Boundless by RISC Zero: Can the Decentralized Proof Market Solve ZK's $97M Bottleneck?
Zero-knowledge rollups were supposed to be the future of blockchain scaling. Instead, they've become hostages to a $97 million centralized prover market where a handful of companies extract 60-70% of fees — while users wait minutes for proofs that should take seconds.
Boundless, RISC Zero's decentralized proof marketplace that launched on mainnet in September 2025, claims to have cracked this problem. By turning ZK proof generation into an open market where GPU operators compete for work, Boundless promises to make verifiable computation "as cheap as execution." But can a token-incentivized network really break the centralization death spiral that's kept ZK technology expensive and inaccessible?
The Billion-Dollar Bottleneck: Why ZK Proofs Are Still Expensive
The promise of zero-knowledge rollups was elegant: execute transactions off-chain, generate a cryptographic proof of correct execution, and verify that proof on Ethereum for a fraction of the cost. In theory, this would deliver Ethereum-level security at sub-cent transaction costs.
Reality proved messier.
A single ZK proof for a batch of 4,000 transactions takes two to five minutes to generate on a high-end A100 GPU, costing $0.04 to $0.17 in cloud computing fees alone. That's before factoring in the specialized software, engineering expertise, and redundant infrastructure needed to run a reliable proving service.
The result? Over 90% of ZK-L2s rely on a handful of prover-as-a-service providers. This centralization introduces exactly the risks that blockchain was designed to eliminate: censorship, MEV extraction, single points of failure, and web2-style rent extraction.
The Technical Challenge
The bottleneck isn't network congestion — it's the mathematics itself. ZK proving relies on multi-scalar multiplications (MSMs) and number-theoretic transforms (NTTs) over elliptic curves. These operations are fundamentally different from the matrix math that makes GPUs excellent for AI workloads.
After years of MSM optimization, NTTs now account for up to 90% of proof generation latency on GPUs. The cryptography community has hit diminishing returns on software optimization alone.
Enter Boundless: The Open Proof Market
Boundless attempts to solve this problem by decoupling proof generation from blockchain consensus entirely. Instead of each rollup running its own prover infrastructure, Boundless creates a marketplace where:
- Requestors submit proof requests (from any chain)
- Provers compete to generate proofs using GPUs and commodity hardware
- Settlement happens on the destination chain specified by the requester
The key innovation is "Proof of Verifiable Work" (PoVW) — a mechanism that rewards provers not for useless hashes (like Bitcoin mining) but for generating useful ZK proofs. Each proof carries cryptographic metadata proving how much computation went into it, creating a transparent record of work.
How It Actually Works
Under the hood, Boundless builds on RISC Zero's zkVM — a zero-knowledge virtual machine that can execute any program compiled for the RISC-V instruction set. This means developers can write applications in Rust, C++, or any language that compiles to RISC-V, then generate proofs of correct execution without learning specialized ZK circuits.
The three-layer architecture includes:
- zkVM Layer: Executes arbitrary programs and generates STARK proofs
- Recursion Layer: Aggregates multiple STARKs into compact proofs
- Settlement Layer: Converts proofs to Groth16 format for on-chain verification
This design allows Boundless to generate proofs that are small enough (around 200KB) for economical on-chain verification while supporting complex computations.
The ZKC Token: Mining Proofs Instead of Hashes
Boundless introduced ZK Coin (ZKC) as the native token powering its proof market. Unlike typical utility tokens, ZKC is actively mined through proof generation — provers earn ZKC rewards proportional to the computational work they contribute.
Tokenomics Overview
- Total Supply: 1 billion ZKC (with 7% inflation in Year 1, tapering to 3% by Year 8)
- Ecosystem Growth: 41.6% allocated to adoption initiatives
- Strategic Partners: 21.5% with 1-year cliff and 2-year vesting
- Community: 8.3% for token sale and airdrops
- Current Price: ~$0.12 (down from $0.29 ICO price)
The inflationary model has sparked debate. Proponents argue ongoing emissions are necessary to incentivize a healthy prover network. Critics point out that 7% annual inflation creates constant sell pressure, potentially limiting ZKC's value appreciation even as the network grows.
Market Turbulence
ZKC's first months weren't smooth. In October 2025, South Korean exchange Upbit flagged the token with an "investment warning," triggering a 46% price crash. Upbit lifted the warning after Boundless clarified its tokenomics, but the episode highlighted the volatility risks of infrastructure tokens tied to emerging markets.
Mainnet Reality: Who's Actually Using Boundless?
Since launching mainnet beta on Base in July 2025 and full mainnet in September, Boundless has secured notable integrations:
Wormhole Integration
Wormhole is integrating Boundless to add ZK verification to Ethereum consensus, making cross-chain transfers more secure. Instead of relying purely on multi-sig guardians, Wormhole NTT (Native Token Transfers) can now include optional ZK proofs for users who want cryptographic guarantees.
