Brevis releases ProverNet whitepaper, detailing the first decentralized zero-knowledge proof generation market
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Brevis releases ProverNet whitepaper, detailing the first decentralized zero-knowledge proof generation market
ProverNet will officially launch soon, and further implementation details and timelines will be announced separately.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
Brevis has released the ProverNet whitepaper, introducing its decentralized zero-knowledge proof generation market architecture, derived from production-level implementations across mainstream multi-chain protocols. The system addresses a fundamental limitation in existing proof infrastructure—its inability to efficiently serve heterogeneous computing workloads requiring different hardware, proof systems, and optimization methods.
ProverNet treats proof generation as a two-sided market, where applications submit specific requests and specialized provers bid to fulfill these demands. The market operates via the TODA (Truthful Online Double Auction) mechanism, designed to handle multiple types of proofs simultaneously while ensuring truthful bidding and optimal resource allocation.
Production Scale Reveals Infrastructure Limitations
Brevis’s current infrastructure has generated over 124 million proofs for 98,000 users, spanning protocols including PancakeSwap, Uniswap, Euler, Linea, and MetaMask, enabling $224 million in trustless reward distributions. These deployments have clearly revealed the diversity of proof workloads, which single-supplier architectures struggle to serve effectively.
PancakeSwap’s VIP fee discount system requires sub-second proofs for individual traders before each transaction to verify eligibility. Euler’s incentive distribution processes 100,000 addresses every four hours, prioritizing throughput over latency. Linea’s ecosystem events generated 12.1 million proofs for multi-protocol reward calculations involving 61,902 addresses. Each workload demands distinct hardware configurations, proof systems (SNARKs vs. STARKs), and performance characteristics.
Michael, CEO and co-founder of Brevis, said:
Current proof systems are optimized for specific use cases—certain rollups, single VMs, or homogeneous work types. ProverNet emerged from our observation that applications fundamentally require different proving approaches. A market where specialized provers compete is more efficient than any single operator attempting to serve all use cases.
Market Architecture and the TODA Mechanism
ProverNet’s architecture treats different proof types as distinct goods in an auction. Applications specify proof requirements, including processing type (zkVM execution, data proofs, recursive aggregation), deadlines, maximum fees, and quality parameters. The TODA mechanism computes optimal allocations each round, matching heterogeneous requests with suitable proving capabilities.
This mechanism addresses unique challenges in proof generation markets. While traditional auction mechanisms assume homogenous goods, TODA can handle multiple proof types simultaneously. Complex proof tasks are decomposed into subtasks executed collaboratively by different provers.
For example, a zkVM proof may involve chunking on one prover, compression on another, aggregation on a third, and final verification packaging on a fourth dedicated system.
TODA guarantees several economic properties:
- Truthfulness (the optimal strategy is honest bidding)
- Budget balance (collected fees exceed payments)
- Individual rationality (no participant accepts unprofitable tasks)
- Asymptotic optimality (as prover supply grows, allocation approaches maximum efficiency).
The market runs on Brevis Chain, a dedicated rollup architecture designed for auction coordination. This architecture isolates market throughput from Layer 1 or Layer 2 network congestion while maintaining transparency and permissionless participation. Proofs generated via ProverNet can be verified on any target blockchain.
Technical Foundation: Pico zkVM and Real-Time Proving
ProverNet builds on Brevis’s existing proof infrastructure, which includes two complementary products serving different computational needs.
Pico zkVM adopts a "minimal core + high-performance coprocessor" architecture, where an ultra-efficient minimal core connects to dedicated cryptographic accelerators, allowing programs to benefit from targeted hardware optimizations while running on a stable virtual machine.
Pico Prism recently achieved 99.6% proof coverage for Ethereum blocks with a 45 million gas limit, completing 96.8% of proofs within 12 seconds, with an average proving time of 6.9 seconds. The system uses a 64×RTX 5090 GPU cluster, achieving real-time proving at 50% lower hardware cost than previous state-of-the-art zkVMs.
The ZK data coprocessor enables smart contracts to access historical blockchain data and perform cryptographically verifiable off-chain computations.
Applications supported include PancakeSwap’s VIP rates (checking 30-day trading volume before transactions), Euler’s trustless reward distribution (processing time-weighted balances across thousands of addresses), and Uniswap v4 routing rebates (verifying trade eligibility without centralized ledgers).
These integrations demonstrate data-intensive proof requirements distinct from general-purpose computation verification.
Together, these systems establish the economic feasibility of real-time cryptographic verification at foundational scale, while serving the heterogeneous workloads that inspired the ProverNet market architecture.
Impact on the ZK Ecosystem
ProverNet represents a shift from single-proof-provider infrastructures toward market-driven resource allocation. Existing prover networks are typically optimized for narrow use cases (e.g., specific rollup proofs, particular VMs, or homogeneous work types), limiting their ability to efficiently serve diverse demands.
The market auction model allows proving teams to focus on specific optimization goals (STARK-based batching, low-latency SNARK proofs, specialized cryptographic operations) without building general-purpose infrastructure, while applications gain competitive pricing, guaranteed service access, and freedom from vendor lock-in.
For developers, this eliminates the trade-off between building custom proof infrastructure (expensive and time-consuming) and relying on centralized services (introducing trust assumptions), as cryptographic verification ensures computational correctness and market competition ensures pricing efficiency and capacity availability.
Availability and Further Information
The full ProverNet whitepaper is available at:http://www.brevis.network/whitepaper/provernet.pdf
A concise technical overview is published on the Brevis blog:https://blog.brevis.network/2025/10/28/brevis-provernet-building-the-open-marketplace-for-zero-knowledge-proofs/
ProverNet will launch officially soon, with further implementation details and timelines to be announced separately.
About Brevis
Brevis is an intelligent verifiable computing platform that provides infinite computational capacity for existing smart contract blockchains. Through zero-knowledge proofs, Brevis moves data-intensive, high-cost computations off-chain while enabling Web3 applications to scale seamlessly without compromising L1 security and trust assumptions.
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