Dominic Williams, founder of the Internet Computer, has criticised marketing claims around LayerZero’s upcoming network, Zero, arguing that comparisons with mainstream cloud providers like AWS risk misleading the market.
In a post on X, Williams responded to statements suggesting Zero could offer a credible decentralised alternative to centralised cloud infrastructure. His core argument is that Zero’s design depends on proving computation through zero-knowledge virtual machines, a process that introduces an extreme cost overhead.
Williams pointed to the Jolt zkVM, developed by a16z Research, which Zero plans to use for generating proofs that computations were executed correctly. While he described Jolt as an impressive technical breakthrough, he highlighted that the proving process can require under 100,000 times more work than running the same program normally, based on figures published by the Jolt project itself.
That multiplier, Williams argued, makes it difficult for any network built around such proofs to credibly compete with traditional cloud services on efficiency or cost. He suggested that once users focus on the computational burden, claims about rivaling AWS “don’t pass the smell test”.
To illustrate, he offered practical examples. A database operation that takes one second on a normal server could take longer than a day when executed with full zk proving. Scaling this across a high-throughput system would require vast numbers of additional machines dedicated purely to proof generation. In one hypothetical scenario, he estimated that reaching the transaction processing levels claimed in LayerZero’s positioning would demand a proving infrastructure on the scale of tens or even hundreds of millions of servers.
Williams also raised questions about how Zero intends to manage what it calls “soft finality” and “hard finality”. Under this structure, computation may complete quickly, but proofs arrive later. That creates the risk, he said, of systems relying on unproven intermediate states, which becomes especially problematic in an environment where applications constantly interact across zones.
He warned that if proofs fail or fall too far behind, the resulting need for rollbacks across interconnected zones could become unworkable. Williams noted that Zero’s own technical material suggests governance intervention may be required in such cases, which could mean downtime or manual fixes rather than purely mathematical guarantees.
Another part of his critique focused on the likelihood that Zero may depend on trusted institutional operators to avoid such failures. Williams speculated that partnerships with large centralised players could reduce the chance of reversions, but at the cost of weakening decentralisation claims.
He acknowledged that specialised hardware for zk proving, including ASICs and FPGA-based accelerators, could reduce the overhead in the future. Even then, he argued, the remaining cost would still be far too high for general-purpose onchain cloud computing at the scale implied by comparisons to AWS. Instead, he suggested such systems may be better suited to narrower applications such as decentralised finance, where the trade-offs could be justified.
Williams closed by saying his assessment may not be perfect and invited correction, but stressed that he felt obliged to speak out because repeated “world computer” marketing has created confusion about what these networks can realistically deliver.
The exchange highlights a broader tension in blockchain infrastructure: balancing ambitious decentralised cloud narratives with the economic realities of proving, scaling, and running computation at competitive cost.
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