ZK-VMs commoditize computation. Specialized zkEVMs like Polygon zkEVM and zkSync Era prove specific execution environments. A general-purpose ZK-VM, like RISC Zero's or SP1, proves any program compiled to its instruction set. This abstraction decouples proof generation from the underlying blockchain, creating a fungible market for verifiable compute.
zk-rollups-the-endgame-for-scaling
Blog
Why General-Purpose ZK-VMs Will Reshape Prover Economics
General-purpose ZK-VMs like zkWasm and zkMIPS standardize the proving target, shifting competitive advantage from custom circuits to hardware efficiency and operational scale. This commoditization will drive a new era of prover economics.
introduction
THE PROVER ECONOMY
Introduction
General-purpose ZK-VMs will commoditize proof generation, shifting value from hardware to software and protocol design.
Provers become a commodity. The competitive landscape shifts from bespoke circuit optimization to raw proving throughput and cost. This mirrors the evolution from ASIC mining to pooled GPU mining, where prover marketplaces like Gevulot and Succinct will arbitrage hardware efficiency.
Value accrual shifts upward. When proof generation is a cheap, standardized service, the economic moat moves to the application and settlement layers. The real value captures in the intent-based protocols (UniswapX, CowSwap) and L1s that consume these universal proofs, not in the prover hardware.
thesis-statement
THE ECONOMIC SHIFT
The Core Thesis: Commoditization of the Proving Target
General-purpose ZK-VMs will commoditize the proving layer, decoupling execution from verification and creating a new market for prover compute.
General-purpose ZK-VMs like RISC Zero and SP1 standardize the proving target. This creates a fungible market for proving compute, similar to how AWS commoditized raw server capacity. Specialized hardware (e.g., Cysic, Ulvetanna) will compete on price-per-proof, not protocol-specific optimizations.
The decoupling of execution and verification is the key architectural shift. L2s like Scroll or zkSync Era currently bundle these functions. Commoditized proving lets them outsource verification to the cheapest prover network, turning a fixed cost into a variable market rate.
This commoditization inverts L2 economics. Today, prover cost is a moat; tomorrow, it is a line item. The value accrual shifts from proprietary proving stacks to the execution environment and application layer, mirroring the evolution from bare-metal servers to cloud platforms.
Evidence: RISC Zero's Bonsai proving service demonstrates this model. It accepts proofs for any circuit built with its ZK-VM, creating a spot market for zero-knowledge computation. The economic pressure will force all general-purpose ZK-rollups to adopt similar outsourced models.
key-trends
PROVER ECONOMICS
Key Trends Driving the Shift
Specialized ZK circuits are hitting a wall of unsustainable costs and fragmentation. Here's why general-purpose VMs are the inevitable next phase.
01
The Specialization Trap
Every new dApp or L2 currently needs a custom, audited circuit. This creates exponential R&D overhead and vendor lock-in to specific prover networks. The result is a fragmented market where prover costs are artificially high due to low hardware utilization.
- Cost: $1M+ and 6-12 months for a secure, custom circuit.
- Inefficiency: Prover hardware sits idle, unable to amortize cost across different workloads.
6-12mo
Dev Time
$1M+
R&D Cost
02
The Commoditization of Proof Generation
General-purpose ZK-VMs like RISC Zero, SP1, and Jolt treat the prover as a standardized compute unit. This turns proof generation into a commodity service, enabling a competitive marketplace similar to AWS EC2 instances.
- Market Dynamics: Provers compete on price/performance for standardized VM instructions.
- Efficiency: >80% hardware utilization by batching heterogeneous proofs, driving costs toward raw electricity + hardware depreciation.
>80%
Utilization
10-100x
More Provers
03
The Application Explosion
A universal ZK-VM lowers the barrier for privacy-preserving DeFi, on-chain AI, and complex game logic. Developers write in standard languages (Rust, C++), not arcane DSLs, unlocking a wave of innovation previously blocked by circuit complexity.
- TAM Expansion: Enables new verticals like fully on-chain order books and confidential DAO voting.
- Network Effect: A shared VM standard creates a unified developer ecosystem and tooling, accelerating adoption across Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin L2s.
