Mechanism design against collusion, Sybil attacks, and off-chain agreements in prover markets

Design a transaction-fee mechanism for ZK-Rollup prover markets that, via mechanism-design principles, forestalls collusion among provers, mitigates Sybil attacks, and/or prevents profitable off-chain agreements between users and provers.

Background

In Layer-1 fee markets, mechanisms like EIP-1559 achieve desirable incentive properties and off-chain-agreement proofness. In ZK-Rollup prover markets, however, multiple provers with private costs, the possibility of Sybil identities, and opportunities for collusion complicate achieving analogous guarantees.

The paper’s analysis shows that Proo is vulnerable to Sybil attacks and partial prover collusion, and that eliminating such vulnerabilities while maintaining strong incentive properties remains unresolved. The authors explicitly pose the design of such a mechanism as an open question.