The economic security behind zero-knowledge proof generation is quite an under-explored topic. Several prover networks and marketplaces have emerged in the past 12 months, most of them relying on a slashable financial bond, but more sophisticated design mechanisms ensuring security, accessibility and decentralization are yet to be seen.

I'll dive into economic security in the context of ZK proof generation from different angles, covering 1. the nature of ZK proving as a hybrid task (it requires intense hardware resources but redundancy/wasted compute should be minimized), 2. the parallels between PoW mining and proof mining, 3. economic security through staking and restaking, and 3. viable alternatives such as reputation systems, Proof of Capacity and Availability for node operators, reputation-based reward mechanisms and more.