1000x
Devs Unlocked
New Verticals
Market Creation
ZK-VM ECONOMICS
The Proving Stack: From Bespoke to Commodity
Comparing the economic and technical trade-offs between bespoke circuits and general-purpose ZK-VMs like RISC Zero, SP1, and Jolt.
| Key Dimension | Bespoke Circuit (e.g., zkEVM) | General-Purpose ZK-VM (e.g., RISC Zero) | ZK-VM + Accelerator (e.g., SP1 + CUDA) |
|---|---|---|---|
Development Time for New App | 3-6 months | 2-4 weeks | 2-4 weeks |
Prover Hardware Requirement | Specialized (FPGA/ASIC) | Commodity CPU | Commodity CPU + Consumer GPU |
Prover Decentralization Potential | |||
Prover Cost per Proof (Est.) | $0.05-$0.20 | $0.50-$2.00 | $0.10-$0.50 |
Proof Time for 1B Cycles | < 1 sec | ~60 sec (CPU) | ~5 sec (GPU) |
Memory-Centric Opcode Support | |||
Ecosystem Composability | Single App | Polyglot (Rust, C++, Solidity) | Polyglot (Rust, C++, Solidity) |
Dominant Cost Driver | Custom Circuit Audit & Optimization | CPU Cycle Cost | GPU Memory Bandwidth |
deep-dive
THE PROVER SUPPLY CHAIN
Deep Dive: The New Prover Stack & Economic Flywheel
General-purpose ZK-VMs like RISC Zero, SP1, and Jolt are commoditizing proof generation, creating a new prover supply chain and economic flywheel.
General-purpose ZK-VMs commoditize proving. Tools like RISC Zero and SP1 decouple proof generation from specific application logic, transforming it into a standardized computational service. This creates a prover supply chain where specialized hardware (e.g., Cysic, Ingonyama) competes to generate proofs for any VM instruction set.
The flywheel is capital efficiency. A commoditized prover market drives down costs through competition and hardware specialization. Lower proving costs enable new cost-sensitive applications (e.g., on-chain gaming, micro-transactions), which increases demand for proofs, further funding prover R&D and accelerating the cycle.
This breaks the app-chain dilemma. Projects no longer must choose between a monolithic L1 or a costly, bespoke zkRollup stack. They deploy a ZK-optimized VM instance (like a zkVM L2) and tap into the shared prover marketplace, achieving sovereignty without the capital burn of building a custom prover.
Evidence: The rise of zkVM L2s like Lasso and the modular prover network Succinct demonstrates this shift. They leverage RISC Zero to provide proving-as-a-service, abstracting complexity and validating the economic model where proof demand funds hardware innovation.
protocol-spotlight
THE PROVER ECONOMY
Protocol Spotlight: Who's Building the Commodity Layer
Specialized ZK-VMs are creating a commodity market for compute, where the cheapest, fastest prover wins.
01
The Problem: Prover Lock-In
Every new ZK-rollup builds a custom VM and prover, fragmenting hardware acceleration and developer talent. This creates vendor lock-in and inefficient capital allocation across the ecosystem.
- High Fixed Costs: Each team rebuilds the same cryptographic primitives.
- Fragmented Optimization: No shared roadmap for hardware (GPU/ASIC) acceleration.
100+
Custom VMs
$1B+
Wasted R&D
02
RISC Zero: The Universal ZK-CPU
A general-purpose ZK-VM that executes any code compiled to RISC-V, making provable compute a commodity. It's the ZK counterpart to AWS EC2.
- Developer Agility: Prove arbitrary logic in Rust, C++, or Solidity without cryptography expertise.
- Shared Acceleration: A single VM target allows for pooled investment in prover hardware optimization.
~10s
Prove Time
RISC-V
ISA
03
SP1: The Performance Play
A super-fast, open-source successor to RISC Zero's original zkVM, built for maximum prover throughput and minimum cost. It's designed to win the commodity race on raw economics.
- Ultra-Efficient: Leverages the plonky2 proving system for rapid recursion.
- Commodity Hardware: Optimized for massively parallel GPUs, not boutique ASICs.
~2x
Faster
-70%
Cost Target
04
The Solution: A Liquid Prover Market
General-purpose VMs enable a decentralized network of competing provers, similar to Ethereum's validator or Filecoin's storage markets. Execution and proving decouple.
- Price Discovery: Rollups auction proof generation to the cheapest prover.
- Specialization: Provers compete on hardware, location, and software optimizations for a single VM.
