The Real Cost of ZK Rollups

Everyone hypes up ZK rollup benefits but nobody talks about proving costs until the bill arrives. The economics are more nuanced than the marketing suggests.

Here's what actually happens. You might have thousands of transactions daily. On mainnet that could cost hundreds of thousands in gas fees. Moving to optimistic rollups brings it down dramatically. Then ZK rollups promise even better. What they don't mention is the additional proving costs that suddenly appear.

The way proving costs scale is completely unintuitive. Simple transfers are cheap to prove. But complex DeFi interactions can actually cost more to prove than they save in gas. If you're running a DEX aggregator you need to understand these patterns. Batching simple transactions separately from complex ones can optimize prover utilization significantly.

The hard truth is that ZK rollups require really careful economic modeling. You can't just migrate your existing system and expect automatic savings. The cost structure is fundamentally different.

Teams get burned by this constantly. They build for the wrong cost model and have to redesign everything. Understanding proving economics upfront saves massive headaches later.