A New Bottleneck in Web3
Blockchains and rollups are racing to handle more users, more transactions, and more complex applications. But they run into a stubborn problem: proving. Verifying that computations are correct is fast and cheap thanks to zero-knowledge proofs, but generating those proofs is a different story. It requires powerful hardware, specialized knowledge, and a lot of time.
Today, most projects end up building their own proving systems from scratch. That means duplicated effort, high costs, and slower progress for everyone. Boundless was created to change that. Instead of every team reinventing the wheel, Boundless offers a shared, decentralized proving network that any blockchain or application can tap into.
What Boundless Really Is
Boundless is not another blockchain or rollup. It’s a proving marketplace, a shared infrastructure layer where projects can post computational jobs that need proofs. Independent operators run prover nodes, compete to solve those jobs, and earn rewards for valid results.
At the heart of this system is a zero-knowledge virtual machine, or zkVM. This technology makes it possible to take ordinary programs, written in common programming languages, and prove them in zero-knowledge. Developers don’t have to design complex circuits for every new workload. They just write code, and the zkVM makes it provable.
How It Works in Practice
When a project needs a proof, it submits the job to Boundless. The marketplace assigns it to a prover, who runs the computation off-chain and produces a proof. That proof is then sent back and verified on the target blockchain by a lightweight smart contract.
The result is simple but powerful. Heavy computation happens off-chain, where resources are abundant, and only the small, easy-to-check proof lands on-chain. That keeps costs low while preserving strong security guarantees.
Why It Matters
Boundless opens the door to a different kind of scalability.
Elastic capacity – Rollups and applications don’t need to maintain their own prover fleets. They can scale on demand.
Lower costs – By pooling resources, the ecosystem avoids wasteful duplication and benefits from economies of scale.
Cross-chain interoperability – Proofs generated in Boundless can be verified across multiple blockchains, helping them talk to each other in a trust-minimized way.
Better developer experience – Teams can focus on their applications instead of wrestling with low-level cryptography and hardware operations.
Put simply, Boundless wants to do for proving what cloud computing did for servers: turn it into a utility that anyone can use.
The Role of the Token
The system runs on a token called ZKC. It rewards provers for completed jobs, provides staking and slashing mechanisms to keep the network honest, and powers governance decisions about how the marketplace evolves. This incentive system is called Proof of Verifiable Work: provers get paid only when they produce proofs that pass verification.
From Testnet to Mainnet
Boundless was incubated by RISC Zero and built on years of work with zkVM technology. In July 2025, it launched an incentivized testnet to stress-test the marketplace. Just two months later, it went live on Base mainnet, marking a major milestone.
That launch turned the idea of universal verifiable compute into something real. Since then, early partnerships have explored cross-chain state proofs, decentralized rollup validation, and new kinds of off-chain computation backed by verifiable results.
Use Cases Emerging Today
1. Rollup security – Outsourcing validity proofs without maintaining custom prover infrastructure.
2. Cross-chain bridges – Proving state across ecosystems without relying on centralized relayers.
3. Off-chain logic – Verifying AI inference, financial simulations, or game logic that runs outside the chain.
4. Privacy applications – Enabling private transactions with efficient, low-cost proofs.
The Road Ahead
Boundless faces challenges, like ensuring prover decentralization, meeting low-latency requirements for real-time apps, and standardizing proof formats across the ecosystem. Hardware is also evolving quickly, with GPUs, FPGAs, and specialized accelerators changing the economics of proving.
But the vision is clear. Boundless wants to make verifiable compute a commodity, accessible to everyone, chain-agnostic, and endlessly scalable. If Ethereum gave the world a global settlement layer, Boundless could become the global proof layer—the invisible infrastructure that makes trustless systems truly scalable.