The prover is the product. Modular blockchains separate execution from settlement, outsourcing state validation to specialized proving networks. This transforms the prover from a public good into a proprietary, monetizable software stack that dictates network security and profitability.
zk-rollups-the-endgame-for-scaling
Blog
The Battle Between Open Source and Proprietary Prover Software
An analysis of the core strategic dilemma facing ZK-rollup teams: open sourcing prover software for ecosystem growth versus keeping it proprietary for competitive moats, and how this choice defines the scaling endgame.
introduction
THE NEW MOAT
Introduction: The Prover is the Product
The competitive edge in modern blockchain infrastructure has shifted from consensus to computation, making the prover the core commercial asset.
Open-source provers create commodity hardware. Projects like RISC Zero and SP1 provide generalized, transparent proving frameworks. This fosters ecosystem interoperability but leads to thin margins, as seen in the competitive landscape of Ethereum L2 rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism.
Proprietary provers capture value. Closed-source stacks, exemplified by zkSync's Boojum and Polygon's Plonky2, create technical moats. These systems optimize for specific use cases—like parallel execution or privacy—enabling premium pricing and locking in developer ecosystems.
Evidence: The proving market will exceed $10B in annual revenue by 2030. The performance gap between a generic STARK prover and a custom ASIC-optimized one is over 1000x in cost efficiency, defining winner-take-most dynamics.
key-trends
PROVER SOFTWARE WARS
The State of Play: A Fractured Landscape
The race for zero-knowledge supremacy has split into two distinct camps: open-source community projects and VC-backed proprietary stacks, each with a fundamentally different value proposition.
01
The Open-Source Thesis: Security Through Transparency
Projects like zkSync's Boojum and StarkWare's Cairo argue that verifiable, community-audited code is the only path to credible neutrality and long-term security. This model prioritizes ecosystem trust over short-term monetization.
- Key Benefit: Eliminates vendor lock-in and protocol single points of failure.
- Key Benefit: Fosters a composable innovation layer where anyone can build tooling or a fork.
- Key Benefit: Aligns with crypto-native ethos, attracting top developer talent.
100%
Auditable
0
License Fees
02
The Proprietary Play: Performance as a MoAT
Companies like RiscZero and Succinct Labs treat their prover (e.g., SP1, Gnark) as a competitive advantage. The bet is that superior performance and developer experience will win market share, justifying a closed-source, commercial model.
- Key Benefit: Aggressive R&D funded by venture capital drives ~30% faster prover speeds.
- Key Benefit: Tight integration and dedicated support reduce integration time from months to weeks.
- Key Benefit: Creates a sustainable business model to fund ongoing optimization and security.
30%
Faster Proving
VC-Backed
Funding Model
03
The Hybrid Hedge: Open Core, Commercial Extensions
A pragmatic middle ground adopted by Polygon zkEVM and Scroll. The core proving stack is open-source, but value-added services (cloud provers, specialized circuits) are monetized. This attempts to capture community goodwill while building a business.
- Key Benefit: Maintains ecosystem goodwill and security scrutiny on the foundational layer.
- Key Benefit: Enables a B2B revenue stream from enterprises needing managed services.
- Key Risk: Potential for "open-washing" if critical optimizations remain proprietary.
Open Core
Base Layer
B2B SaaS
Revenue Layer
04
The Existential Risk: Prover Centralization
Whether open or closed, the current technical reality is prover centralization. A handful of nodes run the proving software, creating a systemic risk. This is the core tension the entire landscape is trying to solve.
- The Problem: A bug in Jolt, Plonky2, or Cairo could halt a multi-billion dollar L2.
- The Problem: Proprietary provers create black-box dependencies for core protocol security.
- The Solution Path: True decentralization requires proof markets (e.g., Espresso Systems) or ASIC-resistant proving.
~5
Major Provers
$10B+
TVL at Risk
OPEN SOURCE VS. PROPRIETARY
Prover Strategy Matrix: Who's Playing Which Game?
A comparison of strategic approaches to prover software, analyzing trade-offs in performance, control, and ecosystem dynamics.
