CrowdProve: Community Proving for ZK Rollups

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Stephan, John, Pavlovic, Matej, Locascio, Antonio, Livshits, Benjamin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Stephan, John
Pavlovic, Matej
Locascio, Antonio
Livshits, Benjamin
author_facet Stephan, John
Pavlovic, Matej
Locascio, Antonio
Livshits, Benjamin
contents Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups have become a popular solution for scaling blockchain systems, offering improved transaction throughput and reduced costs by aggregating Layer 2 transactions and submitting them as a single batch to a Layer 1 blockchain. However, the computational burden of generating validity proofs, a key feature of ZK rollups, presents significant challenges in terms of performance and decentralization. Current solutions rely on centralized infrastructure to handle the computational tasks, limiting the scalability and decentralization of rollup systems. This paper proposes CrowdProve, a prover orchestration layer for outsourcing computation to unreliable commodity hardware run by a broad community of small provers. We apply CrowdProve to proving transaction batches for a popular ZK rollup. Through our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that community proving can achieve performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, existing centralized deployments. Our results show that even systems utilizing modest hardware configurations can match the performance of centralized solutions, making community-based proof generation a viable and cost-effective alternative. CrowdProve allows both the rollup operator and community participants to benefit: the operator reduces infrastructure costs by leveraging idle community hardware, while community provers are compensated for their contributions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_03126
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CrowdProve: Community Proving for ZK Rollups
Stephan, John
Pavlovic, Matej
Locascio, Antonio
Livshits, Benjamin
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups have become a popular solution for scaling blockchain systems, offering improved transaction throughput and reduced costs by aggregating Layer 2 transactions and submitting them as a single batch to a Layer 1 blockchain. However, the computational burden of generating validity proofs, a key feature of ZK rollups, presents significant challenges in terms of performance and decentralization. Current solutions rely on centralized infrastructure to handle the computational tasks, limiting the scalability and decentralization of rollup systems. This paper proposes CrowdProve, a prover orchestration layer for outsourcing computation to unreliable commodity hardware run by a broad community of small provers. We apply CrowdProve to proving transaction batches for a popular ZK rollup. Through our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that community proving can achieve performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, existing centralized deployments. Our results show that even systems utilizing modest hardware configurations can match the performance of centralized solutions, making community-based proof generation a viable and cost-effective alternative. CrowdProve allows both the rollup operator and community participants to benefit: the operator reduces infrastructure costs by leveraging idle community hardware, while community provers are compensated for their contributions.
title CrowdProve: Community Proving for ZK Rollups
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03126