$Proo\varphi$: A ZKP Market Mechanism
Wenhao Wang, Lulu Zhou, Aviv Yaish, Fan Zhang, Ben Fisch, Benjamin, Livshits

TL;DR
This paper introduces a formal market model for zero-knowledge proofs and proposes $Proo\varphi$, an incentive-compatible auction mechanism that addresses practical security challenges in ZKP outsourcing.
Contribution
It presents the first formal ZKP market model and an auction-based mechanism, $Proo\varphi$, with proven incentive compatibility and solutions for practical security issues.
Findings
$Proo\varphi$ is incentive compatible for users and provers.
The mechanism is budget balanced.
System-level designs mitigate security threats like Sybil attacks.
Abstract
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are computationally demanding to generate. Their importance for applications like ZK-Rollups has prompted some to outsource ZKP generation to a market of specialized provers. However, existing market designs either do not fit the ZKP setting 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 competing to generate proofs. Building on this model, we introduce , an auction-based ZKP market mechanism. We prove that is incentive compatible for users and provers, and budget balanced. We augment 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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsOptimization and Search Problems · Transportation and Mobility Innovations
