Source: Brevis

Brevis has today released the ProverNet Whitepaper, introducing its decentralized zero-knowledge proof generation marketplace architecture, which has been field-tested in a production environment of mainstream multi-chain protocols. This system addresses a fundamental limitation in existing proof infrastructures—being unable to effectively serve heterogeneous computational workloads that require different hardware, proof systems, and optimization methods.

ProverNet views proof generation as a two-sided market, where applications submit specific requests and professional provers bid to fulfill these needs. This market operates through a Truthful Online Double Auction mechanism, designed to handle multiple proof types while ensuring honest bidding and optimal resource allocation. ProverNet plans to officially launch soon.

Production Scale Reveals Infrastructure Limitations

Brevis's current infrastructure has generated over 124 million proofs for 98,000 users, covering protocols such as PancakeSwap, Uniswap, Euler, Linea, and MetaMask, facilitating $224 million in trustless reward distribution. These deployments have significantly highlighted the diversity of proof work, with a single-vendor architecture struggling to effectively cater to it.

PancakeSwap's VIP fee discount system requires generating sub-second proofs for individual traders before each trade to check eligibility. Euler's incentive distribution processes 100,000 addresses every four hours, prioritizing throughput over latency. Linea's ecosystem activity generated 12.1 million proofs for multi-protocol rewards computation involving 61,902 addresses. Each workload requires different hardware configurations, proof systems (SNARKs vs. STARKs), and performance characteristics.

Michael, CEO and Co-founder of Brevis, stated: "Current proof systems are optimized for specific use cases, such as certain Rollups, a single virtual machine, or homogenized work types. The birth of ProverNet stems from our observation of applications fundamentally requiring different proof methods. A market competed by professional provers is more efficient than any single operator attempting to serve all use cases."

Market Architecture and TODA Mechanism

ProverNet's architecture views different proof types as different commodities in the auction. Applications specify proof requirements, including processing type (zkVM execution, data proof, recursive aggregation), deadline, maximum fee, and quality parameters. The TODA mechanism computes the optimal allocation in each round, matching heterogeneous requests with suitable proof capabilities.

This mechanism addresses the unique challenge of proof generation markets. Traditional auction mechanisms are based on the assumption of homogeneous goods, while TODA can handle multiple proof types simultaneously. Complex proof tasks are decomposed into subtasks and cooperatively executed by different provers.

For example, a zkVM proof might involve chunking on one prover, compressing on another, aggregating on a third, and finally verifying packaging on a fourth specialized system.

TODA ensures several economic properties:

Truthfulness (optimal strategy is honest bidding)

Budget balance (fees collected exceed fees paid)

Individual rationality (no participant undertakes unprofitable tasks)

Asymptotic optimality (as the supply of provers grows, allocation approaches maximum efficiency).

This market runs on Brevis Chain, a dedicated Rollup architecture designed specifically for auction coordination. The architecture isolates market throughput from Layer 1 or Layer 2 network congestion while maintaining transparency and permissionless participation. Proofs generated through ProverNet can be verified against any target blockchain.

Pico zkVM and Real-Time Proof

ProverNet builds on Brevis's existing proof infrastructure, which includes two complementary products to serve different computational needs.

Pico zkVM adopts a "general core + high-performance coprocessor" architecture, where a minimalistic, efficient core is connected to a dedicated cryptographic accelerator, allowing programs to run a stable virtual machine while benefiting from targeted hardware optimizations.

Pico Prism recently achieved 99.6% proof coverage of an Ethereum block with a gas limit of 45 million, completing 96.8% of the proofs in 12 seconds, with an average proof time of 6.9 seconds. This system utilizes a cluster of 64×RTX 5090 GPUs and achieves real-time proof at 50% lower hardware cost compared to the previous market-leading zkVM.

The ZK Data Coprocessor enables smart contracts to access historical blockchain data and perform verifiable off-chain computations.

Applications supported by this system include PancakeSwap's VIP fee tier (checks 30 days of trading volume pre-transaction), Euler's trustless reward distribution (handling time-weighted balances of thousands of addresses), and Uniswap v4's route rebates (validating transaction eligibility without a centralized ledger) among others.

These integrations showcase the data-intensive proof requirements that differentiate from generic compute validation.

Together, these systems establish the economic feasibility of achieving real-time cryptographic validation at the foundational layer, while serving the heterogeneous workload types that incentivize the ProverNet marketplace architecture.

Impact on the ZK Ecosystem

ProverNet represents a shift from single-proof provider infrastructure to market-driven resource allocation. Existing prover networks are typically optimized for narrow use cases (e.g., specific Rollup proofs, specific virtual machines, or homogeneous work types), limiting their ability to efficiently serve diverse demands.

The market auction model allows proof teams to focus on specific optimization goals (e.g., STARK-based batch processing, low-latency SNARK proofs, specific cryptographic operations) without building generic infrastructure, while applications can receive competitively priced and guaranteed service without vendor lock-in.

For developers, this eliminates the trade-off dilemma between building custom proof infrastructure (expensive and time-consuming) and relying on centralized services (introducing trust assumptions) because cryptographic validation ensures computation correctness, while market competition ensures pricing efficiency and availability of capacity.

More Information

The full ProverNet whitepaper is available at the following address: http://www.brevis.network/whitepaper/provernet.pdf

A concise technical overview has been published on the Brevis blog: https://blog.brevis.network/2025/10/28/brevis-provernet-building-the-open-marketplace-for-zero-knowledge-proofs/

This article is contributed content and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.

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