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Most people talk about smart contracts when discussing automation in Web3. But there is another part that deserves attention: who handles the computation needed before a contract can act? Think about a prediction market with thousands of users waiting for a result. The settlement rules may already be written onchain, but determining the outcome can involve external data, complex computation and verification. Until those steps are completed, the market cannot move forward. This is where @fermah_xyz gets interesting. Fermah is building a proof market where applications can send ZK proving workloads to distributed compute providers. Instead of every protocol having to manage all the proving infrastructure on its own, the workload can be handled through a system designed to coordinate available computing resources. The matchmaker plays an important role here. It connects workloads with suitable providers by considering factors such as hardware availability, computational requirements and provider pricing. Once the computation is completed, a ZK proof can help the application verify that the required calculations followed the specified rules. Now think about what this could mean for different applications. A prediction market could use verifiable computation as part of its resolution process. A DeFi protocol could incorporate proofs into more complex workflows. AI agents could use verified computational results before moving to their next action. None of this means every process becomes fully autonomous overnight. Applications still need reliable inputs, appropriate verification rules and mechanisms to execute the final action. A proof cannot guarantee that the original data was truthful. But it can help separate the work of performing a computation from the process of verifying its correctness. That is an important distinction when applications need to process increasingly complex workloads without requiring every protocol to build its own proving infrastructure. I also think Fermah's distributed model is worth watching as demand grows. More workloads will require more compute capacity, and the ability to coordinate providers efficiently will matter for both cost and performance. The bigger opportunity is giving developers access to proof generation as infrastructure they can build around, rather than treating it as a problem every application must solve independently. For Web3 to support more automated applications, computation needs to be practical, verification needs to be reliable, and the infrastructure connecting both needs to scale. Fermah is working on that infrastructure layer. The interesting part will be seeing how it performs as more real workloads move through the network. @7wealthh