Ethereum’s Pico Prism zkVM Achieves 99.9% Real-Time Proving Efficiency

• Pico Prism delivers 99.9% real-time proving for Ethereum L1 using just 64 RTX 5090 GPUs.
• The update marks a 3.4x jump in performance and a 50% drop in hardware cost.
• Ethereum aims for home-based proving with under 10kW power usage and 10-second latency.

Ethereum’s long-awaited goal of achieving real-time proving on Layer 1 is moving from theory to reality. Researcher Justin Drake highlighted major progress, noting that proving performance has surged past expectations.

Earlier this year, SP1 Hypercube managed to prove 94% of Ethereum blocks in under 12 seconds using 160 RTX 4090 GPUs. Now, Pico Prism has advanced the process, proving 99.9% of the same blocks in the same time with just 64 RTX 5090 GPUs.

This represents a leap in efficiency. Average proving latency has dropped to 6.9 seconds, and performance improvements are outpacing Moore’s law.

According to Brevis, which announced the new zkVM, Pico Prism’s tests on 36-million-gas limit blocks showed major gains, proof coverage below 10 seconds reached 98.9%, compared to 40.9% previously. Hardware expenses fell from $256,000 to $128,000, while proving time decreased from 10.3 to 6.04 seconds.

Source: X

zkVM Race and Ethereum’s Scalability Roadmap

A variety of zkVM projects, such as Airbender, Ceno, Jolt, OpenVM, and Ziren, are now converging on complete real-time proving. The variety mirrors the Ethereum client ecosystem, providing network fault tolerance.

The Ethereum Foundation tabulated a plan toward a zkEVM-based Layer 1 and aims at reducing the proof verification speed and increasing the degree of decentralization.

Today’s problem is that all validators need to re-run all the transactions in order to confirm the blocks. This requires high-end equipment and hinders scaling. In-game proving breaks this bottleneck by having one prover compute a proof that others can confirm in real-time. This saves money and opens up the possibility for more people with simple setups.

Through EIPs 7823 and 7883 in tweaking gas usage and cost of computations, Ethereum’s scalability on the chain should grow exponentially.

Scalability should grow high enough so that the network can support mainstream financial applications with up to 10,000 transactions per second on Layer 1 and up to 10 million transactions per second on Layer 2.

Home Proving and Energy-Efficient Design

One key area for the development teams’ focus is the concept of “home proving,” allowing validators to run from personal equipment with no reliance on the cloud. The intention is initially to attain complete real-time proving within a sub-10-second window with less than 10kW equipment, something akin to a Tesla household charger.

Fusaka, due in December, will ease the real-time proving setup for smaller operators. At the end of the year, teams should demonstrate each Ethereum L1 block with a single 16-GPU cluster in this energy limit.

The future’s Devconnect Argentina’s EthProofs Day hosts the first-ever live demo of zkEVM-based real-time proving, which becomes a giant leap towards a lighter, swifter, and completely decentralized Ethereum network.

Also Read: Pico Prism Turbocharges Ethereum Scaling: 10,000 TPS Within Reach?