Best practices for future-proofing rollup proof throughput: Modular Prover Architectures

Proof generation is the hidden throttle on rollup scalability. This guide distills the newest research, field benchmarks, and operational patterns into an actionable architecture for decision‑makers who need to ship high‑throughput, low‑latency proofs today and stay flexible as proving tech evolves.

TL;DR (description)

A modular prover architecture—decoupling witness, trace, proving, recursion, and verification with hardware‑aware scheduling and multi‑proof optionality—lets rollups scale proof throughput 10–100x while hedging against rapid changes in ZK/Fraud‑proof systems and hardware. Emerging proof networks (Succinct, ZkCloud), verification layers (Aligned), and cross‑stack interop (AggLayer) are now production‑ready building blocks to reduce latency, cost, and single‑vendor risk. (theblock.co)

Why proof throughput is your real bottleneck in 2025

Succinct’s SP1 “Hypercube” zkVM proved 93% of Ethereum blocks in under 12 seconds on a 200× RTX 4090 cluster, targeting real‑time L1 block proving and estimating <$100k cluster cost with optimized hardware. That’s a qualitative step‑change in latency expectations for L1 and rollup proving. (theblock.co)
Hash‑throughput records keep falling: StarkWare’s Stwo exceeded 500k hashes/s on a commodity quad‑core CPU; Polygon’s open‑source Plonky3 crossed 2M hashes/s on an M3 Max; Polyhedra’s Expander hit 2.16M Poseidon H/s on a Ryzen 7950X3D and scales to ~16M H/s on 256‑core servers. These trends compress proof latency and enable deeper recursion/aggregation at practical cost. (starknet.io)
Optimism’s OP Stack reached Stage‑1 with permissionless fault proofs and a modular “multi‑proof” roadmap (Cannon today; Asterisc, Kona, ZK later). Even optimistic rollups now plan for pluggable, redundant proof systems—your architecture must be ready to swap/compose provers. (optimism.io)

Takeaway: throughput isn’t just faster math; it’s an architectural, operational, and vendor‑choice problem. Treat the prover as a modular, multi‑backend service—not a monolith.

The modular prover architecture: the five planes

Design around five separable planes with typed interfaces between them:

Witness plane

Deterministically extract and normalize execution data (EVM traces, RISC‑V/Cairo/Wasmtime traces).
Partition large circuits into subcircuits with bounded memory; overlap witness and proof phases. Academic work like Yoimiya shows circuit partitioning and pipeline scheduling that aligns witness and proof time across resources for higher utilization. (arxiv.org)

Trace plane

Canonicalize traces into an intermediate representation (IR) that is prover‑agnostic. Vendor IRs (e.g., Hypercube IR from Cysic) show how a hardware‑portable op set can speed MSM/NTT/Keccak across GPUs/ASICs; adopt or emulate an IR to de‑risk backend churn. (hozk.io)

Prover plane

Multiple backends: SNARK (Groth16/PLONKish), STARK, folding‑based recursion (Nova/SuperNova family), zkVMs (SP1, RISC Zero), and fraud‑proof VMs (MIPS/RISC‑V). Keep each behind a gRPC/IPC boundary with capability discovery (features, maximum circuit size, cost/latency, fault domains).
Track security notes: Nova‑style folding saw fixes in cycle‑of‑curves variants; monitor and pin versions to patches with formal proofs. (eprint.iacr.org)

Recursion/aggregation plane

Use fast recursive systems (Plonky3, Expander, GoldiBear wrappers) to compress many subproofs; Telos’ Plonky2/GoldiBear wrapper measured wrapping Polygon Hermez proofs in ~0.9s on a consumer CPU; target multi‑minute batch proofs aggregated in seconds. (telos.net)

Verification/settlement plane

On‑chain verification when needed; offload verification to a decentralized verification layer to cut L1 gas (Aligned Layer reports sub‑10% of Ethereum verification costs for many proof types). (blog.alignedlayer.com)

