ZKsync achieves real-time Ethereum proving on a single GPU

ZKsync has announced Airbender Prime, a system capable of generating Ethereum proofs in real time using a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU. During testing across 7,200 Ethereum mainnet blocks, the system proved 99% of blocks in under 10 seconds, with all blocks processed within 12 seconds. This performance places Airbender at the top of the ETHproofs.org public leaderboard regarding proving time, cost-effectiveness, and GPU efficiency.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to the milestone, stating that the “speed battle” for zero-knowledge Ethereum is “definitively won.” However, Buterin emphasized that the industry's focus must now shift from raw throughput to security and formal verification.

Buterin outlined three primary priorities for zkEVM developers: ensuring the mathematical proofs exactly match the Ethereum specification, establishing a hard maximum bound on prover costs relative to the amount of gas in a block, and securing the proof system itself. He noted that high prover costs could negatively impact decentralization by pushing out smaller operators.