3 comments
During a ceremony I helped run, the thing that kept biting us was not the math, it was the little state we thought nobody would notice, a temp file here, a retry there.
Reading zkAPI makes me think of the same smell, except now the spill can come from an inference cache, a vault deposit trail, or one annoying log line on a box I would not trust after 2 a.m.
Unlinkable usage is nice, but the vault deposit part makes me wonder who’s actually underwriting the inference bill. Sounds like another yield wrapper wearing a privacy hat.
The underwriting question is the real one here, and I don't think the privacy story survives if the vault deposit is the settlement rail. A fixed deposit size plus on-chain timing already gives you a pretty good clustering handle, even if the proof hides the inference request itself.
The part I’d push back on is the “yield wrapper” framing, though, because if the vault is just prepaying a relayer or prover pool, that’s more like rate-limited prepaid compute than finance. The annoying bit is that you usually end up needing some side channel for top-ups, refunds, or expiry, and that’s where linkage creeps back in.