---
# System prepended metadata

title: incentivisation scheme for fraud/validity provers
tags: [blockchain, rollups, web3, incentivizations]

---

# incentivisation scheme for fraud/validity provers

tldr; most rollups don't have proving setup, those who have don't have incentivizations figured out.

## current scenario?

![image](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/r1YJ9oa46.png)

many rollups have not implemented fraud/validity proving system or do not have incentivisation mechanism set for them. both of them are harmful for industry and we should focus on them and try to come up with a solution that incentivizes these provers as well as keeping the protocol profitable.

optimism doesn't have fraud proof enabled yet, canon is still in development stages and we don't have clear timelines around that, arbitrum has interactive fraud proofs but its only for whitelisted provers. zk rollups also have whitelist mechanism, where only allowed provers can generate zk proofs for blocks.

whitelisting is a good solution at the start when the system is not stable, now the ecosystem should grow and start enabling anyone to create proofs, to exactly enable this, we will need some incentivisation mechanism setup in place to correctly reward provers that is sustainable and profitable over long term.

in this post, we will discuss some incentivisation tactics that we could thought of

## methods of incentivisations

### collateral

block producer/sequencer can put up some collateral on a block that this is correct and will not proved otherwise. if its proved fraud in the following 7 days, the collateral will be unlocked and sent to the prover, otherwise the collateral will be returned to the block producer.

the amount of collateral that the block producer needs to put up is ambigious, because it depends on the l1 fees during proving and the effort it will go into proving a block fraud as it may contain multiple state changes that are fraud, incrementally increasing the cost to prove.

so, instead of putting up collateral on a per-block basis, it makes sense to put up collateral on per-tx basis, this way, even if multiple txs are fraud from a block, prover will be rewarded for all of them, instead of taking a hit.

**why would block producer put up their own tokens as collateral for someone else's transactions?**

block producers need to also be incentivised for putting up collateral, if all tx in a block is proven to be not fraud (no fraud proof in next 7 days), then block producers should get some kind of incentive for good behaviour, if its a PoS setup, it will be easier to tie the block reward with collateral, like locking their block reward as collateral.

to increase the efficiency of this solution, we can batch multiple proofs with each other and put them onchain in a single transcation (only for non-interactive proofs)

### inflationary token

similar to other blockchains, rollups will launch their own token (like OP or ARB) which can be used for rewarding provers on successful fraud proofs.

projects would need to figure out tokenomics for this which will be a challenge, because that token needs to have a real usecase or something from which it can derive its value, otherwise it wouldn't be profitable for provers to just work for these rewards.

