Ethereum zk rollups cost plummets 98.4 percent as technology advances and market competition heats up
1min read Ethereum's journey with zero-knowledge (ZK) technology has been marked by significant milestones and technological advancements. Initially, Ethereum faced scalability issues due to the need for every node to redundantly re-execute transactions to ensure validity. This limitation prompted the Ethereum community to explore scaling solutions, leading to the adoption of rollups by 2020. Vitalik Buterin's 2021 blog post highlighted the potential of both optimistic and zk rollups in scaling Ethereum. However, zk rollups, despite their technological superiority, were initially too expensive and underdeveloped.
Optimistic rollups, which assume all transactions are valid until challenged, became the first to gain market traction. These rollups, while effective, introduced hidden costs such as longer transaction finality and locked liquidity, which affected user experience and capital efficiency. Meanwhile, zk technology was catching up. At ETHCC 2022, several projects, including Polygon, zkSync, and Scroll, announced zkEVMs, enabling Solidity developers to write code and prove the execution of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This development allowed Ethereum to leverage zero-knowledge technology more effectively.
By 2023, zk rollups began to gain real traction. Zk proofs are superior to optimistic fraud proofs because they are much smaller in size, typically around 1-10 KB compared to megabytes of raw transaction data. This compression results in lower data availability costs and better scalability. However, proof generation remained expensive, with an average cost of $80.21 per proof in December 2023. By 2025, this cost had dropped to $1.3 per proof, a 98.4% improvement.
Several factors contributed to this cost reduction. Firstly, zkVMs (zero-knowledge virtual machines) were developed, speeding up the zk development experience and making validity proof generation more efficient. These zkVMs, such as SP1, RISC Zero, Nexus, and OpenVM, democratized zk development for all developers, regardless of their cryptographic expertise. Secondly, market competition among proof generation services, operated by companies like Risc Zero, Cysic, Lagrange, and Succinct, drove down costs. These marketplaces are permissionless, allowing anyone with a GPU rig to generate zk 