The Architecture Behind Boundless

Introduction

In developing Boundless, we explored numerous approaches to address the diverse needs of developers, focusing on factors like cost efficiency, developer experience, censorship resistance, and reliability.

Ultimately, we determined that smart contracts, co-located with the protocols that need ZK proofs, provide the strongest foundation for developers to interact with Boundless. Leveraging ZK technology, Boundless enables major components, such as the proving node and market requests to operate off-chain while meeting stringent liveness and security requirements. Boundless offers users a seamless experience akin to using a DEX, coupled with the robust benefits of ZK-powered protocols.

Boundless is already deployed across major L1s and L2s, letting each application integrate natively on its home chain.

Boundless Market Architecture Advantages

Boundless is designed for demanding protocols such as stage 2 rollups, DEXs, restaking protocols, and onchain governance systems. Use cases like these require the censorship resistance, safety, and liveness guarantees of a major L1. Our approach to building a proof market ensures:

On-chain verification with the same security as the host chain.

Censorship resistance as strong as the host chain.

Elimination of bridging of funds.

Applications choose their chain; Boundless meets them there.

Verification Guarantees

For applications requiring the safety guarantees of a major L1, there is no substitute for ZK verification on the L1. Verification on other chains and bridging results introduce trust dependencies on additional validator sets and bridges. Boundless addresses this by requiring proof delivery and verification directly on the application’s chain for payment to be processed.

This approach ensures applications interact directly with the Boundless Market contract, eliminating intermediaries and preserving the guarantees of the chain the application chooses to settle on.

Censorship Resistance

Protocols like rollups and governance systems demand consistent proof delivery, even against adversarial efforts to obstruct it. Boundless ensures censorship resistance by leveraging the application’s chain’s transaction guarantees. As long as the application’s chain and a single prover remain operational, Boundless will deliver proofs.

The market’s interactions primarily occur via smart contracts, with off-chain order submission as an optional, untrusted fast path. Even if all supporting web services go offline, the market continues to function, relying solely on the application’s chain’s censorship resistance.

Bid Sequencing

In a competitive proving market, bid sequencing is critical. Boundless leverages the application’s chain’s native sequencing to determine bid order. Bidding and other ordering-critical operations occur as transactions on the smart contract, ensuring the same fairness and minimization of value extraction as the sequencing layer. This method aligns Boundless’s guarantees with those of the application’s chain.

Bridging of Funds

Requiring users to bridge funds to another chain for requests introduces unnecessary friction and trust dependencies. Boundless eliminates this by operating directly on the application’s chain where protocols and users reside. This approach:

Avoids the need for new gas tokens.

Removes the necessity to bridge funds for requests.

Ensures seamless integration with existing wallets and RPC providers.

By aligning Boundless with the protocols and users it serves, interactions become as composable as any other smart contract.

Market Efficiency Without a Custom Chain

Before settling on our approach, we considered building a custom L1 or L2 rollup. Initially, we assumed these options offered unique advantages in latency, price discovery, and operational costs. However, our exploration revealed that these benefits could be achieved without a custom chain.

Low Latency Proof Delivery

For responsive on-chain protocols, proof delivery time is crucial. Boundless aims to enable “next-block-delivery” of proofs, ensuring minimal latency for on-chain applications. By implementing the core of Boundless as a smart contract, the application’s block time is the speed of proof submission. Deploying the market on high-speed chains achieves the same benefits as a custom L2 while maintaining proximity to existing liquidity and tooling.

Price Discovery via Reverse Dutch Auction

Efficient price discovery is essential for market operations. Boundless employs a reverse Dutch auction, which optimizes price discovery in a decentralized setting using the blockchain as a shared clock. While auctions can introduce delays, deploying markets on multiple chains with low block times mitigates this. Ongoing exploration aims to further optimize this process while preserving security.

Minimal Onchain Footprint

Executing market logic as smart contracts on L1 raises concerns about gas costs. Initially, this led us to consider building a custom L2. However, by offloading key logic to the zkVM, minimizing on-chain storage and execution, and aggregating proofs, Boundless significantly reduces costs.

Boundless’s on-chain footprint is minimal. When batching requests, gas costs for a fulfilled request can be as low as 35,000 EVM gas—much less than a DEX swap. This efficiency ensures cost-effectiveness for protocols requiring L1 security.

Boundless Brings ZK to Every Chain

While custom L1s and L2s serve many use cases, they introduce unnecessary complexity and fragmentation for proof markets that need to operate seamlessly across all chains. Boundless is becoming the home of ZK across every chain, providing the most reliable and accessible marketplace for proofs to power the future of blockchain computation.

Let's Build a Boundless Future

Choose the path that fits what you’re needs:

Spin up a prover node and generate proofs: Boundless for Miners

Upgrade to a ZK Rollup in hours: Boundless for Rollup Teams

Run Solidity code without gas restrictions: Boundless for EVM Developers