Boundless Prover Incentives
.png%3Ftable%3Dblock%26cache%3Dv2%26id%3D231051eb-c1b5-80e9-8be3-de6ef2b115f8&w=1920&q=85)
Incentivized Proving is Live
Today marks a milestone in verifiable computing. Boundless mainnet beta is officially live, starting on Base, as the first permissionless marketplace where provers from around the world compete to generate zero-knowledge proofs.
Connect your hardware, set your strategy, and start proving. After mainnet beta, 5 M ZKC (0.5 % of total supply) will be distributed retroactively to provers in proportion to their performance. The incentivized proving competition will run for approximately 5 weeks.
The infrastructure is live. The demand is real. The race starts now.
How provers compete and earn
The marketplace operates through competitive auctions. Your share of the token pool depends on three performance metrics and the following formula:
- Total cycles generated by your prover
- Adjusted by multipliers based on
- Success rate of accepted proof jobs
- Speed measured by maximum effective Hz during proving
Scoring Formula:
Multiplier brackets
Success Rate | Multiplier |
99%+ | 1.0 |
95-99% | 0.90 |
90-95% | 0.85 |
80-90% | 0.5 |
70-80% | .25 |
<70% | 0 |
Max Effective HZ | Multiplier |
Top 1% | 1.15 |
Top 5% | 1.1 |
Top 10% | 1.05 |
Outside Top 10% | 1.0 |
Requestor Addresses
Only proofs that fulfill requests posted by three pre-approved requestor addresses count toward leaderboard points:
- 0x2546c553d857d20658ece248f7c7d0861a240681
- 0xc2db89b2bd434ceac6c74fbc0b2ad3a280e66db0
- 0x734dF7809c4ef94Da037449C287166D114503198
- 0x3Ee7d9175eC8BB9e16e8FD3AbDEF5a354b247528
- 0x2693946791da99da78ac441aba6d5ce2bccd96d3
This safeguard prevents wash-trading (requesting and fulfilling your own proofs) while keeping proving itself completely permissionless - anyone with hardware and stake can start proving immediately. Additional requestor addresses will be added as new integrations go live, and every change will be added to the prover docs in advance to maintain a level playing field.
Getting started
- Connect your prover
- Follow the quick start guide to get online in under 30 minutes and scale up to 100 GPUs per node.
- Set your strategy
- Set your pricing and capacity limits. The built-in trader software will automatically bid on jobs 24/7 according to the parameters you set.
- Start proving & climb the leaderboard
- Generate proofs, earn marketplace fees, and climb the leaderboard for a share of the 5M $ZKC token pool.
Proving on Boundless is 100% permissionless. If you have the hardware, you can start contributing immediately. This approach reflects our belief that critical infrastructure should be open and transparent, never a black box.
Disclaimer: While participation as a prover is 100% permissionless, it’s also highly competitive. If it has been over 48 hours and you have still not won any bids, we recommend either adjusting your bidding strategy or disconnecting your prover and participating in The Signal as a user instead.
Real Demand from Day One
To demonstrate the power of Boundless, we built The Signal, a full ZK consensus client for Ethereum. As soon as an Ethereum block finalizes, The Signal compresses it into a ZK proof and pushes the request to the Boundless marketplace. Every proof is a high-value job: provers earn fees for generating it, while any chain can verify Ethereum’s state with a single contract call via our Steel library.
These consensus proofs have the potential to make all bridges more secure, replacing multisigs with proofs, laying the rails for truly trustless crosschain interoperability. From day one, provers on Boundless will have meaningful work that will better the entire ecosystem.
Additionally, Boundless will prove more blockchains in the near future, diversifying the workloads and expanding opportunities for provers.
Why we skipped public testnet
We chose to skip public testnet because incentive systems only reveal their true dynamics when real value is at stake. Since late 2024, we've tested extensively with select partners, validating the core mechanics. But testnets cannot simulate the price discovery, strategic behavior, and hardware economics that emerge when proofs carry tangible value.
By launching directly on mainnet with real deposits and market-rate pricing, we observe authentic proving economics from day one.
The 0.5% token pool creates the competitive pressure needed to stress-test market forces under competitive conditions. This accelerates our path to sustainable, permissionless infrastructure that works at scale. We believe in shipping real products that solve real problems, not demos that approximate future functionality.
What comes next
Boundless mainnet beta is just the start of a very exciting year. Over 30 protocols are integrating boundless as their proving infrastructure, diversifying the types of proof jobs and expanding earning opportunities. We're also shipping Proof of Verifiable Work later this year - a mechanism that rewards provers based on the computational complexity of work performed, enabling ZK mining.
The vision is larger than a single marketplace. As more applications adopt ZK and proving capacity scales globally, we're building the infrastructure for a world where any computation can be trustlessly outsourced and cryptographically verified.
The future of compute is verifiable. It starts today.
