Justin Drake@drakefjustin
Progress toward real-time proving for Ethereum L1 is nothing short of extraordinary.
In May, SP1 Hypercube proved 94% of L1 blocks in under 12 seconds using 160 RTX 4090s. Five months later Pico Prism proves 99.9% of the same blocks in under 12 seconds, with just 64 RTX 5090s. Average proving latency is now 6.9 seconds.
Performance has outpaced Moore's law ever since Zcash pioneered practical SNARKs a decade ago. Today's Pico Prism results are a striking reminder of that exponential curve.
Beyond performance, zkVM diversity is remarkable. At least nine zkVMs are racing toward real-time proving: Airbender, Ceno, Jolt, OpenVM, Pico Prism, R0VM, SP1 Hypercube, Ziren, ZisK. That diversity is strength, similar to CL and EL client diversity.
Fusaka, expected in December, will simplify real-time proving. EIP-7825 caps per-tx gas usage, enabling more parallel proving via subblocks. MODEXP, a prominent "prover killer", is being repriced with EIP-7823 and EIP-7883.
By year's end several teams will prove every L1 EVM block on a 16-GPU cluster, drawing less than 10kW total. The 10kW target—about the same as a Tesla home charger—matters for on-prem proving in garages and offices, eliminating reliance on cloud proving.
gigagas frontier
L1 throughput has grown 100x since genesis ten years ago, from 20 kilogas/sec to 2 megagas/sec. With zkEVMs we can 100x again, in half the time. The key is to bypass validators as Ethereum's current scalability bottleneck.
Lean execution proofs also decentralise validation. Goodbye 4TB NVMe, 8 cores, 64GB RAM recommended by EIP-7870. A Raspberry Pi running statelessly, or even a phone, will soon suffice. The scalability vs decentralisation dilemma is dying.
Zooming out, the lean Ethereum vision is gigagas L1 and teragas L2. Gigagas L1 (10K TPS) means high-value payments, trading, and social apps directly on mainnet. Teragas L2 (10M TPS) means welcoming the entirety of finance onto Ethereum.
Nov 22: Ethproofs day demo
Behind the scenes teams are preparing a special Devconnect demo. In 38 days my home validator will run on zkEVM proofs. My mighty Geth node will go dark—no more execution client.
Devconnect Argentina is Ethereum's world fair. World fairs unveiled the lightbulb, running water, cars, refrigeration, phones, escalators. Real-time proving is Ethereum's lightbulb moment.
Ethereum's future is bright. Believe in something :)
