Proving is not decentralized. The computational work to generate a ZK-proof (SNARK/STARK) for a block requires specialized hardware (GPUs/FPGAs) and expertise, creating a high barrier to entry. This centralizes the prover role to a few specialized operators, contradicting L2 decentralization claims.
zk-rollups-the-endgame-for-scaling
Blog
Why ZK-Rollup Viability Hinges on Prover Commoditization
The current ZK-Rollup model is broken. Proving costs are a bottleneck, not a moat. True scaling requires treating provers as a cheap, standardized utility, not a proprietary advantage. This is the path to sub-cent transaction fees.
introduction
THE HARDWARE CONSTRAINT
The Prover Bottleneck: ZK-Rollups' Dirty Secret
Zero-knowledge proof generation is a computationally intensive process that creates a centralizing economic and operational chokepoint for all ZK-rollups.
Cost dictates scalability. The prover's operational expense is the primary variable cost for a ZK-rollup. Until this cost falls dramatically via commoditization, transaction fees cannot compete with Optimistic rollups like Arbitrum or Optimism on pure cost basis.
Commoditization is the only path. Viability requires treating the prover as a commodity compute resource, similar to AWS EC2 instances. Projects like RISC Zero and Succinct are building generalized proof systems to abstract this layer, while EigenLayer enables restaking for decentralized prover networks.
Evidence: A single ZK-proof for a large batch can take minutes on high-end hardware and cost dollars. Until this approaches the sub-cent, sub-second realm of Optimistic rollup fraud proof challenges, mass adoption is throttled.
key-trends
ZK-ROLLUP VIABILITY
The Three Trends Defining the Prover Market
The high cost and latency of proof generation is the primary bottleneck preventing ZK-Rollups from achieving mass adoption. Commoditizing this process is the only viable path forward.
01
The Problem: Prover Costs Are a Tax on Every Transaction
ZK-Rollups like zkSync Era and Starknet must pay for compute-intensive proof generation, a cost passed directly to users. This creates a fundamental economic disadvantage versus Optimistic Rollups.
- Cost Structure: Proving can be 50-80% of a rollup's operational overhead.
- Market Impact: This imposes a hard floor on transaction fees, limiting micro-transactions and DeFi composability.
- Scalability Paradox: High throughput increases proving costs linearly, negating economies of scale.
50-80%
Of OpEx
Hard Floor
On Fees
02
The Solution: Specialized Hardware Prover Networks
Dedicated proving networks like RiscZero, Succinct, and Ingonyama are commoditizing proof generation by leveraging GPUs, FPGAs, and eventually ASICs. This mirrors the evolution from CPU mining to ASIC mining in Bitcoin.
- Performance Leap: GPU/FPGA provers offer 10-100x speed improvements over general-purpose CPUs.
- Cost Reduction: Competition among prover nodes drives prices toward marginal cost, targeting >50% reduction in proving fees.
- Abstraction: Rollups consume proofs as a service, outsourcing capital expenditure and R&D.
10-100x
Faster
>50%
Cost Target
03
The Enabler: Universal Proof Systems and Shared Security
The shift from monolithic, custom proof stacks (e.g., a rollup's integrated prover) to universal, verifiable compute platforms. Projects like EigenLayer for decentralized proving and Nebra for proof aggregation enable shared security and liquidity.
- Interoperability: A proof generated for one chain (e.g., via Polygon zkEVM) can be verified cheaply on another, enabling native cross-chain liquidity.
- Security Pooling: Restaked ETH or other assets can secure proving networks, creating cryptoeconomic security rivaling L1s.
- Market Efficiency: Creates a liquid marketplace for proving work, where rollups auction proof jobs to the cheapest, fastest provider.
Shared
Security
Liquid Market
For Work
deep-dive
THE PROVER MARKET
From Moats to Utilities: The Inevitable Commoditization
ZK-Rollup viability depends on the commoditization of the prover, transforming it from a proprietary moat into a low-cost utility.
Provers are a cost center, not a defensible moat. The core value of a rollup is its execution environment and user base, not the cryptographic machine that validates it. Expending capital to maintain a proprietary prover network drains resources from application-level innovation.
Commoditization drives efficiency. Specialized proving services like RiscZero and Succinct create competitive markets. This forces prover performance to become a commodity, collapsing costs through economies of scale and hardware acceleration, similar to how AWS commoditized server infrastructure.
