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CrowdProve: Community Proving for ZK Rollups

John Stephan, Matej Pavlovic, Antonio Locascio, Benjamin Livshits

TL;DR

This paper tackles the bottleneck of expensive validity-proof generation in ZK rollups by introducing CrowdProve, a prover orchestration layer that outsources proving tasks to a broad community of commodity-hardware provers. The system centers on a Job Distributor (JD) and a Least-Recently-Processed (LRP) mechanism to dynamically assign tasks, verify proofs, and compensate provers, enabling partial decentralization while preserving security. Empirical results show that CrowdProve can match or exceed the performance of centralized deployments across hardware configurations, with significant potential for cost savings, especially when leveraging GPU and consumer-grade hardware in large-scale prover networks. The authors discuss deployment variants, smart job assignment, compensation strategies, and pathways toward fuller decentralization, highlighting practical benefits and remaining challenges in secure, scalable ZK proof generation for rollups.

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.

CrowdProve: Community Proving for ZK Rollups

TL;DR

This paper tackles the bottleneck of expensive validity-proof generation in ZK rollups by introducing CrowdProve, a prover orchestration layer that outsources proving tasks to a broad community of commodity-hardware provers. The system centers on a Job Distributor (JD) and a Least-Recently-Processed (LRP) mechanism to dynamically assign tasks, verify proofs, and compensate provers, enabling partial decentralization while preserving security. Empirical results show that CrowdProve can match or exceed the performance of centralized deployments across hardware configurations, with significant potential for cost savings, especially when leveraging GPU and consumer-grade hardware in large-scale prover networks. The authors discuss deployment variants, smart job assignment, compensation strategies, and pathways toward fuller decentralization, highlighting practical benefits and remaining challenges in secure, scalable ZK proof generation for rollups.

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.
Paper Structure (28 sections, 3 figures, 3 tables)

This paper contains 28 sections, 3 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Our Approach in
  3. Contributions
  4. Paper Outline
  5. Background
  6. Rollups
  7. Proving Systems
  8. for Community Proving
  9. System Architecture
  10. Community Prover Module
  11. Job Distributor
  12. Least-Recently-Processed (LRP) Job Assignment Mechanism
  13. Proving Process
  14. Benefits of
  15. Challenges of Community Proving and 's Solutions
  16. ...and 13 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: System Architecture of
  • Figure 2: Proving time in minutes for 17,188 jobs when varying the number of provers under different hardware configurations. Left: linear scale, right: logarithmic scale for better clarity on lower values.
  • Figure 3: Total number of jobs executed per minute, when proving 100 jobs of Circuit ID 1 and Aggregation Round 0 across varying number of (8 CPU, 32 GB RAM)-provers.