Technology Category
Machine Learning: Hardware-aware MLData Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed SystemsSearch and Optimization: Distributed Search
CrowdProve: Community Proving for ZK Rollups
🤖 AI Summary
To address the scalability limitations, weakened decentralization, and high verification costs caused by centralized provers in ZK Rollups, this paper proposes the first community-driven, decentralized proof generation paradigm tailored for ZK Rollups. Our approach operates over a heterogeneous, unreliable hardware network and integrates dynamic task sharding, lightweight proof sharding, redundant submission, and multi-replica consistency verification. We further design an incentive-compatible contributor collaboration protocol and hardware-adaptive adaptation techniques. Experimental evaluation in realistic ZK Rollup settings demonstrates that our system achieves proof latency and throughput comparable to—and often exceeding—state-of-the-art centralized provers, while requiring only mid-to-low-end device clusters to deliver equivalent performance. This significantly reduces operational costs without compromising security or decentralization guarantees.
Technology Category
Application Category
📝 Abstract
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.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Decentralization
Zero-Knowledge Aggregation
Blockchain Scalability
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
CrowdProve
Decentralized Computing
Zero-Knowledge Aggregation
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