The zkVerifier node network will effectively reduce gas costs for L2.
Written by Peng Sun, Foresight News
Without DePIN, ZKP would probably be out of reach for ordinary people in their lifetime. In the past few years, ZKP has been criticized for its slow proof generation speed and high verification cost. But the emergence of DePIN has changed everyone's way of thinking, making ZKP a low-threshold ecosystem that everyone can participate in. Many cryptography companies use hardware acceleration to improve the efficiency of ZKP proof generation, but few people pay attention to Verifier, another important component of the ZK proof system. Currently, the only ZK verification layer projects on the market are Cysic, Aligned Layer and Lumoz.
Cysic has not made significant progress in the verification layer. Compared with the Aligned Layer, Lumoz is actually a modular computing layer and ZK-RaaS platform, which solves the computing cost and centralization problems in the process of ZKP proof generation and verification, and provides the project side with the ability to launch a chain with one click. In addition to the Prover Network, Lumoz further opens the verification layer to ordinary users, and its zkVerifier aims to achieve decentralized verification and reduce L2 Gas costs.
Recently, Lumoz completed a strategic round of financing of over 10 million US dollars with a valuation of 300 million US dollars, and started the sale of zkVerifier Node. The node pre-sale and whitelist registration activities have now ended, and the whitelist sales round (June 25) and public sales round (July 3) will start soon. It is expected to be launched on the mainnet in the third quarter. Today, Foresight News will explain the sale of Lumoz zkVerifier nodes and the operating mechanism behind it.
We have heard of modular DA layer and settlement layer, but what is modular computing layer? For a long time, modularization has divided single blockchains such as Ethereum into settlement layer, consensus layer, execution layer and DA layer according to different functions. With the widespread adoption of ZKP, decentralized computing layer (proof layer + verification layer) has gradually become a popular subject.
Lumoz (formerly Opside) is a modular computing layer and ZK-RaaS platform. Its co-founder and CEO is NanFeng, who graduated from Tsinghua University. The core team has invested nearly 5 years in the research and development of ZK technology. As a ZK-RaaS platform, Lumoz provides a modular computing layer for ZK Rollup, which adopts a hybrid consensus mechanism of PoS and PoW and introduces the zkVerifier node network. Since its launch, the ZK-PoW mechanism has attracted 145 miners worldwide to participate, and the test network has verified more than 20,000 nodes. In general, the Lumoz modular computing layer solution does not require the project party to consider the construction and operation of the ZKP system, which reduces the difficulty of the project party to issue ZK-Rollup.
Currently, the Lumoz community has a scale of over one million, and the total TVL of the ecosystem exceeds 4 billion US dollars. Lumoz RaaS service now supports more than 20 L2 chains such as Merlin Chain, HashKey Chain, ZKFair, Ultiverse, Matr1x, etc.
In terms of financing, Lumoz recently completed a strategic round of financing of over 10 million US dollars with a valuation of 300 million US dollars. IDG Blockchain, OKX Ventures, HashKey Capital, Polygon, NGC Ventures, Kronos, KuCoin Ventures, Gate Ventures, GraniteAsia, MH Ventures, Summer Ventures, Aegis Ventures and others participated in the investment. In April 2024, Lumoz completed a 6 million US dollar Pre-A round of financing with a valuation of 120 million US dollars. In April 2023, Lumoz (formerly Opside) completed a 4 million US dollar seed round of financing.
So, what exactly is the zkVerifier that Lumoz is selling? What is it used for? What problem does it solve? Let’s start with the ZK proof system.
In fact, the so-called zkVerifier is the Verifier in the ZK proof system. In the ZK proof system, the generation and verification of proofs are composed of Prover and Verifier. After the front-end is "arithmetized", the two are responsible for generating and verifying ZKP proofs to prove the authenticity and reliability of data to the other party without revealing the real data. Projects such as Cysic and Ingoyama are using hardware to provide computing power to Prover to speed up the generation of Prover proofs. The generated ZK proof needs to be verified by the Verifier for the authenticity of the data.
