Why Prover Networks Must Escape the Ethereum Gravitational Pull

Ethereum's dominance has made the EVM the de facto standard for ZK circuits. This convergence creates systemic risk and architectural lock-in.\n- Single Point of Failure: A critical bug in a dominant EVM prover (e.g., RISC Zero, SP1) could cascade across $100B+ in secured assets.\n- Innovation Stifled: New VMs (Move, SVM, FuelVM) are forced to compile down to EVM bytecode for proving, adding overhead and complexity.

Provers must be built for specific virtual machines from first principles, not transpiled through the EVM. This unlocks order-of-magnitude gains.\n- Performance: A native Solana VM (SVM) prover like Clockwork or Triton can achieve ~100ms proof times vs. ~2s for EVM-equivalent.\n- Developer Experience: Move-based chains (Aptos, Sui) can use zkMove for seamless, verifiable smart contracts without EVM toolchain bloat.

Ethereum's staking economy incentivizes validators to run EVM-centric provers, creating a gravitational pull that distorts the market.\n- Capital Inefficiency: Provers must compete for 32 ETH validator slots, tying up capital better used for proof generation.\n- Centralization Pressure: Projects like EigenLayer restaking further concentrate economic security around Ethereum, making alternative prover networks economically non-viable.

Decouple prover incentives from L1 staking by creating independent networks with tailored tokenomics.\n- Specialized Hardware: Networks like Ulvetanna (FPGA) and Cysic (ASIC) can monetize hardware superiority without ETH stake.\n- Proof Marketplace: A decentralized marketplace (conceptually like Espresso Systems' shared sequencer) allows rollups to auction proof generation, creating a $1B+ fee market independent of L1 consensus.

EVM-centric proving fragments liquidity and breaks cross-VM composability, the core promise of a modular stack.\n- Siloed States: A zkRollup on zkSync (EVM) cannot natively verify a proof from a Starknet (Cairo) app, forcing slow, trusted bridges.\n- Capital Drag: Liquidity is trapped in EVM-aligned L2s, while non-EVM chains like Solana and Monad develop isolated ecosystems.

Build a base layer that can verify any ZK proof, creating a universal settlement and composability layer.\n- Proof Aggregation: Protocols like Nebra and Succinct are building generalized proof systems that can verify proofs from RISC Zero, Plonky2, and Halo2 in a single step.\n- Unified Liquidity: This enables true cross-VM atomic composability, allowing a trade on Aevo (EVM) to settle against liquidity on Jupiter (SVM) in one atomic proof.

Settling proofs directly on Ethereum forces ZK-Rollups to pay volatile gas fees and wait for ~12-minute block times for finality. This caps throughput and makes micro-transactions economically impossible.\n- Finality Latency: Proofs wait for L1 inclusion (~12-20 mins).\n- Cost Volatility: Provers bid in gas auctions, passing fees to users.\n- Throughput Ceiling: Limited by Ethereum's block space, not the prover's compute.

Decouple proof settlement from Ethereum by using an independent data availability layer (e.g., Celestia, EigenDA) and a fast finality layer (e.g., Espresso, Astria). The L1 becomes an optional security backstop.\n- Independent Finality: Settle in ~2 seconds on a dedicated chain.\n- Predictable Cost: Fees decoupled from Ethereum gas.\n- Modular Stack: Mix-and-match DA, execution, and settlement (inspired by Fuel, Sovereign Labs).

EVM-centric provers (like zkSync, Scroll) are optimized for a single VM. RiscZero's zkVM executes any code (Rust, C++) and proves it, enabling verifiable off-chain computation for AI, gaming, and DeFi.\n- VM Agnostic: Prove computations for any ecosystem.\n- Prover Marketplace: Decentralized proof generation to avoid centralization.\n- New Primitive: Enables on-chain verification of complex logic (e.g., Modulus for AI).

Building SP1, a high-performance ZK VM, and a decentralized prover network to serve multiple rollups. This creates economies of scale, similar to how AWS commoditized server infrastructure.\n- Shared Security: Rollups don't need to bootstrap their own prover sets.\n- Proof Aggregation: Batch proofs across chains for efficiency (similar to Avail's approach to DA).\n- Interop Focus: Powers cross-chain proofs for ecosystems like Polygon, EigenLayer.

The future is a competitive market for proof generation, where specialized hardware (GPUs, Accseal ASICs) sells compute to the highest bidder. Rollups become pure execution clients.\n- Specialized Hardware: ASICs/GPUs drive proof costs toward <$0.001.\n- Execution Markets: Sequencers (like Espresso) auction block space.\n- Ethereum's Role: Shifts to a high-security data availability and dispute layer (see Celestia vs. EigenDA debate).

Escaping Ethereum creates new risks: validator centralization on nascent settlement layers, liquidity fragmentation across sovereign chains, and the complexity of cross-chain security.\n- Sequencer Risk: Espresso, Astria must decentralize to avoid MEV extraction.\n- Bridging Fragility: Users now bridge to a Celestia-settled rollup, not Ethereum.\n- Security Budgets: New layers must attract sufficient stake to prevent attacks.

Settling every proof on Ethereum L1 creates a zero-sum fee market with users. As demand grows, costs become prohibitive, capping the network's total addressable market.

• Cost per proof scales with ETH gas, not proof complexity.
• Creates a perverse incentive to batch less, reducing efficiency.
• Example: A $10B+ ZK-Rollup pays millions annually just for finality.

Ethereum's 12-second block time is a hard physical limit for proof finality. This makes sub-second proofs pointless and prevents real-time applications like gaming or HFT.

• Forces a trade-off between security (L1 finality) and performance.
• Layer 2s like Arbitrum and Optimism are fundamentally latency-bound by this constraint.
• AltLayer's ephemeral rollups and EigenLayer's shared sequencers are early attempts to break this cycle.

The solution is sovereign settlement layers (e.g., Celestia, EigenDA, Avail) or high-throughput L2s as settlement (e.g., using Arbitrum or zkSync as a hub). This decouples proof verification from Ethereum's execution.

• Data Availability is the true commodity; verification is cheap elsewhere.
• Enables vertical integration of proving, sequencing, and settlement.
• Projects like Polygon AggLayer and zkSync Hyperchains are architecting for this multi-chain, Ethereum-aligned future.

Relying solely on Ethereum forces provers (RiscZero, Succinct, etc.) to be general-purpose EVM provers. Escape allows for domain-specific VMs optimized for gaming, AI, or DeFi, unlocking order-of-magnitude efficiency gains.

• EVM equivalence is a bottleneck for algorithmic innovation.
• Custom VMs like SVM (Solana) or MoveVM (Aptos) show the performance upside.
• zkVM projects must choose between the Ethereum ecosystem and technical frontier.