Ethproofs Report

The recent @eth_proofs Call #3 covered key topics around @ethereum’s ever-growing involvement in ZK infrastructure, featuring updates from various zkVM teams, progress in GPU proving, security approaches, and discussions around long-term plans to scale L1 to one gigagas per second and beyond. 

Full recording:

Some of the key highlights

zkVM Tracker Updates

Kicking off the the call, @drakefjustin shared updates on the Ethproofs zkVM tracker. A new column has been added to track GPU provers, along with the following changes:

• Ziren by @ProjectZKM has rebranded from zkMIPS.
• Valida by @0xLita has open-sourced its codebase.
• @ziskvm has integrated with Ethproofs.
• The @KakarotZkEvm and Petra (@IrreducibleHW) teams have shifted their focus toward private and local applications.

It was also announced that upcoming calls (#4 and #5) will feature discussions on the pros and cons of various ISAs, including RISC-V and possible alternatives.

Valida - Release Update by @PlatonicMorgan from the @lita_xyz team

Morgan Thomas presented version 0.1.0 of Lita's zkVM, Valida. 

Key highlights from the presentation:

• Valida is now fully open-source under Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses.
• Support for multi-segment proving has been added, allowing longer executions to be proved.
• GPU prover development is underway, using Nim-to-CUDA compilation.
• Rust 1.86 and the standard Rust library are now supported, with a user-friendly experience for compiling regular Rust programs.

Morgan noted that Valida is not yet ready for full Ethproofs integration due to missing precompile support and lack of GPU acceleration.

Pico Performance, presented by @succinct_li of @brevis_zk 

Brevis's Alan shared recent progress on their in-house zkVM, Pico, which is based on STARK proofs and a Koala backend:

• Pico achieved a 2× speedup on CPU compared to its closest competitors.
• The recently released GPU version 1.0 shows up to a 20× performance boost.
• It has been benchmarked on standard workloads such as Fibonacci and RA blocks.
• In Ethproofs benchmarks, Pico outperformed its nearest competitor (SP1 by @SuccinctLabs) by an average of 25–27%.
• Open-sourcing of the GPU version is planned after adding support for multi-GPU and multi-node setups, tentatively within two months.

Ethereum Foundation Updates

The @ethereumfndn introduced its newly formed zkEVM team, consisting of 6-7 members focused on deploying ZK-based clients at the Ethereum L1 level. 

The team outlined several core directions:

• The overall goal is to enable ZK-based client validation on @ethereum validators following the Pectra (formerly Glamsterdam) hard fork, scheduled for 2026.
• Hardware constraints: Multi-GPU systems with a total power draw below 10 kW, suitable for residential setups.
• zkVM requirements: Open source code, formal verifiability, strong security, and no trusted setup (except universal ones).
• Licensing: Preferably MIT or Apache, though other options may be considered.

Benchmarking (@ignaciohagopian) - A benchmarking framework was presented for testing zkVMs on real Ethereum blocks. 

It includes:

• Prover killers
• Opcode and precompile-specific stress tests
• Analysis of gas cost linearity
• Public collection of proof time and throughput data

Security (@codytouchgrass) - Security efforts focus on architecture compliance and fuzzing tools. The main priority is detecting underconstrained circuits in proof systems. The team is using the Pyus tool from @VeridiseInc and plans to add fuzzing for Plonky3, along with a circuit analysis framework based on LLCK.

Ethproofs.org Updates 

Farah, an @ethereumfndn grantee, presented recent updates to the @eth_proofs website:

• A new GitHub issue template to streamline the onboarding process for teams
• A public project board to track onboarding progress
• A new “Coming Soon” tab on the site to showcase upcoming zkVMs
• UI improvements and sorting of proofs by proving speed

The Path to ZK-L1 and Gigagas

@drakefjustin rounded off the call with an in-depth presentation on scaling @ethereumfndn to a ZK-L1 with a throughput of 1 gigagas per second. 

Key insights:

Latency

• Implementation of same-slot proving
• Use of the debug_traceExecution API from reth for faster data access
• Techniques like block splitting into sub-blocks (SP1 by @SuccinctLabs), ahead-of-time tracing (@ziskvm), and accelerated proof aggregation (@RiscZero)

Security

• Diversity through combining different zkVMs with various guest clients
• 'Slow-fast pairing' approach - balancing fast and slower systems for stability
• Verifying 3 out of 5 proofs (K out of N) to increase fault tolerance

Liveness

• Mandatory proofs required within the same slot
• Fault tolerance via at-home GPU clusters (e.g. 16 x RTX 4090)
• Moving away from data centers in favor of accessible, residential-grade hardware
• Cost estimate: proof generation costs less than $0.0001 per megagas

Scaling to 1 Ggas/s

• Automatic 3× annual gas limit increases (EIP-7938)
• Migration to more performant databases (e.g. QMDB, TrieDB)
• Future improvements via ASICs, multi-premise setups, and changes to the state tree structure (e.g., hex → binary)

The @eth_proofs Call #4 is scheduled for August '25.