Standing in the server park of Zhangjiang, Shanghai, when I counted the 17th rack labeled 'Boundless Prover', the administrator Lao Zhang grinned: 'These machines do not mine ETH, but prove instead.' This scene perfectly illustrates the transformation brought about by @Boundless — the computing power that was once hidden in Inner Mongolia's mining farms is now flowing to the public market in the form of standardized commodities.
According to the latest quarterly report released by #Boundless , the global number of nodes in its prover network has reached 1,407, of which 38% have transitioned from traditional Bitcoin miners. This migration is not only about reusing equipment (some mining machines can support zkVM through firmware upgrades), but also about switching revenue models: completing an AI inference verification task earns 0.3-1.2 $ZKC , which feels more 'valuable' than simple hash collisions.
I verified an interesting phenomenon during testing: when proof demand surges, market prices do not rise linearly. Last week, due to a concentration of institutional clients submitting 100,000 privacy transaction proofs, the task unit price first surged from 0.8 ZKC to 2.4 ZKC, and then dropped back to 1.1 $ZKC after 6 hours - a large amount of idle computing power was attracted into the market at high prices, automatically completing the supply-demand rebalancing. This elasticity is the essence of the decentralized market.
However, reality is far more complex than economic models. While designing an off-chain rendering solution for the NFT platform Spectral, we encountered the 'proof delay paradox': although generating a single proof only takes 2 seconds, cross-regional network transmission may consume 8 seconds. This forced the team to develop a 'pre-proof caching' solution to generate proof drafts in advance for potentially needed computational results. Such engineering details are often not mentioned in academic papers as life-and-death issues.
It is worth noting the shift in attitude from regulatory bodies. The U.S. SEC recently classified ZK proof services as 'data processing' rather than securities transactions, which is for $ZKC
The value flow has cleared key obstacles. At the same time, #Boundless is collaborating with the Big Four accounting firms to design standardized accounting standards for proof of costs - when ZK expenditures can be deducted as R&D expenses, the final barrier adopted by the institution is opened.
Looking at the continuously fluctuating proof task flow on the dashboard (current peak: 37 per second), I suddenly recalled the historical 'Tesla vs Edison' battle in electricity. Today's ZK computing power war may determine whether blockchain heads towards a closed direct current grid or an open alternating current grid. At least this afternoon, I bet on the latter.