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<img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://blockchainreporter.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/blockchain45.webp" alt="blockchain main" style="float: right; margin-left: 5px;" title="Vitalik Says zkEVM Speed Race Is Won — Now Proving the Prover Is the Real Test 20">
<p>Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has declared the zkEVM “battle for speed” to be “definitively won” and says the top priority should now “shift fully to security.” In an <a href="https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2110576209658548683" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">October 15 post on X</a>, he congratulated ZKsync’s Airbender team on a milestone that redefines the zero-knowledge race: real-time Ethereum proving on a single graphics card.</p>
<p>The statement reads as more than praise. It moves the finish line for every zkEVM — away from faster benchmarks and toward proofs that are themselves provably correct.</p>
<h2 id="what-airbender-prime-actually-proved">What Airbender Prime Actually Proved</h2>
<p>ZKsync unveiled Airbender Prime on October 13, calling it the first Ethereum prover, to its knowledge, to demonstrate real-time proving on a single GPU. Running on one NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell card, the system generated proofs for a consecutive batch of 7,200 Ethereum mainnet blocks; 99% of those proofs finished in under 10 seconds, and every block completed within 12 seconds including witness preparation. Competing provers have required large GPU clusters to reach comparable timings, so a single card changes who can realistically run a prover.</p>
<p>The prover is built on the open RISC-V instruction set and uses hash-based STARK technology, which ZKsync positions as resistant to quantum attack. It also ships with a standalone verifier, so results can be checked without trusting the team’s numbers.</p>
<h2 id="the-three-part-security-checklist">The Three-Part Security Checklist</h2>
<p>Buterin spelled out what “formally verifying” now means: proving the arithmetization is equivalent to the Ethereum specification, setting a hard maximum bound on prover cost relative to the gas in a block, and verifying the security of the proof system itself.</p>
<p>The distinction matters because a benchmark can be gamed or measured loosely, while the Ethereum spec leaves no slack. A prover that is fast on a friendly workload still has to be shown to behave exactly like Ethereum’s rules on every input. That is the same reason <a href="https://blockchainreporter.net/zero-knowledge-proofs-are-cryptos-answer-to-the-ai-trust-crisis/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">zero-knowledge proofs are treated as a trust fix</a> only when the proof system itself is sound.</p>
<h2 id="why-speed-was-the-easier-problem">Why Speed Was the Easier Problem</h2>
<p>Optimizing proof throughput is an engineering problem with clear, comparable numbers. Matching a mathematical proof to the Ethereum specification is slower, harder work that produces no headline benchmark. Quantum-resistance claims carry the same burden: saying a hash-based proof system is post-quantum ready is not the same as independently verifying its cryptographic assumptions hold.</p>
<p>ZKsync’s own recent trajectory makes the point. Before Airbender Prime, the team spent months <a href="https://blockchainreporter.net/zksync-hardens-eravm-security-ahead-of-retirement/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">hardening the security of its older EraVM</a>, work that matters precisely because raw proving speed is no longer the bottleneck.</p>
<h2 id="what-happens-next">What Happens Next</h2>
<p>The next observable milestone is not a faster benchmark but formal-verification progress and independent scrutiny of the prover’s security. If the field treats Buterin’s checklist as the new bar, the center of gravity moves from proving speed to provable correctness — a slower race with a much higher bar.</p>

Vitalik Says zkEVM Speed Race Is Won — Now Proving the Prover Is the Real Test

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