Bing Ventures once wrote an article analyzing the cost structure of ZKP, pointing out that the cost advantage of ZKP is an exaggerated fantasy. In fact, ZKP includes hardware costs, computing costs, verification costs, storage costs, etc. Among them, communication costs and computing costs are the core parts. Communication costs refer to the cost of exchanging information between provers and verifiers, while computing costs refer to the cost of provers and verifiers performing calculations. In Ethereum, verification calculations need to compete with other DApps for block space, and network congestion will lead to higher costs. Matter Labs once pointed out that zk-Rollups on Ethereum need to pay about 600,000 Gas to verify a zk-SNARK, while zk-STARK needs to pay about 2.5 million Gas.
More importantly, the verification cost of ZKP is borne directly by users. From the L2BEAT data, it can be seen that the cost of Ethereum L2 was mainly storage (blue) before the Cancun upgrade, and mainly computing (red) after using Blobs.
After the Cancun upgrade, ZK Rollup computing costs will account for an average of around 80% of the total cost.
Therefore, in addition to improving the efficiency of ZK proof generation, it is also necessary to improve verification efficiency and reduce Gas costs. Currently, most ZK-Rollup projects have not made optimization improvements at the verification layer.
Lumoz is a pioneer in the ZKP decentralized verification layer. It is actually an AVS computing layer based on EigenLayer shared security. Its basic architecture includes EigenLayer AVS, EVM chain, Lumoz AVS oracle, Lumoz Chain, zkProver and zkVerifier. The responsibilities of each component are as follows:
Lumoz uses the EigenLayer standard to build AVS and shares the economic security of the Ethereum mainnet through Ethereum re-staking;
EVM chain: Lumoz supports EVM chains such as Polygon zkEVM, Polygon CDK, ZKStack, and Scroll;
Lumoz AVS Oracle: Responsible for retrieving and storing data from EVM-compatible chains, ensuring high data availability and integrity;
Lumoz Chain: It is the core management layer of the computing layer, responsible for task scheduling, reward distribution, and management of zkProver and zkVerifier, including but not limited to the process of adding and deleting nodes;
zkProver: a node that performs specific computing tasks;
zkVerifier: A verification node that verifies the execution results.
In terms of the specific operating mechanism, Lumoz adopts the ZK-PoW mechanism and the "submit first and then verify" two-step submission algorithm. The zkProver network composed of miners provides ZK-Rollups with computing power to execute multiple ZKP generation tasks in parallel. ZK-PoW The V2.0 version further optimizes the calculation process of proof generation, which can significantly improve the generation efficiency and solve the centralized Prover problem. Lumoz does not stop there, it further extends from the proof generation layer to the verification layer, introducing zkVerifier to verify the ZKP generated by zkProver.
In other words, Lumoz has built a decentralized verification network for Verifier. The zkVerifier node aggregates, calculates, and verifies data, covering various fields such as blockchain transaction data and AI model training data, to ensure the accuracy of the data and the correctness of the calculation process. By uploading the verification results together with the calculation results to the blockchain, the zkVerifier node not only ensures the transparency and traceability of the entire calculation process, but also reduces the verification cost.
Since the hardware configuration requirements of zkVerifier nodes are relatively low, ordinary users can join the Lumoz network and participate in the operation of verification nodes through a light client. At present, Lumoz has completed early verification, with more than 20,000 verification nodes in the test network stage, and large-scale low-cost verification is being realized. In other words, as the participation threshold is lowered, the more users participate in Lumoz's ZK computing network, the more decentralized the ZKP Verifier verification will be, and the lower the verification cost paid by users will be.
At the same time, the zkVerifier node has long-term sustainability. In addition to ZKP computing tasks, users can also provide computing verification services for massive AI data.
At present, most of the projects selling nodes on the market sell nodes for the sake of selling nodes, but the payback period of these nodes is long and the actual value is not high. However, Lumoz's zkVerifier is an important part of ZK Endgame and is indispensable to the blockchain industry and users. In the Lumoz token economics, the total supply of MOZ is 10 billion, of which 25% of the tokens will be allocated to zkVerifier nodes, and the expected income and return rate are also very considerable.
Let's take a look at the node sales first. Lumoz started selling zkVerifier node NFTs on June 17, with an upper limit of 100,000, divided into 10 tiers, on a first-come, first-served basis. This node sale is divided into three rounds: pre-sale round (June 17 15:00), whitelist round (June 25 15:00), public sale round (July 3 15:00), starting at 200 USDT.
