Why Prover-Friendly Architectures Will Win

The Problem: Provers need cheap, abundant, and verifiable data to build proofs. Monolithic chains make this expensive and slow.\n- Solution: Decouples execution from data availability (DA), creating a hyper-scalable data layer.\n- Key Benefit: Rollup provers can post data for ~$0.01 per MB, enabling massively parallel proof generation without chain bloat.\n- Key Benefit: Data Availability Sampling (DAS) allows light nodes to securely verify data availability, the bedrock for trust-minimized bridging.

The Problem: Dedicated proving networks (e.g., for zkEVMs) face a cold-start: high capital cost for hardware, low initial utilization.\n- Solution: Restaking pooled security to bootstrap economically secure networks of actively validated services (AVS).\n- Key Benefit: Enables shared security for prover networks, reducing the capital barrier for new proof systems like RiscZero or Succinct.\n- Key Benefit: Creates a liquid marketplace for proving work, where operators can re-stake ETH to serve multiple zk-rollups and interoperability layers.

The Problem: Centralized sequencers create MEV extraction points and are a single point of failure for rollups, undermining decentralization.\n- Solution: A shared, decentralized sequencer network coupled with integrated proof generation.\n- Key Benefit: Fair ordering mitigates MEV, making proof generation more predictable and efficient.\n- Key Benefit: HotShot consensus provides fast finality for rollup blocks, which provers can immediately start proving, reducing latency to ~2-4 seconds.

The Problem: Isolated rollups and their proving systems create fragmented security and liquidity, complicating cross-chain proofs.\n- Solution: A unification layer (Nexus) built atop a robust DA layer (Avail), secured by multi-asset cryptoeconomics (Fusion).\n- Key Benefit: Nexus acts as a proof aggregation hub, enabling seamless verification of proofs from any connected rollup (zk or optimistic).\n- Key Benefit: Fusion Security allows assets like BTC and ETH to secure the Avail DA layer, creating a stronger economic floor for the entire proving stack.

The Problem: Every app-chain building its own prover is a massive duplication of effort, capital, and security risk.\n- Solution: General-purpose zkVMs (like RiscZero) and proof aggregation networks (like Succinct) that serve multiple clients.\n- Key Benefit: Economies of scale for expensive proving hardware, driving down cost per proof for all clients.\n- Key Benefit: Security is consolidated and audited in one core protocol, rather than fragmented across dozens of custom, unaudited circuits.

The Problem: Users shouldn't need to think about provers or bridging; the experience is fragmented.\n- Solution: Chain Signatures and Nightshade sharding abstract away complexity, providing unified security and near-instant finality.\n- Key Benefit: Single signature can control assets on any chain, with Near validators (provers) generating the necessary cross-chain proofs in the background.\n- Key Benefit: 1-second finality on the DA layer provides a rapid foundation for proof generation, enabling real-time cross-chain composability.

The modular thesis (Celestia, EigenDA) outsources execution, consensus, and data availability. The new bottleneck is the prover—the entity generating validity proofs. Architectures that don't prioritize prover efficiency will fail at scale.

• Prover costs dominate L2 operational expenses, not sequencer fees.
• Proof generation time is the primary constraint on finality and user experience.
• Winner-takes-most dynamics will emerge around prover infrastructure, similar to MEV.

Monolithic, sequential execution (like Ethereum's EVM) is a prover's worst nightmare. The winning architecture will be a parallel execution environment with native proving friendliness.

• Monad, Sei V2, Solana SVM demonstrate the performance ceiling of parallelization.
• Provers like Risc Zero, SP1, Jolt enable this by generating proofs for arbitrary Rust code.
• The stack will converge on parallel VMs purpose-built for zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs).

General-purpose provers are inefficient. The future is application-specific coprocessors (like Axiom, Herodotus, Brevis) that prove specific computations off-chain and post verified results on-chain.

• Moves heavy logic (DeFi risk engines, on-chain AI, game logic) off the critical path.
• Enables trust-minimized access to historical state and cross-chain data.
• Creates a new design space for dApps unconstrained by gas limits.

Don't assume proof generation will become a cheap commodity. Hardware acceleration (GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs) and proof aggregation (using PLONK, Nova, ProtoGalaxy) will create massive moats.

• Projects like Ulvetanna, Ingonyama are building specialized hardware.
• Aggregation layers (e.g., Nexus, Avail's fusion) will bundle proofs for cost efficiency.
• The winning stack will vertically integrate or form tight partnerships with elite prover networks.

The shift from transaction-based to intent-based architectures (UniswapX, CowSwap, Anoma) is fundamentally a prover problem. Solving for user intent requires proving optimal execution across a fragmented liquidity landscape.

• Solvers compete to fulfill intents, but a shared prover network verifies their work.
• Enables cross-domain atomicity without bridging assets, verified by ZKPs.
• The prover becomes the trust layer for the entire intent settlement network.

Application-layer returns will accrue to the underlying prover infrastructure. The capital efficiency and security guarantees of the entire ecosystem depend on it.

• Look for: Parallel VMs (Movement, Lumi), hardware (Accseal), aggregation (Nebra), and proof co-processors.
• Avoid: Monolithic L2s with opaque, centralized provers.
• The metric: Prover cost per million transactions, not just TVL.