Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Sec
Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC) Year 2025 Peer-reviewed
Blockchain Security · DeFi

Proo$\phi$: A ZKP

Wenhao Wang Lulu Zhou Aviv Yaish Fan Zhang Ben Fisch Benjamin Livshits
2025
Publication year
FC
Venue
Peer-reviewed
Type

Problem

Abstract. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are computationally demand- ing to generate. Their importance for applications like ZK-Rollups has prompted some to outsource ZKP generation to a market of specialized provers.

Approach

However, existing market designs either do not fit the ZKP set- ting or lack formal description and analysis. In this work, we propose a formal ZKP market model that captures the interactions between users submitting ZKP tasks and provers compet- ing to generate proofs. Building on this model, we introduce Prooφ, an auction-based ZKP market mechanism.

Results

We prove that Prooφ is incen- tive compatible for users and provers, and budget balanced. We augment Prooφ with system-level designs to address the practical challenges of our setting, such as Sybil attacks, misreporting of prover capacity, and collusion. We analyze our system-level designs and show how they can mitigate the various security concerns. 1

Cite this paper — BibTeX
@InProceedings{wang25proof,
  title = "Proo$\phi$: A {ZKP} Market Mechanism",
  author = "Wenhao Wang and Lulu Zhou and Aviv Yaish and Fan Zhang and Ben Fisch and Benjamin Livshits",
  year = "2025",
  month = apr,
  booktitle = "Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC)",
}
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