RISC Zero launches Boundless testnet on Base

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The incentivized testnet (mainnet beta) of RISC Zero’s Boundless network went live on Base yesterday.

Boundless is not a new blockchain. Boundless is a marketplace for zero-knowledge virtual-machine (zkVM) proofs — sometimes called a proof market — that can deploy to any network and settle proofs anywhere.

Who needs it? Any chain or application that wants to process heavy computation onchain, but whose existing virtual environment is ill-suited to leverage zk technology. 

Boundless lets teams do so without making radical changes to their architecture. Just like how Chainlink brought price feeds to each chain, Boundless brings verifiable compute.

Boundless network

Here’s how the network roughly works:

1. Chains/apps request and submit computation tasks to the Boundless network running auctions on its contracts.

2. “Provers” (miners) on the Boundless network running CPUs/GPUs claim these jobs to perform the expensive computation off-chain.

3. To accept tasks, provers stake ZKC tokens to lock a proof request. These tokens are slashable, so there’s an economic mechanism to keep work honest.

4. When provers finish the job, a tiny, mathematically-verifiable zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) receipt is settled on the host chain.

Because verifying a tiny-sized proof on Ethereum or a rollup costs only a minimal amount of gas, the base chain never feels the heat from the underlying computation — even if that computation took minutes, ran on a cluster with GPUs or touched gigabytes of data.

Boundless’ CEO Shiv Shankar reminded me of the prohibitive costs of running zk computation onchain, which can go reach thousands of dollars.

“Today, anyone is able to do that massive computation with a zkVM for less than $30. This sort of boundless mindset is what we are bringing to every chain. Elastic unlimited computation [is] available to you at any point in time,” he said.

The Boundless explorer shows 363 active provers processing jobs today, though the team told me they anticipate at least a thousand GPUs proving soon.

Boundless architecture

Unique to Boundless’ network is its self-developed cryptographic primitive called “proof of verifiable work” (PoVW).

Traditional proof-of-work pays bitcoin miners for hashes, Boundless’ PoVW pays for useful zkVM cycles.

PoVW tags pieces of verifiable metadata — or “work receipts” — to each proof as a record of how much computation went into it. This lets Boundless pay the hundreds of provers on its network in proportion to the actual compute delivered, as well as detect fraudulent proofs.

This contrasts to the off-chain auction bidding that Succinct uses, or the time-based quotes that Kalypso uses.

Today’s adoption

Early adopters to Boundless include teams like EigenLayer, Celestia, Taiko, Lido and more.

Teams are using Boundless provision of verifiable compute for a variety of purposes.

For instance, EigenLayer is using Boundless to power its AVS slashing logic, Celestia is using it to prove the validity of its data availability on any chain, the Taiko based rollup uses it as part of its multi-prover setup, and Lido leverages Boundless for a zk-based staking oracle.

Although Boundless ships with its own RISC Zero zkVM, the network is proof system agnostic.

Support for competing zkVMs, such as Succinct’s SP1, ZKsync’s Boojum or Jolt, is on the roadmap, allowing developers to switch tooling without leaving the marketplace.

Boundless’ full mainnet launch and Token Generation Event are slated for late 2025.

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