Concrete cost estimate for the stronger non-amortizable construction

Derive a concrete cost estimate for the stronger non-amortizable PRF-based construction, whose prover derives a fresh secret vector from a registered PRF key and proves its correct derivation with a general-purpose zero-knowledge argument.

Background

The paper sketches a PRF-based construction that improves the non-amortizability overhead from logarithmic to essentially linear in the trace length. The construction uses a more expensive prover because each identity derives and proves a fresh pseudorandom vector for each block.

Although the paper describes the asymptotic mechanism and its stronger theoretical guarantee, it does not quantify the practical proving cost of the additional general-purpose zero-knowledge proof and related operations. A concrete estimate is needed to assess the construction’s deployment feasibility and its trade-off against the original TRACE variant.

References

The construction, however, requires a more expensive prover compared to prior schemes. We leave a concrete cost estimate for this construction to future work.

— One Node, Two Roles: Simultaneous Contests for Validation and Attention in Rollups  (2610.12220 - Anchuri et al., 8 Oct 2026) in Section 1, subsection “Our Contributions,” paragraph “A registered prover model for attention mechanisms”