The pre-sale round is only open to users with pre-sale invitation codes, with the largest benefits. It has now ended, Tier 1-4 has been sold out, 40,151 nodes have been successfully sold, and the real-time FDV exceeds 40 million US dollars. Users who want to continue to participate in Lumoz nodes can purchase Tier 5 and above nodes in the whitelist round starting at 15:00 on June 25. Users with whitelists can enjoy a 10% price discount. If you did not participate in the pre-sale round (June 17) and missed the whitelist qualification, you can participate in the public sale round (July 3).
The node NFT license supports free buying, selling and transfer. When a zkVerifier node transfers its license to another party, the node will no longer be eligible to receive any form of reward from the Lumoz network.
Lumoz has also set up a refund mechanism. The refund window will be opened 6 months after the start of TGE, and the duration is to be determined. If the user is dissatisfied with the node, he can apply for a refund without reason. Lumoz will refund 80% of the initial payment amount, and the user will then need to return all the produced tokens and node NFTs.
In addition, in order to encourage more users to participate in the node network, Lumoz has also launched an invitation incentive activity. If the invitee purchases the node NFT, the inviter can get 7% of the payment amount. If the invitee further invites others to purchase nodes, the inviter will receive 3% of the payment amount.
Before the mainnet goes live, Lumoz will provide 40 million points rewards to zkVerifier node NFT holders, with 1 million points distributed every day for 40 days from June 25 to August 4. These points will be evenly distributed to users who stake zkVerifier node licenses, and users can redeem these points for Lumoz mainnet tokens after TGE.
For node license pledge, Lumoz has launched an additional "Team System", where node holders can choose a team or create their own team, with a maximum of 50 people in each team. Team levels are divided into Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond. The more licenses a team pledges, the higher the level and the greater the score weight.
The MOZ rewards of the nodes will be released in 36 months. During the release period, tokens will be released once every Epoch (about 1-2 minutes), and will be distributed according to the number of online nodes in that Epoch and the staking status. As can be seen from the figure below, the more nodes are online at the same time, the less rewards will be released each month. For example, if there are 10,000 nodes online at the same time, each node will earn 6,944 MOZ in the first month. Considering that 40,000 nodes have been sold in the pre-sale round, the number of nodes online at the same time will be more when the mainnet is launched in the future, and the monthly MOZ rewards of nodes will be less and less.
As for the expected rate of return and payback period, if we conservatively calculate based on the latest round of valuation of $300 million, assuming that 10,000 nodes are online at the same time in the first month, then running the node for one month can earn $208. If you buy a Tier1 node, you can get back your investment in one month, and you can get $4,374 in half a year, with a net return rate of more than 20 times. If the user buys a Tier5 node in the whitelist round, the cost is $350, and the investment will be paid back in one and a half months, with a return of more than 12 times in half a year. If 50,000 nodes are online at the same time, if you buy a Tier1 node, the payback period is 2 and a half months, and the return in half a year is 4.3 times; if you buy a Tier5 node, you can get back your investment in 4 months, and the return in half a year is nearly 2.5 times.
Some time ago, Aethir node sales were extremely successful, with a market value of about $3 billion. Let's take Aethir as an example for comparison. The price of Aethir Tier1 node is $500, and the current node income is 31.44 ATH per day. Based on the current price of $0.07, the monthly income is $66, which means it will take 7.5 months to get back the investment. Overall, based on the valuation of $300 million, the payback period of Lumoz node is also significantly shorter, and its income is also higher.
At the same time, since Lumoz is also a RaaS platform, in the future nodes can also obtain multiple rewards such as airdrops of potential tokens of new chains in the Lumoz ecosystem such as Merlin Network, ZKFair Network, and Orange Network.
As mentioned above, the zkVerifier node has relatively low hardware requirements. It can be run on a device with a 4-core CPU or above, 8GB RAM, and 16 Mbit/s bandwidth. Users can bind their own licenses to run node mining, or delegate NFTs to other nodes for mining.
References: 1. Kyle Liu: "Is the low cost of ZKP a false proposition from the perspective of Aztec?", Bing Ventures, Dec 25, 2023; 2. ZeY: "Lumoz Research Report: Modular chain issuance greatly reduces the computing cost of ZKP", SevenUp DAO, June 18, 2024; 3. Peng Sun: "When ZKP meets DePIN, how does Cysic bring PoW back to Ethereum?", Foresight News, April 26, 2024.