What is Boundless?
Boundless is a universal protocol that empowers ZK miners to generate zero-knowledge proofs that any blockchain can verify. A built-in marketplace matches demand from all ecosystems to miners who can supply verifiable compute.
Participants include:
- Requestors submit proof jobs to the Boundless marketplace
- Miners (aka Provers) claim those jobs, generate the proofs, and submit the results for onchain verification.
Whenever a proof is accepted the miner earns twice: the requester’s fee and a second payout in $ZKC, the native Boundless token. $ZKC is issued every epoch by the protocol in direct proportion to the verifiable work each miner contributes.
Proof of Verifiable Work
Boundless introduced Proof of Verifiable Work (PoVW) - a first-of-its-kind incentive mechanism that pays miners exactly for the verifiable compute they deliver. While classic Proof-of-Work relies on probabilistic hash races, PoVW measures the RISC-V cycles sealed inside each ZK proof and rewards miners accordingly. The meter is tamper-proof and non-replayable, so rewards are deterministic.
How PoVW works
- Every Boundless proof has an immutable tag that records the number of cycles proven, with a unique nonce to prevent replay. The tag’s integrity is ensured by the proof, so neither the miner nor the requestor can tamper with it.
- At the end of every epoch, the PoVW contract totals all cycles finalized in that window. The entire calculation happens on-chain and can be audited by anyone.
- A fixed amount of $ZKC (Boundless’ native token) is minted for the epoch and distributed pro-rata to cycle share (e.g., a miner who delivered 2% of total cycles, receives 2% of the mint).
Miners Earn Double on Boundless
Marketplace fees deliver immediate cash flow; $ZKC scales with proof complexity, giving heavier jobs a bigger payout. The split lets you balance near-term earnings with long-term upside.
Finetuning Your Strategy
Boundless gives miners full control, with extensive configuration options and complete source code to modify as you wish. Every prover node runs an embedded service called the Trader. The Trader acts as your onchain market analyst:
- Monitors proof requests in real time
- Bids and locks jobs that match your strategy
- Routes each job to your proving cluster
- Submits the finished proof onchain and settles both the requester fee and the RISC-V cycle count used for $ZKC distribution.
Miners can configure their trader to finetune their strategy, including their price, max stake, deadline tolerance, and more. This gives miners granular control over their earning potential and risk appetite, and allows them to find an edge in the market. The full list of configurable parameters can be found in the prover documentation.
A New Dimension for Miner Competition
Boundless turns mining into a competition on two different fronts:
- Trading edge: write smarter Trader logic to spot profitable orders first, lock them, and keep idle capacity near zero. Superior strategy means higher fill-rate at better margins.
- Hardware edge: compete to produce the best proving cluster, providing higher throughput and reliability, and lower latency and costs.
Hardware Suggestions
Note: It is possible to run a prover with less hardware. It may not be competitive with the rest of the market.
A recommended minimum configuration for competitive proving performance:
- CPU - 16 threads, reasonable single core boost performance (>3Ghz)
- RAM - 32 GB
- Disk - 200 GB of solid state storage, NVME / SSD preferred
- GPUs: at least one NVIDIA GPU with >= 8GB of VRAM.
- In testing, we've found the best performance on the following NVIDIA GPUs: 4090, 5090 and L4.
- While it's possible to use a single GPU, we recommend at least 10 GPUs to run a competitive prover.
Ultimately, the more GPU power you have, the better the proving performance. The better the proving performance, the more jobs you can successfully fulfill in the market. The Boundless proving stack supports multi GPU proving as a first class citizen; please see multi GPU configuration and performance optimization for more details.
Get started in 30 minutes
Visit the quick start page for more information.