Zero-knowledge proofs have become a core primitive for blockchain infrastructure, underpinning privacy, scaling, and secure interoperability. For layer-2 rollups in particular, ZK can be used to accelerate finality by eliminating the traditional 7-day challenge window.
Advances in zkVMs have made this practical. Teams can now generate proofs for real workloads and move from research to production far more quickly than before.
As a result, the bottleneck has shifted. The challenge is no longer whether rollups can generate proofs, but how proofs are generated and guaranteed in production: securely, reliably, and under worst-case conditions.
This forces every rollup team to confront the same question: how should proving be handled?
There are three ways to do it:
Most teams begin by comparing zkVM benchmarks on sites like ethproofs. However, these numbers only reflect the cost of generating a single proof under ideal conditions and neglect other significant costs that teams incur in production.
In production (whether you’re a full validity rollup or using zk fraud proofs) the real cost depends on how much capacity must be kept online, how redundant it needs to be, and who operates it. Once idle capacity, orchestration overhead, and availability risk are accounted for, the economics look very different from zkVM benchmarks.