| Strategic Dimension | Open Source (e.g., RISC Zero, SP1) | Proprietary (e.g., Polygon zkEVM, zkSync) | Hybrid / Dual-License (e.g., StarkWare) |
|---|---|---|---|
Core Software License | Apache 2.0 / MIT | Closed Source | Proprietary + eventual open source |
Prover Performance (Proving Time) | Community-optimized | Vendor-optimized | Vendor-optimized |
Hardware Acceleration Strategy | Open ecosystem (GPUs, FPGAs) | Vendor-controlled (e.g., custom ASICs) | Vendor-led, ecosystem-following |
Protocol Revenue Model | None (public good) | Sequencer fees / take rate | License fees + eventual protocol fees |
Ecosystem Lock-in Risk | None | High | Medium (diminishing over time) |
Prover Diversity & Censorship Resistance | High (multiple implementations) | Low (single implementation) | Low → Medium (over time) |
Time-to-Market for New L2s | < 1 month (forkable) |
| Varies (license negotiation) |
Security Audit Surface | Public, continuous scrutiny | Private, staged disclosures | Initially private, then public |
deep-dive
THE PROVER WARS
The Open Source Gambit: Ecosystem Flywheel vs. Commoditization
The strategic calculus of open-sourcing prover software determines whether a project builds a defensible ecosystem or accelerates its own commoditization.
Open source is a trap for projects without a robust execution layer. Releasing a prover like Jolt or SP1 creates a public good that competitors like Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism immediately fork. This accelerates the commoditization of proving itself, turning a core innovation into a cheap utility.
The flywheel requires control. Successful projects like StarkWare and zkSync use proprietary provers to anchor their ecosystems. This creates a vendor lock-in effect where developers build on a specific ZKVM stack, ensuring long-term revenue from sequencer fees and proving services.
The counter-strategy is standardization. Projects like RISC Zero and Succinct bet that an open, modular stack will win. They aim to become the Linux kernel for ZK, where ecosystem growth around a shared standard (e.g., RISC-V) outweighs the value of any single execution layer.
Evidence: The rapid forking of the Apache-licensed OP Stack demonstrates commoditization risk, while StarkWare's closed Cairo prover has secured a $8B ecosystem. The winner defines whether the prover is the product or the platform.
counter-argument
THE INCENTIVE MISMATCH
The Proprietary Fortress: Moats, Margins, and Centralization
Proprietary prover software creates financial moats that directly conflict with the decentralized ethos of the underlying L2s they secure.
Proprietary provers are rent-extractive. They create a closed-source monopoly on the critical proving function, allowing the vendor to capture the majority of L2 sequencer profits. This centralizes economic power and creates a single point of failure, as seen with early zkSync Era and Polygon zkEVM relying on centralized proving services.
Open-source stacks commoditize hardware, not software. Projects like Risc Zero and SP1 provide verifiable compute frameworks where the competitive moat shifts to hardware optimization and operational scale. This mirrors the Ethereum execution client landscape, where multiple clients (Geth, Nethermind) compete on performance.
The long-term trade-off is security for margin. A proprietary prover's code cannot be fully audited by the public, creating systemic risk for the L2's billions in TVL. The vendor's incentive to protect its margins will always conflict with the network's need for verifiable, trust-minimized security.
Evidence: The proving cost for a large zk-rollup batch is ~$0.20-$0.50. A proprietary service charges sequencers 10-100x this cost, extracting millions annually. This model is unsustainable against open-source alternatives like gnark or Halo2 libraries, which enable permissionless prover networks.
risk-analysis
THE PROVER SOFTWARE WARS
The Bear Cases: What Could Go Wrong?
The race for high-performance ZK proving is creating a critical, under-discussed fault line between open-source and proprietary software stacks.
01
The Proprietary Black Box
Proprietary provers from firms like RiscZero or Miden create a single point of failure and trust. The core proving algorithm is a secret sauce, making security audits impossible and creating vendor lock-in for the entire L2.
- Security Risk: Unauditable code is a prime target for sophisticated attacks.
- Centralization Vector: The prover operator becomes a de facto centralized authority.
- Innovation Stifling: The ecosystem cannot fork or improve upon the core proving technology.
0
Auditable Code
1
Critical Vendor
02
The Open-Source Commoditization Trap
Fully open-source prover stacks like those from gnark or Halo2 risk becoming low-margin commodities. Without a moat, the primary differentiator becomes cost, leading to a race-to-the-bottom that starves R&D funding.
- R&D Underfunding: No sustainable business model to fund the next generation of proof systems.
- Fragmentation: Multiple incompatible forks dilute developer mindshare and tooling.
- Performance Lag: May lose the performance war against well-funded proprietary labs focused solely on optimization.
-90%
Margin Compression
10+
Competing Forks
03
The Licensing Minefield
Hybrid models with open-source cores but proprietary accelerators (e.g., Polygon zkEVM) create legal and operational complexity. Projects face uncertainty over future licensing changes or royalty demands that could cripple economic viability.
- License Risk: A change from Apache 2.0 to a commercial license can strand billion-dollar L2s.
- Integration Hell: Combining GPL, MIT, and proprietary code creates legal compliance nightmares.
- Community Distrust: Perceived bait-and-switch tactics erode developer and user confidence.
