ZKsync Launches Airbender Prime, Achieves Real-Time Ethereum Proofs on a Single GPU

ChainCatcher report: ZKsync, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, has announced the launch of its prover, Airbender Prime. According to ZKsync, this is the first prover to demonstrate real-time Ethereum proofs on a single GPU. Airbender Prime is post-quantum secure and employs hash-based STARKs combined with GKR sumcheck, WHIR polynomial commitments, and BLAKE2s hashing; its L1 proofs use Keccak-256-based commitments instead of BN254 pairings. The prover is built on the open RISC-V standard and integrates real-time proving with an independent verifier. In a single-GPU evaluation, an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell generated proofs for 99% of 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds per block, including witness preparation; all blocks were completed within 12 seconds. ZKsync states that Airbender Prime leads in average proof time, GPU efficiency, and cost on the public ETHproofs leaderboard, with dual-GPU and quad-GPU real-time configurations already deployed, while significantly lowering hardware requirements for proof generation.