$0.01
Target / Tx
24/7
Market
05
Jolt: The Academic Frontier
A new ZK-VM design from a16z crypto using Lookup Arguments, which promises an order-of-magnitude improvement in prover performance. It represents the next wave of academic research hitting production.
- Theoretical Efficiency: Minimizes cryptographic overhead per CPU step.
- Future-Proof: Architecture designed for the endgame of ZK hardware.
100x
Potential Gain
2025
Horizon
06
The Endgame: Prover Commoditization
When proving is a cheap, fungible service, innovation shifts up the stack. This mirrors how AWS commoditized servers, enabling Netflix and Airbnb.
- App-Centric Innovation: Developers focus on novel state machines and user experience, not proof systems.
- ZK-Rollups as a Service: Launching a sovereign chain becomes as simple as deploying a smart contract.
1k+
Chains Possible
$10B+
Market Cap
counter-argument
THE ECONOMICS
Counter-Argument: The Custom Circuit Moat
Specialized ZK-circuits create a temporary moat, but general-purpose VMs will commoditize prover hardware and slash costs.
Specialized circuits are a moat. Projects like Polygon zkEVM and Scroll built custom ZK-circuits for EVM compatibility, creating a high initial R&D barrier. This specialization optimized for their specific state transition logic.
General-purpose VMs erase that moat. Frameworks like RISC Zero and SP1 compile any program into a ZK-proof. They enable a single prover architecture to service multiple chains, from Ethereum L2s to Solana SVM-appchains.
Prover hardware becomes a commodity. Just as AWS commoditized servers, general ZK-VMs will commoditize GPU/ASIC provers. Dedicated proving services will compete on price, not proprietary circuit knowledge.
Evidence: The cost to generate a ZK-proof for a simple transfer on a custom zkEVM is ~$0.05 today. Aggregated proving via a shared VM architecture, as theorized by projects like Succinct, targets sub-cent costs.
risk-analysis
ECONOMIC & TECHNICAL FRICTION
Risk Analysis: What Could Derail This Future?
The shift to general-purpose ZK-VMs is not a foregone conclusion; these are the critical bottlenecks that could stall adoption.
01
The Prover Commoditization Trap
If proving becomes a pure hardware race, margins collapse to near-zero, killing innovation. The winning stack must capture value beyond raw compute.
- Risk: Proving costs become a race to the bottom, akin to generic cloud compute.
- Mitigation: Protocols must embed value (e.g., sequencing rights, MEV capture, proprietary proving markets) to avoid being commoditized.
~90%
Margin Erosion
$0.01
Target / TX
02
The Fragmented Tooling Chasm
Every new ZK-VM (zkEVM, zkWASM, CairoVM) creates its own compiler, debugger, and prover network, fracturing developer mindshare.
- Risk: Developer adoption stalls without the unified tooling maturity seen in EVM ecosystems.
- Mitigation: Winners will be the VMs that prioritize EVM-equivalent tooling or enable seamless compilation from mainstream languages like Rust and C++.
12-18 mo.
Tooling Lag
5x
Dev Onboarding Cost
03
Centralization via Hardware Oligopoly
Specialized hardware (ASICs, FPGAs) creates massive economies of scale, leading to prover centralization and new trust assumptions.
- Risk: A handful of large proving farms control the network, reintroducing the validator centralization problem ZK promised to solve.
- Mitigation: Requires innovative distributed proving schemes (like proof recursion/aggregation) that keep smaller, consumer-grade hardware viable.
>1 GH/s
ASIC Advantage
<10
Dominant Provers
04
The Cross-VM Interop Bottleneck
General-purpose VMs enable niche execution environments, but secure, trust-minimized communication between them remains unsolved.
- Risk: A tower of babel of ZK-VMs that cannot communicate cheaply or securely, stifling composability.
- Mitigation: Success depends on robust, light-client-based bridging protocols (inspired by IBC, LayerZero) that can verify state proofs from heterogeneous VMs.
~2s
Latency Floor
$1M+
Trust Assumption Cost
05
Auditability & Formal Verification Debt
Complex, Turing-complete ZK circuits are black boxes. A single bug in a circuit or VM implementation can lead to catastrophic, undetectable failures.
- Risk: Unlike a smart contract bug, a flaw in the proving system itself can invalidate the security of every application built on it.
