The partnership between major ZK infrastructure teams announced late December keeps proving relevant. With ASIC hardware now coming online for proof generation, we're seeing a meaningful shift in economics—proving costs dropping while throughput improves, all without creating new centralization bottlenecks.

This matters because it addresses a real pain point. When hardware acceleration rolls out properly, proof generation becomes faster and cheaper for everyone participating in the network. No single entity controls the compute layer. That's the kind of infrastructure evolution the ecosystem actually needs right now.