A zkVM, or zero-knowledge virtual machine, generates cryptographic proof of proper execution of a program without re-running the computation, opening the door to trustless verification, greater throughput, and more scalable applications. Verifiable computation’s long-term goal is to become the standard for integrating the broader internet with blockchain, aligning with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s vision of cost-effective and frequent validity proofs. Users may be able to leverage their collateral without bridging, improving liquidity and capital efficiency, when Ethereum embraces zero-knowledge proofs.

Buterin envisions the ability to aggregate proofs from multiple rollups into a single proof, submitted once per slot, centralizing settlement activity on the base layer, reducing reliance on bridge operators, and enabling almost instant cross-rollup asset movement through Ethereum.

The progress in reducing hardware demands and enhancing performance

A recent breakthrough has tempered skepticism surrounding the current state of ZK technology. Brevis, an infrastructure provider powering smart, verifiable applications with zk proofs (ZKPs), has announced that its Pico Prism zkVM has achieved record proving coverage of 99.6% (below 12 seconds) and real-time proving coverage of 96.8% (below 10) for Ethereum blocks with a 45M gas limit.

Among Pico Prism’s other improvements over existing solutions are $128,000 hardware cost vs $256,000, 64 RTX 5090 GPUs vs 160 RTX 4090 GPUs for comparable performance, 6.9-second average proving time for 45M gas blocks and 6.04 seconds for 36M gas blocks vs 10.3 seconds, and a performance improvement of 3.4x using combined cost efficiency and speed metrics. 

Pico Prism has moved to production-ready infrastructure, doing away with a critical bottleneck in Ethereum’s transition to base-layer zero-knowledge verification. GPU hardware costs are reduced by 50%, rendering real-time proving economically feasible for large-scale production deployment.

Existing issues with scalability and economic viability

Zk rollups like StarkNet, zkSync Era, and Polygon zkEVM compress thousands of Ethereum transactions into a single ZKP that proves their correctness, and generating one proof for a full Ethereum block (around 45M of gas) can take 10–20 seconds or longer, even on clusters with hundreds of GPUs or ASICs. Zk rollups depend on provers

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Author: CryptoDaily