ZK has always been the proposed endgame for Ethereum scaling and is advancing faster than anticipated, aggressively pulling forward timelines. Still, there is a lack of clarity around the market design when enshrining ZK in the L1. A short 🧵of my EthCC talk on this topic ↓

1/ It’s helpful to compare proof delegation to the familiar PBS auction. Both outsource complex tasks to external parties, but cash flows in opposite directions: builders buy valuable blockspace provers sell the service of proof generation This makes prover accountability harder

3/ We introduce a model for procurement with a liveness penalty. The penalty C captures the economic loss from a missed slot, and is incurred if no proof is supplied. This can be as large as hundreds of ETH (per recent MEV-Boost winning bids @mevproposerbot)!

7/ In summary, proof procurement is not one size fits all. The adversarial environment is akin to (and arguably more nuanced than) the one in TFM design, but without nearly as much supporting literature. Some open questions below.

h/t @ks_kulk @_julianma @kevaundray for their related posts: - -