High
Legal Overhead
$1B+
TVL at Risk
04
The Hardware Dependency Spiral
The pursuit of ultimate proving speed leads to custom hardware (ASICs, FPGAs), controlled by a handful of entities like Ingonyama or Cysic. This recentralizes power to those who control the physical means of production, recreating the miner centralization problem from PoW.
- Capital Barrier: $10M+ ASIC tape-out costs exclude all but VC-backed players.
- Geopolitical Risk: Hardware manufacturing is concentrated in specific regions, creating supply chain vulnerabilities.
- Protocol Capture: Future protocol upgrades could be held hostage by hardware oligopolies.
$10M+
ASIC Cost
3-5
Dominant Firms
future-outlook
THE PROVER WAR
The Hybrid Future and the Hardware Endgame
The race for zkVM dominance will bifurcate into open-source software for general-purpose chains and proprietary hardware for specialized, high-throughput applications.
Proprietary software creates moats. Projects like Polygon zkEVM and zkSync Era use custom provers to optimize for their specific VM architecture, creating a defensible technical advantage. This mirrors the early GPU wars where NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem locked in developers.
Open-source commoditizes the base layer. Frameworks like RISC Zero and SP1 provide a verifiable compute standard, allowing any chain to build a zkVM without deep cryptography expertise. This democratizes access but sacrifices peak performance.
The endgame is hardware acceleration. The proving bottleneck shifts from algorithm design to raw compute. Specialized ASICs, like those from Ingonyama, will dominate high-frequency trading and social-fi applications requiring sub-second proofs.
Evidence: Polygon's zkEVM prover generates a proof in under 10 minutes on consumer hardware, but a custom FPGA cluster from Ulvetanna reduces this to seconds. The performance delta dictates the market segment.
takeaways
PROVER SOFTWARE STRATEGY
TL;DR for Protocol Architects
The prover stack is the new moat; choosing between open-source and proprietary models defines your protocol's security, cost, and control.
01
The Open-Source Playbook (e.g., RISC Zero, SP1)
Commoditizes the proving layer to foster ecosystem growth and security through auditability.\n- Key Benefit: Eliminates vendor lock-in, enabling permissionless innovation on the proving primitive.\n- Key Benefit: Security is crowd-sourced; vulnerabilities are found and patched faster by a global community.
100%
Auditable
0
License Fees
02
The Proprietary Moats (e.g., Polygon zkEVM, zkSync)
Treats the prover as core IP to control the roadmap, optimize performance, and capture value.\n- Key Benefit: Enables deep, vertical integration for ~50% better prover efficiency and faster time-to-market for new features.\n- Key Benefit: Creates a sustainable business model, funding R&D without relying solely on token emissions.
~50%
Efficiency Gain
Full
Roadmap Control
03
The Hybrid Hedge (e.g., StarkWare, Aztec)
Open-sources components (e.g., Cairo, Noir) while keeping the prover runtime closed. Balances ecosystem development with competitive advantage.\n- Key Benefit: Builds a developer ecosystem with open tools while retaining the performance edge of a closed, optimized proving service.\n- Key Benefit: Mitigates fork risk; the community can audit the language, but cannot easily replicate the full stack.
Controlled
Ecosystem
Protected
Core IP
04
The Forkability Problem
Fully open-source provers are inherently forkable, threatening long-term fee capture and sustainability.\n- Key Problem: A competitor can clone your entire stack, undercut fees, and fragment liquidity. See the EVM L2 wars.\n- The Solution: Layer value capture above the prover via sequencers, shared security, or application-specific hooks that are harder to replicate.
High
Fork Risk
Sequencer
Real Moat
05
The Performance Arbitrage
Proprietary provers can achieve 2-5x faster proving times through custom hardware (GPU/FPGA) and undisclosed optimizations.\n- Key Problem: Open-source projects lag in raw performance, ceding the high-throughput, low-latency market (e.g., gaming, CEX matching engines).\n- The Solution: Open-source communities must attract capital to fund equivalent hardware R&D, a significant coordination challenge.
2-5x
Speed Edge
Hardware
Key Lever
06
The Security Audibility Tax
Closed-source provers impose a 'trust tax'; users must trust the operator's security claims without full verification.\n- Key Problem: Opaque code increases systemic risk and limits adoption by institutions requiring provable security.\n- The Solution: Proprietary teams must invest heavily in third-party audits and bug bounties, but this remains inferior to continuous public scrutiny.
High
Trust Assumption
Audit Cost
Overhead
ENQUIRY
Get In Touch
today.
Our experts will offer a free quote and a 30min call to discuss your project.
NDA Protected
Confidentiality24h Response
Time to ValueDirectly to Engineering Team
No Sales Fluff10+
Protocols Shipped
$20M+
TVL Overall