The Problem: Blockchains are terrible computers

Blockchains were engineered for state consensus, not high-throughput computation. By design, every validator must deterministically re-execute each transaction before it can be committed to the ledger. This guarantees correctness, but forces overall performance to match the slowest node on the network.

Practical consequences

• Execution is capped. Gas/block size limits exist to keep verification latency bounded so that nodes can remain in sync. Any transaction that would push execution time or memory beyond those limits is rejected.
• Compute is needlessly replicated. Thousands of nodes perform the same transactions, so total re-execution grows linearly with node count, while the amount of “real” work stays constant.
• Scaling paths fragment state. New networks increase execution through parallelization of state machines, however these create separate liquidity pools, state silos, and introduce bridging risk, rather than removing the bottleneck altogether.

In practice, blockchains are good at payments and simple DeFi primitives, yet can’t handle more expressive applications and complex workloads like large-scale historical state queries, or complex pricing algorithms. Developers resort to aggressive micro-optimizations (gas golf) or access offchain compute that re-introduce new trust assumptions.

To support advanced markets, games, and data-rich applications, blockchains need a standard mechanism for accessing high-volume, verifiable compute without sacrificing trust guarantees. Until that exists, onchain expressivity will remain constrained by the narrow lane of re-execution.

Introducing Boundless: The Universal ZK Protocol

Boundless is a universal zero-knowledge protocol where anyone can access abundant verifiable compute . Boundless provides a network of nodes dedicated solely for execution, producing ZK proofs that the work was done correctly, verified on every chain at a low, constant cost. By decoupling execution from consensus, Boundless lets every chain keep its native security while escaping gas ceilings and re-execution.

The Boundless Market: How you plug in

Access to Boundless begins through The Boundless Market contracts, deployed natively on every major chain. The Boundless Market acts as a permissionless clearing house that matches proof requests from applications with compute capacity supplied by Boundless prover nodes. Because the market contracts exist on every chain, developers can stay in their home ecosystem: they interact with a local contract address, pay in the chain’s native token, and receive a proof they can verify on the spot.

How the Boundless Market Works

1. Create & broadcast a proof request

• A developer constructs a proof request that specifies:
  • The zkVM program (URL)
  • Input - either inline or a URL
  • Requirements on proven execution output (e.g. an expected journal hash)
  • Offered price and required stake - as auction parameters (min/max price, ramp-up time, time-outs, and slashing stake)
• The request can be posted onchain with BoundlessMarket.submitRequest() or sent offchain after pre-funding the Market contract.