A New ERA for ZK: Decentralizing the ZK Stack

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A new era for the ZK ecosystem has started. For the first time, a decentralized prover network has successfully launched a decentralized implementation of the ZK stack prover. What comes now is the next phase of scalability and ZK development, driven by the pursuit for lower costs, higher throughput, and stronger networks.

Lagrange Labs is excited to announce that the Lagrange Prover Network has successfully integrated a decentralized version of  ZKsync’s ZK stack prover. The test, run in late 2024, defines a new approach to proof generation, and sets the stage for further integrations beginning this year. As part of the test network, a group of top institutional operators participated in decentralized proof generation for the ZK stack, including P2P, Nethermind, Black Sand, EigenYields and Staked.
Together, Lagrange and its operators have successfully demonstrated the technical and economic viability of replacing centralized ZK stack provers with the Lagrange Prover Network.

The successful implementation marks the first decentralized prover successfully executed for ZKsync’s ecosystem and the first instance of a live testnet for decentralized prover for any major ZK rollup ecosystem. The result is a new era not just for ZKsync, but for the ZK ecosystem as a whole. With the next stage of rollout, Lagrange will continue to improve costs, increase throughput, and strengthen reliability — showing firsthand the tangible benefits of decentralized proving for ZK rollup ecosystems. 

Lagrange: The Decentralized Prover Network

The Lagrange Prover Network (LPN) provides universal proof generation for a span of blockchain use cases, including rollup ecosystems like ZKsync’s Elastic Chain. Built on Eigenlayer, the LPN improves on centralized ZK prover systems, which rely on single gateways that manage the process of generating proofs on the network. The LPN, on the other hand, supports multiple subnetworks that are made up of a distributed group of independent operators, or provers. Collectively, this “network of prover networks” is able to scale infinitely to absorb any transaction volume and generate secure and low cost proofs in the process. Read more about the LPN.

ZKsync: The Elastic Chain

ZKsync is a Layer 2 solution designed to address pervasive scaling issues with Ethereum. The ZK Stack is a modular, open-source framework that is both free and designed to build custom ZK-powered L2s and L3s (referred to as ZK Chains), based on the code of ZKsync Era. At its core, the ZK Stack offers two key features: sovereignty with seamless connectivity. ZK Chains operate independently, relying solely on Ethereum L1 for their liveness and security, while a network of Hyperbridges facilitates the interconnection of every ZK Chain, enabling trustless, fast, and cheap interoperability. Leading the charge in the ZKsync ecosystem is ZKsync Era, serving as the pioneering ZK Chain and the first EVM-compatible ZK rollup. Following in the footsteps of Era, the ZK Stack allows any developer to build their own sovereign ZK Chains without sacrificing interoperability and composability. 

Today, Matter Labs, the development team behind ZKsync, uses a centralized deployment of provers to power proof generation for most ZK stack chains. The system has worked to scale the ZKsync ecosystem to date, but it is also saddled with the common constraints of centralized processes, including: scalability, liveness guarantees, and cost. 

The test in late 2024 charts the path forward for further decentralized proving integration across the ZKsync and ZK stack ecosystems in 2025, including with top rollup-as-a-service platforms including Caldera and AltLayer.

The Elastic Chain is More Powerful with Lagrange

As mentioned earlier, Matter Labs today uses a centralized proving system in order to  generate proofs for batches of transactions executed on ZK stack chains. Today’s system encounters three prevailing issues:

1. Limited scale. A surge in transaction volume can cause a bottleneck on centralized prover deployments, slowing down the network’s capacity to process transactions and generate proofs.
2. High cost. Any centralized system has the capacity to set its own price. Though ZKsync today is notably cheaper than Ethereum mainnet, centralization of the proving system leaves the ecosystem vulnerable to unilateral pricing decisions on behalf of the services being used by ZKsync (such as Google Cloud).
3. Liveness guarantees. As with any centralized system, a centralized  prover deployment has less redundancy, thus leaving the entire ecosystem vulnerable.Should a centralized component of the system, like Google Cloud, experience a downtime, then the entire ecosystem could experience slowdowns and liveness issues.