Citrea Bitcoin L2
Citrea, a Bitcoin Layer-2 zk-rollup built by Chainway Labs, uses RISC Zero's zkVM to generate validity proofs posted to Bitcoin via BitVM. This enables EVM-equivalent programmability on Bitcoin while using BTC for settlement and data availability.
Google Cloud Partnership
Through its Verifiable AI Program, Boundless partnered with Google Cloud to enable ZK-powered AI proofs. Developers can build applications that prove AI model outputs without revealing inputs — a crucial capability for privacy-preserving machine learning.
Stellar Bridge
In September 2025, Nethermind deployed RISC Zero verifiers for Stellar zk Bridge integration, enabling cross-chain proofs between Stellar's low-cost payment network and Ethereum's security guarantees.
The Competition: Succinct SP1 and the zkVM Wars
Boundless isn't the only player racing to solve ZK's scalability problem. Succinct Labs' SP1 zkVM has emerged as a major competitor, sparking a benchmarking war between the two teams.
RISC Zero's Claims
RISC Zero asserts that properly configured zkVM deployments are "at least 7x less expensive than SP1" and up to 60x cheaper for small workloads. They point to tighter proof sizes and more efficient GPU utilization.
Succinct's Response
Succinct counters that RISC Zero's benchmarks "misleadingly compared CPU performance to GPU results." Their SP1 Hypercube prover claims $0.02 proofs with ~2 minute latency — though it remains closed source.
Independent Analysis
A Fenbushi Capital comparison found RISC Zero demonstrated "superior speed and efficiency across all benchmark categories in GPU environments," but noted SP1 excels in developer adoption, powering projects like Celestia's Blobstream with $3.14B in total value secured versus RISC Zero's $239M.
The real competitive advantage may not be raw performance but ecosystem lock-in. Boundless plans to support competing zkVMs including SP1, ZKsync's Boojum, and Jolt — positioning itself as a protocol-agnostic proof marketplace rather than a single-vendor solution.
2026 Roadmap: What's Next for Boundless
RISC Zero's roadmap for Boundless includes several ambitious targets:
Ecosystem Expansion (Q4 2025 - 2026)
- Extend ZK proof support to Solana
- Bitcoin integration via BitVM
- Additional L2 deployments
Hybrid Rollup Upgrades
The most significant technical milestone is transitioning optimistic rollups (like Optimism and Base chains) to use validity proofs for faster finality. Instead of waiting 7 days for fraud proof windows, OP chains could settle in minutes.
Multi-zkVM Support
Support for competing zkVMs is on the roadmap, allowing developers to switch between RISC Zero, SP1, or other proving systems without leaving the marketplace.
Decentralization Completion
RISC Zero terminated its hosted proof service in December 2025, forcing all proof generation through the decentralized Boundless network. This marked a significant commitment to the decentralization thesis — but also means the network's reliability now depends entirely on independent provers.
The Bigger Picture: Will Decentralized Proving Become the Standard?
The success of Boundless hinges on a fundamental bet: that proof generation will commoditize the way cloud computing did. If that thesis holds, having the most efficient prover network matters less than having the largest and most liquid marketplace.
Several factors support this view:
- Hardware commoditization: ZK-specific ASICs from companies like Cysic promise 50x energy efficiency improvements, potentially lowering barriers to entry
- Proof aggregation: Networks like Boundless can batch proofs from multiple applications, amortizing fixed costs
- Cross-chain demand: As more chains adopt ZK verification, demand for proof generation could outpace any single provider's capacity
But risks remain:
- Centralization creep: Early prover networks tend toward concentration as economies of scale favor large operators
- Token dependency: If ZKC price collapses, prover incentives evaporate — potentially causing a death spiral
- Technical complexity: Running a competitive prover requires significant expertise, potentially limiting decentralization in practice
What This Means for Developers
For builders considering ZK integration, Boundless represents a pragmatic middle ground:
- No infrastructure overhead: Submit proof requests via API without running your own provers
- Multi-chain settlement: Generate proofs once, verify on any supported chain
- Language flexibility: Write in Rust or any RISC-V compatible language instead of learning ZK DSLs
The trade-off is dependency on a token-incentivized network whose long-term stability remains unproven. For production applications, many teams may prefer Boundless for testnet and experimentation while maintaining fallback prover infrastructure for critical workloads.
Conclusion
Boundless represents the most ambitious attempt yet to solve ZK's centralization problem. By turning proof generation into an open market incentivized by ZKC tokens, RISC Zero is betting that competition will drive costs down faster than any single vendor could achieve alone.
The mainnet launch, major integrations with Wormhole and Citrea, and commitment to supporting rival zkVMs suggest serious technical capability. But the inflationary tokenomics, exchange volatility, and unproven decentralization at scale leave important questions unanswered.
For the ZK ecosystem, Boundless's success or failure will signal whether decentralized infrastructure can compete with centralized efficiency — or whether the blockchain industry's scaling future remains in the hands of a few well-funded prover services.
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