Hardware strategy that actually matches ZK workloads

Heterogeneous accelerators: GPUs for parallel NTT/MSM/Keccak; FPGAs/ASICs for fixed arithmetic kernels; CPUs for control flow and witness transforms. Ingonyama’s ICICLE shows GPU‑optimized Poseidon, MSM, and mixed‑radix NTT; v3 adds CPU backend for device‑agnostic scheduling. (ingonyama.com)
Emerging ASICs: Cysic documents a family (ZK‑C1, ZK‑Air, ZK‑Pro) focused on MSM/NTT with claims of 10–100× efficiency vs. GPU for specific kernels; integrate ASICs as first‑class resources, but assume limited programmability—keep the IR abstraction. (docs.cysic.xyz)
Real‑world clusters: SP1’s 200×4090 test suggests “real‑time” clusters are feasible with commodity GPUs; use node groups with NVLink/PCIe topology awareness to minimize MSM/NTT data movement. (theblock.co)

Practical tip: profile PCIe copies—several stacks report 40–50% of end‑to‑end time sunk in host↔device transfers if witness generation happens on CPU and MSM/NTT on accelerators. Co‑locate partial witness generation close to the accelerator or push more of the pipeline onto the device. (docs.open-proof.com)

Multi‑proof optionality is the new north star

OP Stack’s “multi‑proof nirvana” explicitly plans redundant proof systems side‑by‑side (Cannon, Asterisc RISC‑V, Kona in Rust, later ZK). Your prover plane should broker requests to multiple backends with policy: cheapest‑wins for routine batches; diversity‑first for safety‑critical checkpoints. (optimism.io)
Open implementations to watch:
- Asterisc: RISC‑V fraud‑proof VM with EVM‑emulated step inside Solidity/Yul. (github.com)
- Kona: Rust implementation of OP STF, reused by OP‑Succinct and Kailua for ZK or ZK‑fraud proofs. (github.com)
- OP‑Succinct: full validity proofs for OP chains; reports 0.5–1.0¢ proving cost/tx with minutes‑scale latency on clusters. (succinct.xyz)
- Kailua (Boundless/RISC Zero): ZK fraud‑proofs now; validity mode targets ~1‑hour finality; designed to run Kona inside RISC Zero zkVM. (github.com)

Design pattern: record “dual provenance” for safety windows—e.g., one Groth16/Plonkish proof plus an independent zkVM proof over the same STF for critical epochs. Gate L2 withdrawals or bridge operations on an AND/OR policy to balance UX and safety.

Outsource and diversify: proof networks and verification layers

Decentralized prover networks: Succinct’s Prover Network is live with SP1; real‑time proving targets and a token‑staked marketplace; partners like Cysic bring multi‑node GPU/ASIC capacity. Use it to burst beyond your owned capacity or as a primary. (dune.com)
ZkCloud (ex‑Gevulot): universal proving platform with containerized provers, CPU/GPU fleets, and a Cosmos‑based orchestration chain; pitched cost reductions “up to 95%” vs traditional cloud for ZK workloads and open operator onboarding. Useful as a vendor‑neutral layer across proof systems (SP1, R0VM, etc.). (zkcloud.com)
Managed services: RISC Zero’s Bonsai offers parallel proving with 99.9% uptime SLAs; keep as a fallback target in your broker layer. (risc0.com)
Verification layers: Aligned Layer (an EigenLayer AVS) verifies proofs cheaply and posts results to Ethereum or other DA layers—measure verification cost savings against L1 gas for your circuits. (blog.alignedlayer.com)
ZK state committees and coprocessing: Lagrange’s AVS runs ZK light clients and generates ZK state proofs for optimistic rollups with an unbounded attester set—useful for cross‑rollup finality or onchain data queries. (lagrange.dev)

Procurement tip: require per‑proof quotes and SLOs (p50/p95 latency, failure rate, requeue delay). Integrate competitive bidding at the broker: push each batch with a max fee/latency policy and accept best bids across providers.