ZKsync has long been aware of the limitations of centralized proving, and invited teams to advance the decentralization of its prover system in mid-2024. 

In late 2024, Lagrange successfully implemented the first decentralized implementation of  ZKsync’s ZK stack prover on the Lagrange Prover Network. By using the LPN, ZK stack chains can decentralize their proof generation process, moving the proving of transactions towards a robust and lower cost network of provers. The end result of decentralizing the ZK stack prover on the LPN is:

1. More scalable proving. The LPN alleviates bottlenecks in resource access, enabling highly scalable proving of transactions and allowing ZK stack chains to be truly elastic in response to user demands.
2. Lower costs. Replacing a centralized pricing model with a distributed group of independent provers creates market competition. As provers compete to process transactions and generate proofs, they will adjust their prices accordingly.
3. Resilience. Multiple provers working independently from each other increases the resilience of the entire ZKsync ecosystem. Should a portion of the operators go offline, the network will not notably suffer, as the rest of LPN will adjust to absorb the bandwidth.

The successful test in late 2024 now sets the stage for the ZKsync ecosystem to continue exploring the potential to integrate with decentralized proving powered by  the LPN through the rest of the year. Lagrange has recently announced partnerships to do decentralized proving with top rollup-as-a-service platforms, including Caldera and AltLayer. For everyday users of ZKsync, an integration of the LPN would not require a change in how they interact with apps or services. However, they would benefit from lower fees and faster transactions. For businesses running services on ZKsync, they would have the confidence in the ZK stack remaining one of the most reliable and resilient frameworks for launching L2s.

The First ZK Prover Network for the ZK Stack: How it Works

Below is an overview of how decentralized  proof generation works for a ZK stack prover on  the Lagrange Prover Network.

1. Transactions on a ZK stack rollup are batched together by the sequencer and submitted to be processed (i.e. for proofs to be generated). The ZK stack rollup implements a “smart organizer” known as a Proxy Prover. The responsibility of the Proxy Prover is to take these batches of transactions and organize them into bundles that can be processed most efficiently. The integration of LPN does not change this general process of ZKsync’s transaction submission, though it does introduce a new Proxy Prover agent to make the interaction with the LPN more efficient.
2. The Proxy Prover will send the transaction bundles to the Lagrange Prover Network. This is in contrast to the previous process, in which the Proxy Prover would send bundles to the centralized ZKsync Prover System.
3. As transaction bundles are sent to the Lagrange Prover Network, operators compete to be assigned transactions to prove. This assignment process is managed by the Lagrange Gateway, which implements an auction system to allocate the work based on the most competitive auctions coming from the operators.
4. Tasks (i.e. bundles of transactions) are assigned to the winning operators, who process the transactions and generate ZK proofs.

Once a proof is generated, the operator submits back to a shared storage layer that enables the auctioneer to settle a payment to the operator as a reward for generating the proof. If an operator fails to deliver a proof on time, the operator faces penalties such as slashing or non-payment, incentivizing them to meet their commitments and ensuring the network’s reliability.‍

What’s Next for ZKsync and Lagrange

With the successful implementation of end-to-end decentralized proving for the ZK stack, Lagrange is well on its way to decentralizing proof generation across the Elastic Chain in 2025.

Over the next months, Lagrange will gradually roll out a production version of the ZK stack prover on  Lagrange Prover Network, with the goal of diverting more and more transactions from centralized proving systems to the decentralized LPN. Some of the more immediate improvements that the Lagrange Labs team is focusing on is the efficiency of the transaction batching and enhancements to the auction system to handle higher volumes and foster more competitive pricing, respectively. Lagrange is actively encouraging interested teams to join the Lagrange Prover Network as operators for the ZK stack in order to improve capacity and reliability. Interested operators can reach out here.

Overall, the ZK stack integration with the Lagrange Prover Network is an example of how novel systems can be improved by identifying and eliminating centralization. Even in a field as early as ZK, ensuring decentralization across the entire stack is an effort Lagrange is committed to leading,  to yield a more powerful, open, and fair web3.

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