The moat shifts to the settlement layer. The real defensibility for a rollup moves to its data availability solution (e.g., Celestia, EigenDA) and its security inheritance from Ethereum. The prover is just the final, fungible step in a trust-minimized pipeline.
Evidence: The cost to generate a ZK-SNARK proof on Ethereum has dropped over 1000x in five years. Projects like Polygon zkEVM and Scroll already leverage external proving infrastructure, treating it as a utility.
ZK-ROLLUP VIABILITY
The Prover Landscape: Proprietary vs. Commodity Trajectories
A comparison of the economic and technical trade-offs between vertically-integrated prover stacks and the emerging commodity market for zero-knowledge proof generation.
| Core Metric / Feature | Proprietary Prover Stack | Commodity Prover Market | Hybrid Approach |
|---|---|---|---|
Prover Architecture | Tightly coupled to execution client (e.g., zkSync Era, Starknet) | Decoupled, agnostic to L2 (e.g., RiscZero, SP1, zkVM) | Execution client with pluggable prover backend |
Hardware Optimization | Custom ASIC/GPU pipeline for specific ZK-SNARK (e.g., PLONK) | General-purpose zkVM targets commodity CPUs/GPUs | Optimized for a family of proof systems (e.g., Nova cycles) |
Prover Cost per Tx (Target) | $0.01 - $0.05 | < $0.01 | $0.02 - $0.03 |
Time to Finality (L1) | ~10 minutes | ~5 minutes | ~8 minutes |
Developer Lock-in | |||
Prover Revenue Capture | Captured by L2 sequencer | Captured by prover marketplace (e.g., =nil; Foundation) | Shared between L2 and prover network |
Proof System Flexibility | |||
Capital Efficiency (Hardware) | Low (dedicated, non-fungible) | High (fungible, reusable for multiple chains) | Medium (semi-specialized) |
counter-argument
THE HARDWARE TRAP
The Moat Argument: Why Proprietary Provers Might (Briefly) Win
Proprietary proving hardware creates a temporary, defensible moat before the market commoditizes.
Proving is a hardware race. The fastest prover wins the most sequencer revenue and MEV. Early leaders like zkSync and StarkWare invest in custom silicon (ASICs) and optimized software stacks to create a performance gap.
Commoditization lags innovation. Just as NVIDIA GPUs dominated before specialized AI chips, today's proprietary stacks like RISC Zero's zkVM or Polygon zkEVM's Plonky2 establish a lead. Open-source alternatives like Halo2 or Noir need time to catch up on optimization.
The moat is temporary. Performance advantages from custom instruction sets and parallel execution will erode as proving libraries mature and hardware (e.g., Accseal's accelerators) becomes a generic service. The end-state is a commoditized prover market.
risk-analysis
THE HIDDEN FRAGILITY
The Bear Case: What Could Derail Commoditization?
Prover commoditization is the only path to sustainable ZK-rollup scaling, but these systemic risks could keep the market fragmented and expensive.
01
The Hardware Trap
Specialized hardware (ASICs, GPUs) creates a winner-take-all market, not a commodity one. The entity controlling the fastest prover can extract monopoly rents, defeating the purpose of commoditization.
- Nvidia and Cysic dominate high-end GPU/ASIC markets.
- Creates capital-intensive moats that startups can't breach.
- Leads to centralized proving power, a single point of failure.
$10M+
ASIC Entry Cost
>80%
Market Share Risk
02
The Protocol Lock-In
ZK-rollup teams (e.g., zkSync, Starknet, Polygon zkEVM) optimize their provers for proprietary VMs and circuits. This creates technical silos where a generic prover can't compete on efficiency.
- Custom instruction sets (e.g., Cairo VM) require bespoke proving.
- Fragmented developer tooling increases integration complexity.
- Results in vendor-locked proving markets, not open auctions.
5-10x
Perf Gap
Months
Integration Lag
03
The Data Availability Choke Point
Even with a cheap prover, rollups are bottlenecked by data publishing costs on Ethereum. If DA isn't commoditized in parallel, the total cost to users remains high, capping prover value.
- Ethereum blob fees are volatile and can spike.
- Alternative DA layers (Celestia, EigenDA) add complexity and trust assumptions.
- Prover cost becomes a secondary concern if DA is 80% of the fee.
