Hardware requirements

A Prova prover doesn't need exotic hardware. The protocol is disk-bound, not CPU-bound — no PoRep, no SNARKs, no GPU.

Minimum

• CPU: 4 cores (2.0 GHz+)
• RAM: 8 GB
• Disk: anything ≥ 1 TB. SATA SSD or NVMe preferred. Spinning rust works for cold storage.
• Network: symmetric 100 Mbps. Real upload, not consumer-asymmetric.
• Connection: real IP, real DNS. No CGNAT.
• OS: Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+, Debian 12+, RHEL 9+ tested). macOS works for dev. Windows untested.

Recommended (10 TB tier)

• CPU: 8 cores
• RAM: 32 GB
• Disk: 10 TB NVMe or 4× 4 TB SSD ZFS RAID-Z1. ECC where possible.
• Network: 1 Gbps symmetric. Multi-homed if you can.
• Power: UPS. Single power loss during a proof = missed proof = slash.

At scale (100 TB+)

• Server-grade hardware. Hetzner SX-line, OVH bare metal, used Dell R7xx with shelves.
• ZFS or btrfs with checksumming and scrubbing.
• Two upstream providers (BGP if you're feeling spicy).
• Cooling. Real cooling.

What disk shape

Disk	Good for	Notes
NVMe	Hot tier, fast retrievals	Most expensive per byte
SATA SSD	Default. Best balance.	Sweet spot for now
SAS HDD (7.2k or 10k)	Cold tier, cheap bulk	Slower retrievals → may lose deals to faster provers
SMR HDD	Don't	SMR's write amplification kills proof latency

You can mix tiers. The prover daemon supports a "hot" tier (recent + popular pieces) and a "cold" tier (rarely-retrieved). Caching strategies live in prover/pkg/store/.

What CPU

PDP proofs are SHA-256 on a few KB at a time. Any modern CPU does this in microseconds. The CPU bottleneck (if any) is TLS termination + HTTPS retrieval throughput — i.e., serving clients, not generating proofs. Modern AES-NI CPUs handle gigabit-line-rate HTTPS without breaking 5% utilization.

What network

The two metrics that matter:

1. Upload bandwidth. You're serving every retrieval. A 1 Gbps link means ~125 MB/s peak retrieval throughput. If your provers are popular, more = more revenue.
2. Latency. Clients route to the fastest healthy prover. A prover in São Paulo serving Norwegian users will lose to one in Frankfurt. Place your hardware where the demand is.

Geographic placement

If you're starting with one node, put it where:

• Land and electricity are cheap (Nordic countries, Iceland)
• Latency to ENS / NFT / web3 traffic is good (EU + NA East coast)
• Regulatory environment is friendly (Norway, Switzerland, Singapore)

If you're scaling to 5+ nodes, spread across continents. Prova's marketplace prefers geographically-diverse redundancy, which means cross-continent provers see preferential placement.

Stake (the hidden cost)

Your biggest hardware-equivalent expense is the PROVA stake you must lock to commit capacity. The current floor is minStakePerGiB × committedGiB, plus a USDC-equivalent floor read from a Chainlink PROVA/USD oracle (whichever is higher). The contract floor at TGE is 100 PROVA per GiB; check ProverStaking.minStakePerGib() before registering.

For a 10 TB prover (10,240 GiB):

• Disk: $1,000-2,500 (one-time)
• Network: $50-100/month
• Stake: ~1,024,000 PROVA locked (refundable when you exit cleanly via the unbonding queue)
• Slash exposure: up to slashFraction of your stake per fault event (default 10%)

Plan accordingly.

See also

• Earnings calculator
• Become a prover