- Mitigation: Requires massive investment in formal verification (like the work on the Cairo VM) and conservative, slow rollout of new opcodes.
6-12 mo.
Audit Timeline
$10M+
Potential Exploit
06
The Economic Misalignment of Rollups
Layer 2 rollups today profit from sequencer fees and MEV. Outsourcing proofs to a neutral marketplace may conflict with their revenue model.
- Risk: Rollups may resist ceding control of their proving process, opting for vertically integrated, less efficient stacks to capture value.
- Mitigation: Prover markets must offer economic incentives (e.g., profit-sharing, token staking) that align with, rather than threaten, rollup business models.
30-40%
Revenue from MEV
1
Integrated Stack
future-outlook
THE PROVER MARKETPLACE
Future Outlook: The Prover-as-a-Service (PaaS) Economy
General-purpose ZK-VMs like RISC Zero and SP1 commoditize proof generation, creating a liquid market for verifiable compute.
ZK-VMs standardize the proving market. RISC Zero and SP1 establish a common instruction set, allowing developers to write provable code in Rust or C++ without custom circuit design. This abstraction separates application logic from proof-system optimization.
Proof generation becomes a commodity. Specialized operators, akin to Lido or EigenLayer node operators, compete on hardware efficiency and cost. This creates a liquid prover marketplace where applications auction proof jobs to the cheapest, fastest provider.
Application-specific rollups become untenable. The operational overhead of running a dedicated prover network for a single dApp is inefficient. The PaaS model enables shared security and cost amortization across multiple applications, similar to how AWS consolidated server infrastructure.
Evidence: The cost of generating a ZK-SNARK proof on Bonsai (RISC Zero's network) has decreased 10x in 12 months due to algorithmic and hardware improvements. This trend mirrors the historical cost curve of cloud computing.
takeaways
ZK-VM PROVER ECONOMICS
Key Takeaways for Builders and Investors
The shift from specialized ZK-circuits to general-purpose ZK-VMs like RISC Zero, zkWasm, and SP1 is fundamentally altering the cost structure and business model of zero-knowledge proving.
01
The Problem: Prover Fragmentation
Every new dApp or L2 requires custom circuit development, creating massive, non-reusable R&D overhead. This fragments proving power and keeps costs high for everyone.
- Cost: Custom audit and development can exceed $1M+ per application.
- Inefficiency: Idle prover capacity on one chain cannot be used by another.
- Barrier to Entry: Only well-funded teams can afford bespoke ZK systems.
$1M+
Dev Cost
0%
Capacity Reuse
02
The Solution: Commoditized Proving Power
General-purpose ZK-VMs treat proving as a standardized compute job. This creates a liquid market for verifiable computation, similar to AWS for cloud resources.
- Market Dynamics: Provers compete on price and latency to execute proofs for any VM-compatible chain (e.g., Ethereum, Solana via zkWasm).
- Economies of Scale: High-throughput provers like Ulvetanna achieve ~10x cost reductions through hardware optimization.
- New Business Model: Prover-as-a-Service (PaaS) emerges, decoupling security from infrastructure.
~10x
Cost Reduction
PaaS
New Model
03
The Investment Thesis: Vertical Integration
The real value accrual shifts from the VM layer to the orchestration and hardware layers. Controlling the prover stack is the new moat.
- Orchestrators: Platforms like Espresso Systems that sequence and batch proofs across VMs will capture fees.
- Hardware: ASIC/GPU farms optimized for ZK-VM instructions (e.g., SHA-256, Keccak) become critical infrastructure.
- Implication: Investing in a ZK-rollup is less important than investing in the prover network that secures all of them.
Stack
Value Shift
ASIC/GPU
Key Asset
04
The Endgame: Proofs as a Commodity
When proving is cheap and fast, the architectural focus moves upstream to application logic and interoperability. The ZK-VM becomes the silent, commoditized backbone.
- Developer Win: Builders write in Rust/C++ for SP1 or RISC Zero, ignoring cryptography.
- Interoperability: Cheap proofs enable seamless, trust-minimized bridging and shared sequencing.
- Metric to Watch: Cost per Million Gas Proven will become the standard benchmark, driving competition to fractions of a cent.
¢/M Gas
Key Metric
Rust/C++
Dev Focus
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