Interop and aggregation: design for cross‑stack futures

Polygon AggLayer: pessimistic proofs are live; v0.3 adds an execution‑proof mode so non‑CDK chains can join and prove their own state, pushing toward sub‑10s cross‑chain UX. If you’re building a chain that will depend on cross‑chain liquidity, plan now for AggLayer‑compatible proofs and bridge semantics. (agglayer.dev)
Plonky3’s role: widely adopted as a recursion backbone (SP1, Valida) and slated to power AggLayer’s safety stack; lean on it for proof aggregation and future portability. (theblock.co)

Concrete throughput patterns we see working

Pipelined partitioning with recursion

Partition the batch into 32–128 subcircuits; assign each to GPU/ASIC workers; recursively fold to a single proof. Keep a 1:1 witness:proof pipeline so that witness generation never starves the accelerators. Yoimiya‑style decoupling improved resource utilization and total proving time in experiments. (arxiv.org)

Dual‑path backends

For bytecode‑equivalent zkEVM circuits, run your incumbent SNARK/STARK path and, in parallel, a zkVM proof over the STF (SP1/Kona). Use the zkVM path as a “safety belt” when upgrading circuits or during high‑risk releases. (succinct.xyz)

Brokered burst capacity

When p95 latency exceeds an SLO (e.g., >120s), autoscale to Succinct or ZkCloud with a per‑proof ceiling. Keep 20–30% headroom locally for retries; outsource the tail. (dune.com)

Off‑L1 verification and co‑posting

Verify proofs through Aligned Layer for cost, then co‑post the verification result and a minimal digest to L1. Run periodic “full L1 verify” checkpoints (e.g., every N blocks or weekly) to bound trust. (blog.alignedlayer.com)

Hardware‑aware scheduling

Co‑locate witness transforms with accelerators to cut PCIe transfers; batch MSM/NTT in sizes that fit GPU memory (avoid thrash). Where latency matters, prefer many mid‑tier GPUs (e.g., 4090s) over a few datacenter cards—real‑time SP1 results were achieved that way. (theblock.co)

Case studies you can copy from (and what to extract)

Starknet + Stwo: CPU‑friendly prover achieving >500k hashes/s; good template for building CPU‑first fallback paths for resiliency when GPU fleets are constrained. (starknet.io)
Polygon Plonky3 + GoldiBear wrapper: use fast recursion wrappers to aggregate 100s–1000s of proofs in seconds; this is the easiest win for L1 cost and latency without redesigning circuits. (polygon.technology)
OP Stack multi‑proof path: design your contracts and infra so fraud‑proofs, zk‑fraud‑proofs, and validity proofs can swap in without rewiring the rest of the stack. This is the reference for staged decentralization and proof diversity. (optimism.io)
OP‑Succinct / Kailua / Kona: practical blueprints to get OP chains down from 7‑day fraud windows to minutes–hour finality using zkVMs, with minimal changes to the rest of the rollup. (succinct.xyz)
Succinct Prover Network + Cysic: use a decentralized marketplace to source provers; Cysic’s entrance brings GPU/ASIC capacity and stronger latency guarantees under auctions. (theblock.co)
Lagrange State Committees: if you run an optimistic rollup, bolt on ZK light clients for cross‑chain consumption of your state with a large and economically secure attester set. (lagrange.dev)
AggLayer v0.2/0.3: build for chain‑agnostic interoperability; the pessimistic proof model secures a shared bridge even if one chain goes bad. (agglayer.dev)

SRE playbook for provers (what your ops team should enforce)

SLOs and budgets
- p50 < 60s, p95 < 180s per batch proof (tune to your block size).
- Error budget: <0.5% proof job failures; <0.1% verification reverts.
- “Tail taxes”: explicitly account for L1 congestion spikes and verification layer backoffs.
Determinism and auditability
- Pin all math libraries (field ops, FFT) and enable reproducible builds. Determinism is required for prover markets with slashing (e.g., Succinct). (ainvest.com)
Hot‑swap upgrades
- Zero‑downtime keys/parameters rotation; blue/green deployment for new circuit revisions; dual‑prove new circuits for at least one epoch before flipping the default.
Checkpoint policy
- Weekly full on‑chain verification, daily verification‑layer posts, per‑block compressed summaries. Calibrate to your risk appetite and gas budget. (blog.alignedlayer.com)
Telemetry
- Emit per‑stage metrics: witness qps, MSM/NTT occupancy, PCIe I/O, GPU memory headroom, recursion depth, verification gas. Track per‑backend “effective $/proof” and “Joules/proof.”

