The Hidden Cost of Vendor Lock-In with Proprietary ZK Circuits

Vendor lock-in is the primary risk of closed-source ZK circuits. Teams like Polygon zkEVM and Scroll build custom proving systems, but their performance and cost are dictated by a single vendor's hardware optimizations.

Technical debt accrues silently because a circuit's proving time and cost are fixed by its initial design. This contrasts with EVM execution, where costs fall predictably with hardware improvements from providers like AWS or Google Cloud.

The exit cost is prohibitive. Migrating a live application from a custom zkEVM like zkSync Era to a new proving system requires a full security re-audit and a complex, risky state migration.

Evidence: StarkWare's shift to a new proof system required a hard fork and months of coordination, demonstrating the inflexibility of proprietary stacks compared to modular approaches like RISC Zero or SP1.

Proprietary circuits are technical debt. A custom zkEVM or ZK coprocessor creates a permanent dependency on a single vendor's proving infrastructure, like RISC Zero or a closed-source prover. This eliminates your ability to switch providers when costs drop or new proving schemes emerge.

Portability dictates long-term economics. The cost to migrate from a proprietary system is prohibitive, locking you into a vendor's pricing model. In contrast, standardized circuits using Plonk or Halo2 enable competition between proving services from Polygon, Scroll, and others, driving costs toward zero.

Performance is a temporary advantage. A 20% faster proprietary prover today is irrelevant when a portable, commoditized prover network achieves 10x cost reduction in 18 months. The industry's trajectory, seen with EVM compatibility, is toward standardization and commoditization of execution layers.

Evidence: StarkWare's move to open-source its prover and the rise of shared sequencing layers like Espresso and Radius demonstrate the market's rejection of closed systems. Teams building on proprietary stacks are paying a long-term tax for short-term convenience.

Proprietary circuits create walled gardens. Each ZK-rollup like zkSync Era or Polygon zkEVM uses custom, closed-source circuits for its state transition function. This forces developers to commit to a single execution environment, as code and tooling are non-transferable.

The cost is ecosystem fragmentation. A dApp built for StarkNet's Cairo cannot deploy to Scroll without a full rewrite. This vendor lock-in replicates the appchain problem at the L2 level, defeating ZK's promise of a unified, trustless settlement layer.

Standardization lags behind innovation. Efforts like the EZKL library or the Plonky2 proving system aim for portability, but dominant players prioritize proprietary performance gains. The result is a Tower of Babel where proving systems don't communicate.

Evidence: The StarkEx and zkSync circuits are incompatible by design. Bridging assets between them requires a trusted, non-ZK bridge layer, reintroducing the security assumptions ZK technology aims to eliminate.

Circuit Obsolescence Risk is the first cost. A custom ZK circuit is a frozen snapshot of logic. Upgrading business rules requires a full, expensive re-audit and redeploy, unlike the fork-and-upgrade model of EVM smart contracts. This creates a permanent innovation lag.

Proving Infrastructure Dependence is the second. Your protocol is chained to the vendor's proving hardware and software stack. Shifting from a zkSync prover to Polygon zkEVM is a full migration, not a simple RPC endpoint change, because proof systems are not standardized.

Audit Sunk Cost is the third and largest. The multi-million dollar audit for a proprietary circuit is non-transferable. Moving to a new ZK stack, like from StarkWare to RISC Zero, means discarding that entire security investment and starting from zero.

Evidence: The EVM's bytecode standard enabled the L2 wars; any team could fork Optimism's Bedrock or Arbitrum Nitro. No equivalent standard exists for ZK-VM proofs, which is why zkSync, Scroll, and Polygon operate as walled gardens.

Proprietary circuits create walled gardens. A chain using a custom ZK stack like zkSync's Boojum or Polygon's Plonky2 cannot easily migrate its applications to a competing L2. This is vendor lock-in for the entire ecosystem, not just the core team.

Innovation shifts from applications to infrastructure. Developers spend cycles optimizing for a single chain's quirks instead of building portable dApps. This mirrors the early EVM vs. Cosmos SDK fragmentation, which stifled composability for years.

The performance gap is closing. Open-source stacks like RISC Zero and SP1 now achieve performance parity with proprietary systems. The argument for closed-source optimization is a temporary advantage that sacrifices long-term network effects.

Evidence: StarkWare's move to open-source its STARK prover, Stone, acknowledges that ecosystem growth outweighs proprietary edge. Chains that prioritize lock-in today will face developer attrition as open standards mature.

Vendor lock-in is a capital expense. A proprietary proving system like a custom zkEVM or zkVM forces you to fund a perpetual R&D team. This is a sunk cost fallacy that chains like Polygon zkEVM and Scroll have already absorbed, but new L2s cannot afford.

Portability is a hedge against obsolescence. A circuit designed for a specific proof system (e.g., only Plonky2) is stranded when a faster, cheaper prover (e.g., Boojum, RISC Zero) emerges. This technical debt compounds annually as the proving market innovates.

The standard is the escape hatch. Adopting a portable intermediate representation like LLVM IR (RISC Zero) or a shared proving marketplace (Espresso Systems, Avail) decouples application logic from proving infrastructure. This is the same interoperability playbook that made EVM the dominant standard.

Evidence: The cost to audit and maintain a custom zkVM circuit suite exceeds $5M annually. In contrast, using a portable standard like Noir or a shared sequencer data availability layer shifts this cost to a competitive market of prover networks.