Proving costs for validity rollups have dropped sharply over the past year as dedicated accelerators moved from prototypes into commercial availability.
Two proving services published benchmark figures showing an order-of-magnitude improvement in cost per block compared with general-purpose hardware.
The shift matters beyond rollups. Cheap proofs make verifying light clients practical on mobile devices, which would reduce reliance on hosted node providers.
There is a centralisation caveat: if the cheapest proving runs on scarce specialised hardware, the set of viable provers narrows considerably.
Protocol designers are responding with proof markets that let anyone submit, so that a slower prover can still win when the fast ones are busy or offline.