$0.01-$1+
Blob Fee Range
~80%
Fee Dominance
04
The Economic Misalignment
A pure commoditized prover market assumes rational, profit-driven actors. In reality, rollup sequencers (often the same entity) may subsidize proving to capture MEV or app revenue, distorting the market.
- Sequencer-Prover vertical integration kills price discovery.
- Subsidized proofs create artificial barriers for independent provers.
- Leads to a fake commodity market controlled by a few integrated players.
>60%
Sequencer Control
$0
Subsidized Price
05
The Complexity Asymptote
ZK-proof systems (STARKs, SNARKs, Plonky2) are evolving rapidly. The constant churn of proof schemes and recursion architectures makes it impossible to build a stable, long-lived commodity hardware target.
- 18-month innovation cycles obsolesce hardware investments.
- Fragmented proof stack (Groth16, Plonk, Halo2) splits market volume.
- Results in high-risk R&D with uncertain payback periods.
18 mo.
Innovation Cycle
5+
Major Schemes
06
The Regulatory Wildcard
ZK-technology, especially general-purpose provers, could face export controls or compliance burdens as a dual-use technology (privacy + scalability). This adds legal overhead that favors large, compliant incumbents.
- ZKPs enable private transactions, attracting regulatory scrutiny.
- Compliance costs create barriers for decentralized prover networks.
- Leads to geofenced proving services, fragmenting the global market.
Global
Fragmentation Risk
High
Legal Overhead
future-outlook
THE INFRASTRUCTURE SHIFT
The 2025 Landscape: Proofs as a Service
ZK-rollup scalability and decentralization will be determined by the commoditization of the prover function.
Prover cost is the bottleneck. ZK-rollup transaction fees are dominated by the computational expense of proof generation, not L1 data posting. This creates a centralizing force around the sequencer-prover monopoly.
Commoditization enables specialization. Decoupling proof generation from sequencing creates a competitive market. Projects like RiscZero and Succinct are building generalized prover networks that any rollup can use.
Proof markets are inevitable. Rollups will auction proof-generation jobs to the cheapest, fastest prover. This mirrors the evolution from solo mining to pooled mining in Bitcoin, driving efficiency through competition.
Evidence: The cost to generate a ZK-SNARK for a simple transfer has dropped 1000x in 3 years. Ethereum's EIP-4844 (blobs) further reduces data costs, making the prover the primary cost center.
takeaways
ZK-ROLLUP VIABILITY
TL;DR for CTOs and Architects
The long-term dominance of ZK-Rollups depends not on novel cryptography, but on the economic commoditization of the proving layer.
01
The Problem: Prover Costs Are a Scaling Bottleneck
Generating a ZK proof is computationally intensive, creating a direct cost passed to users. This is the primary barrier to sub-cent transaction fees and high-frequency dApps.\n- Cost Structure: Proving can be 50-80% of a sequencer's operational expense.\n- Latency Impact: Complex proofs can take minutes, capping finality speed.
50-80%
Of Sequencer Cost
Minutes
Proof Time
02
The Solution: Decouple Execution from Proving
Treat provers as a competitive, permissionless marketplace—similar to Ethereum validators or Solana's JITO searchers. This drives efficiency through specialization and economies of scale.\n- Market Dynamics: Many prover networks (e.g., RiscZero, Succinct) compete on cost and speed.\n- Architectural Shift: Rollups become execution-only, outsourcing proof generation.
10x+
Prover Competition
-90%
Potential Cost Drop
03
The Benchmark: Look at Data Availability (DA) Layer Evolution
The commoditization playbook is already written. Celestia and EigenDA turned DA from a monolithic cost center into a competitive market, slashing L2 expenses. The same will happen for proving.\n- Precedent: DA costs fell from ~$0.50/tx (on-chain) to ~$0.0001/tx (modular).\n- Outcome: Rollups optimize for execution, plugging into best-in-class proof/DA markets.
~$0.0001
DA Cost/Tx
1000x
Cheaper
04
The Endgame: Specialized Prover ASICs & Hardware
Ultimate commoditization requires hardware-level optimization. Just as mining evolved from CPUs to ASICs, proving will converge on dedicated hardware (e.g., Accseal, Cysic) for order-of-magnitude gains.\n- Performance Leap: ASICs can offer 1000x speedup over GPUs for specific proof systems (STARKs, Groth16).\n- Barrier to Entry: Creates a capital-intensive but highly efficient commodity market.
1000x
Faster (ASIC vs GPU)
~500ms
Proof Target
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