows best-in-class hardware optimization per layer.
- Modularizes risk and cost, following the Celestia blueprint.
Modular
Architecture
Market Pricing
Cost Driver
future-outlook
THE UNSUSTAINABLE COST
The Path Forward: Efficiency or Obsolescence
Prover redundancy is a capital-intensive scaling dead end that will be replaced by shared security and intent-based architectures.
Prover redundancy is a capital trap. Every new L2 deploys its own prover, forcing it to bootstrap security and liquidity from zero. This creates massive duplicate infrastructure costs that users ultimately pay for via transaction fees.
Shared security is the exit. Networks like EigenLayer and Babylon enable L2s to lease decentralized validator sets and proof systems. This commoditizes security, shifting the cost model from CAPEX to OPEX.
Intent-based architectures bypass the problem. Protocols like UniswapX and Across abstract the execution layer. Users express outcomes; a solver network finds the optimal path, making the underlying prover a commodity.
Evidence: The combined market cap of top L2 tokens (ARB, OP, STRK) exceeds $20B, yet they collectively secure less value than Ethereum. This capital misallocation proves the model is broken.
takeaways
THE PROVER REDUNDANCY TRAP
TL;DR for Time-Poor CTOs
Every major L2 and appchain runs its own prover, creating massive capital and operational waste. Here's the breakdown and the emerging solution.
01
The Problem: $1B+ in Stranded Capital
Every L2 and appchain today is forced to build and maintain its own prover infrastructure. This is a massive capital sink.
- Billions in hardware sits idle 95% of the time.
- Teams of specialized engineers are required for optimization and maintenance.
- No economies of scale, leading to ~30-50% higher costs passed to users.
$1B+
Stranded Capital
95%
Idle Time
02
The Solution: A Shared Prover Marketplace
Decouple proof generation from chain execution. A marketplace where provers compete to compute proofs for any chain.
- Dramatic cost reduction via supply-side competition and hardware utilization.
- Instant access to cutting-edge hardware (e.g., ASICs, GPUs) without upfront capex.
- Faster proving times as specialized providers optimize for specific proof systems (zkEVM, Cairo, etc.).
-70%
Proving Cost
10x
Hardware Access
03
The Architecture: Proof-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Think AWS for zero-knowledge proofs. Chains submit proof jobs; a decentralized network of provers executes them.
- Standardized APIs (like RPC endpoints) for proof submission and verification.
- Economic security via staking and slashing for malicious/invalid proofs.
- Interoperability layer enabling native cross-chain proofs, a more elegant base than intent-based bridges like LayerZero or Across.
~1 min
Proof Time
100+
Chain Support
04
The Competitors: RiscZero vs. =nil; Foundation
Two distinct technical approaches are leading the PaaS race.
- RiscZero: General-purpose zkVM. Write provable code in Rust. Ideal for novel applications and custom VMs.
- =nil; Foundation: zkLLVM compiler toolchain. Compile existing C++, Rust, etc. Ideal for porting heavy, existing codebases (like Ethereum clients).
zkVM
RiscZero
zkLLVM
=nil;
05
The Impact: Unlocking the Appchain Future
Shared proving is the missing infrastructure for sustainable hyper-scalability.
- Makes appchains economically viable by removing the #1 operational cost center.
- Enables "Proof of X" for any compute (AI, gaming, DePIN) without building a full L2.
- Creates a new crypto primitive: verifiable compute as a commodity, akin to decentralized storage (Filecoin, Arweave).
1000x
More Appchains
New Primitive
Verifiable Compute
06
The Risk: Centralization & Censorship
A shared prover layer creates new systemic risks that must be architecturally mitigated.
- Prover cartels could form, manipulating prices or censoring chains.
- Single point of failure if the network relies on a few dominant hardware providers.
- Solution: Robust decentralization via permissionless participation, proof diversity, and anti-collusion mechanisms.
High
Systemic Risk
Critical
Design Priority
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