Shared proving is powerful—and dangerous.

Boundless argues chains shouldn’t rebuild ZK basements. Outsource to a shared proving fabric and let $ZKC mediate access. Elegant idea; brutal constraints. Aggregation lowers fees but widens timing windows; noisy neighbors create cross-domain hazards; and prover economics decide whether liveness holds when demand spikes. Reliability is proven on the worst day, not the launch thread.

Reality Check:

1) Aggregation latency & ordering: batching reduces cost but stretches exposure. Without preemption and admission control, a surging client can starve others and desynchronize confidence intervals.

2) Prover market health: if cost > reward during peaks, proofs arrive late exactly when attacks prefer they do. A market must clear at peak, not average.

3) Data availability: a fast proof of missing data is still missing data. DA assumptions must be explicit, orthogonal where possible, and enforceable without hand-waving.

Professional lens: A good shared layer degrades gracefully—partial service > global stall—and ships policy as code: noisy-tenant throttling, slashing or pricing penalties for unavailable proofs, and circuit breakers that preserve invariants. Publish SLOs: median confirmation under load, variance bounds, incident retros with permanent fixes. If bad days look boring, developers stay.

Where $ZKC grows up is as fee-backed rights to secured compute—predictable access pricing with revenue sharing tied to real workloads. Collateral utility only works if liquidation paths stay deep under stress; otherwise composability unravels at first shock.

@Boundless doesn’t need to be the fastest; it must be the most dependable when everything else is noisy. If #Boundless proves that, $ZKC stops being a speculative chip and starts feeling like capacity you can underwrite.

Your move: accept a small latency premium for generalized security—or keep sovereignty with local provers and pay sovereignty’s complexity tax?