Briefing
The core research problem is the centralization risk inherent in ZK-Rollups’ reliance on single, proprietary provers, which requires a new economic model to incentivize decentralized proof generation while ensuring efficiency and security. The foundational breakthrough is the introduction of Prooφ , a dual-auction mechanism that formally separates user transaction bidding from prover cost bidding, enabling the system to select the most cost-efficient provers while maintaining incentive compatibility. This new theory provides the architectural blueprint for a truly decentralized, competitive, and sustainable ZK-Rollup ecosystem, fundamentally securing the long-term integrity of Layer 2 state finality.
Context
Before this work, the decentralization of ZK-Rollups was fundamentally limited by the absence of a robust economic framework for the “prover market.” Existing transaction fee mechanisms, such as those used in Layer 1 blockchains, were not designed to account for the heterogeneous, private, and high marginal costs associated with generating computationally intensive validity proofs. This theoretical limitation led most operational ZK-Rollups to rely on centralized, proprietary proving infrastructure, which introduced risks of censorship, single points of failure, and economic inefficiency in resource allocation.
Analysis
Prooφ addresses this challenge by conceptualizing the prover process as a two-sided market governed by a dual-auction structure. The first side is a user-facing auction that determines the transaction set based on user fees, establishing the total revenue pool. The second side is a prover-facing mechanism where provers bid their capacity and unit cost.
The system ensures efficiency by selecting transactions with the highest value up to a fixed capacity limit and then compensating provers whose costs are below the average fee of the selected batch. The introduction of a transaction constraint capacity parameter is critical; this parameter limits the batch size, directly mitigating the risk of off-chain collusion and Sybil attacks among provers by capping the potential profit from such agreements.
Parameters
- Incentive Compatibility ∞ The mechanism ensures that users and provers are economically motivated to bid honestly, a core requirement for a robust market.
- Dual-Auction Structure ∞ The design separates the user-side fee auction from the prover-side cost and capacity auction, which is necessary to align heterogeneous costs with user demand.
- Transaction Constraint Capacity ∞ An upper bound placed on the total constraints of transactions included in each round, which is the primary tool for forestalling off-chain agreements.
Outlook
This research immediately opens a new frontier in Layer 2 architecture, shifting focus from merely optimizing proof generation speed to optimizing the market for proof generation. Future work will concentrate on refining the capacity parameter to dynamically adjust to network conditions and further strengthening the mechanism’s robustness against sophisticated Sybil attacks. Within three to five years, this mechanism design principle could be integrated into all major ZK-Rollup protocols, leading to a fully decentralized, permissionless proving layer that significantly enhances the fault tolerance and censorship resistance of the entire Layer 2 ecosystem.