Security considerations you can’t ignore

Folding systems and recursion: track updates for Nova‑style proofs; vendor implementations have had soundness patches, and theoretical bounds are still an active area—stay current and pin commits. (eprint.iacr.org)
Permissionless validation risks (optimistic): even with BoLD on Arbitrum or Stage‑1 on OP, enable rate‑limits, bond sizing, and monitoring to prevent griefing; note that Arbitrum’s BoLD targets ~12–13 day bounded resolution and warns about caveats for permissionless configs. (theblock.co)
Data retention: if you use third‑party Prover APIs (e.g., ZKsync), batch data may expire (reported ~30 days in early deployments); your broker must pull inputs promptly or maintain your own archival. (zksync.mirror.xyz)

A 90‑day implementation plan

Weeks 0–2: Architecture and procurement

Stand up a minimal broker with two backends (your incumbent prover and SP1 via Succinct). Define a ProverJob proto with fields for circuit_id, target_latency, max_fee, recursion_strategy. (succinct.xyz)
Choose an IR (adopt or emulate Hypercube‑style ops); map witness transforms to the IR. (hozk.io)

Weeks 2–6: Pipeline and recursion

Partition circuits; deploy recursion via Plonky3 or Expander; measure p50/p95. Aim for 32–128 subcircuits and single‑second wrapper proofs. (polygon.technology)
Co‑locate witness transforms on GPU nodes to reduce PCIe overhead. Validate determinism.

Weeks 6–9: Verification and interop

Integrate Aligned Layer for verification offload; schedule weekly on‑chain verification checkpoints. (blog.alignedlayer.com)
If targeting cross‑chain UX, align proof artifacts with AggLayer requirements. (agglayer.dev)

Weeks 9–12: Resilience and growth

Add a third backend (e.g., ZkCloud) for burst capacity; configure policy (price‑first for routine, diversity‑first for checkpoints). (zkcloud.com)
If on OP Stack, begin a “lite ZK” path (OP‑Succinct Lite or Kailua) to reduce dispute latency without full validity—then plan the validity mode cutover. (blog.succinct.xyz)

What “good” looks like by Q1 next year

Latency: median <60s, p95 <180s per batch.
Cost: <$0.01/tx proving for typical batches; verification costs offloaded where safe. (succinct.xyz)
Diversity: two distinct proof families in production (e.g., circuit + zkVM); weekly full on‑chain verify. (optimism.io)
Capacity: ability to burst 2–5× via prover networks within minutes. (dune.com)

Final thought

Future‑proofing throughput isn’t choosing the “fastest” prover; it’s building a market‑aware, hardware‑aware, multi‑proof pipeline with clean seams. The teams who modularize now will add capacity by flipping a config, not rewriting their rollup.

If you’d like an architecture review or a proof‑throughput load test, 7Block Labs can help you wire up the broker layer, tune recursion, and stand up redundancy with Succinct/ZkCloud/Aligned in under six weeks.

Sources and further reading

Succinct SP1 Hypercube real‑time proving and Prover Network milestones; Cysic joins as multi‑node prover. (theblock.co)
Starknet Stwo, Polygon Plonky3, Polyhedra Expander performance records. (starknet.io)
OP Stack Stage‑1 fault proofs and multi‑proof path; Asterisc, Kona. (optimism.io)
OP‑Succinct and Kailua (ZK fraud‑proofs/validity). (succinct.xyz)
Aligned Layer verification, EigenLayer AVS. (blog.alignedlayer.com)
Lagrange ZK AVS/state committees. (lagrange.dev)
AggLayer pessimistic proofs and v0.3 execution‑proof mode. (agglayer.dev)
Yoimiya pipeline partitioning for ZK systems; CrowdProve community proving. (arxiv.org)
ICICLE GPU/CPU multi‑platform proving libraries. (ingonyama.com)
ZkCloud (ex‑Gevulot) proving network and Firestarter platform. (zkcloud.com)