The Future of Zero-Knowledge Proofs Is a Commodity Market

Every major L2 and privacy app is building its own prover, creating massive redundancy and vendor lock-in. This fragments liquidity, slows innovation, and inflates costs for end-users.

• ~$1B+ in cumulative wasted R&D spend
• Weeks to months of integration time per new chain
• Prover costs are a black box, passed to users

Decouple proof generation from specific chains, creating a competitive marketplace where specialized provers (e.g., RiscZero, Succinct, Ingonyama) bid for work. Think AWS for computation, but for cryptographic truth.

• Proof-as-a-Service (PaaS) commoditizes trust
• Real-time price discovery via auction mechanisms
• Standardized proof formats (e.g., Plonky2, Halo2) enable interoperability

Virtual machines like RISC Zero's zkVM and SP1 are creating a universal instruction set for provable computation. This turns custom circuit engineering into generic software compilation, unlocking a massive developer pool.

• Write once, prove anywhere portability
• Leverage existing toolchains (Rust, C++)
• Enables proof aggregation across disparate applications

The final stage is a permissionless proving network where trust is derived from economic security, not brand reputation. This mirrors the evolution from private data centers to global cloud providers, collapsing the cost of privacy and scalability to near-zero.

• Fully decentralized prover networks (e.g., Aleo, Espresso Systems)
• Sub-cent transaction costs with full privacy
• ZK becomes a baseline utility, like TCP/IP

Rollups are locked into a single proving stack, creating a single point of failure and stifling innovation. This leads to vendor-specific optimizations and prevents cost competition.

• Risk: Centralized control over $50B+ in sequencer revenue.
• Inefficiency: No market pressure to reduce ~$0.10-$1.00 per proof costs.

Decouples proof generation from settlement, creating a liquid market for proving power. Rollups submit proof tasks, and a decentralized network of provers competes to compute them cheapest and fastest.

• Benefit: Drives cost toward marginal electricity price.
• Benefit: Enables proof specialization (GPU for Plonk, ASIC for STARK).

Every new ZK architecture (STARK, Plonk, Halo2) requires custom hardware (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC). This leads to massive stranded capital as hardware becomes obsolete or underutilized.

• Inefficiency: $100M+ in specialized hardware sits idle.
• Barrier: High capex prevents new prover entrants.

Abstracts the underlying proof system behind a standardized instruction set (like RISC-V). Any prover can verify any circuit, turning hardware into a fungible commodity.

• Benefit: Maximizes hardware utilization across protocols.
• Benefit: Future-proofs infrastructure against algorithmic breakthroughs.

ZK validity is meaningless without data to reconstruct state. High DA costs on Ethereum (≥$0.30/tx) dominate rollup expenses, making cheap proofs irrelevant.

• Reality: ~80% of rollup op cost is DA, not proving.
• Limit: Caps TPS to ~100-300 for ETH L2s.

Separates DA (via EigenDA, Celestia, Avail) from settlement. ZK proofs can then be layered: a ZK proof of a DA proof (like NearDA), creating a hierarchy of cost/security.

• Benefit: Reduces DA cost by 10-100x.
• Benefit: Enables ≥100k TPS scalable stacks.

Specialized hardware (ASICs, FPGAs) creates centralization and vendor lock-in, undermining the commodity ideal.

• Dominant players like Ingonyama or Ulvetanna could control the proving market.
• Prover decentralization becomes impossible, reintroducing trusted compute bottlenecks.
• Cost structure shifts from competitive software to monopolistic hardware pricing.

A commodity market requires a universal, trustless verifier. Who verifies the verifiers?

• Recursive proof aggregation (e.g., Nova, Plonky2) creates a single point of failure.
• Proof marketplaces (e.g., =nil; Foundation) must solve decentralized attestation.
• Without this, the system defaults to trusting a handful of centralized prover cartels.

Commodity pricing destroys margins, killing incentives for R&D and security.

• Race to the bottom on fees eliminates funding for next-gen proof systems (STARKs, folding schemes).
• Prover extractable value (PEV) emerges, where provers can censor or reorder proofs for profit.
• The market gets stuck on outdated, 'good enough' SNARKs, stifling innovation.

ZK ecosystems (zkEVMs, zkVMs) are building walled gardens, not a unified commodity layer.

• Proof systems (Plonk, STARK, Groth16) are not natively interoperable.
• Vendor-specific VMs (Polygon zkEVM, zkSync Era, Scroll) create protocol lock-in.
• Without a universal ZK circuit language, the market fragments into incompatible silos.

Governments will target the privacy-preserving layer, not the public ledger, creating legal uncertainty.

• ZKPs as munitions: Export controls could restrict core cryptographic libraries (e.g., libSTARK).
• KYC for provers: Mandatory licensing could recentralize the proving market overnight.
• This legal overhang deters institutional capital and large-scale infrastructure investment.

ZK tooling remains inaccessible. Commoditization requires developer adoption, which is stagnating.

• Circuit writing is still a dark art, limiting the supply of provable applications.
• Auditing ZK code is orders of magnitude harder and more expensive than smart contracts.
• Without a 'Solidity for ZK', the total addressable market for proofs remains niche.