[Proven Ethereum with a single GPU—but the real-world test is different.] @zksync proved 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks using just a single GPU. 99% of these were proven within 10 seconds, and all blocks were proven within 12 seconds. Yet, according to EthProofs’ real-time proofing performance metrics—supported by the Ethereum Foundation—only 2 out of 8 evaluated provers met the recent weekly eligibility criteria. These two results cannot be directly compared, as they measure different targets and environments. Rather, the gap between them reveals the next challenge for ZK technology. Summary: - Airbender Prime demonstrated the feasibility of matching Ethereum’s ~12-second block production rate using just a single GPU. - In real-world prover operations, however, proof speed alone is not enough—uptime, proof failure rates, and hardware requirements must also be considered. - Long-term, zkEVM competitiveness will likely hinge less on raw proof throughput and more on accuracy verification, proof cost under worst-case conditions, and operational reliability. On October 13, ZKsync announced Airbender Prime: a system that proved 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks using a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU. Since Ethereum produces blocks approximately every 12 seconds, 7,200 blocks correspond nominally to about 24 hours of block data. The significance lies in the fact that—when including time needed to prepare the witness data—99% of blocks were processed within 10 seconds. If proof generation is faster than block production, verifiers can confirm execution results cryptographically rather than re-executing every transaction—dramatically reducing computational overhead. However, performing a performance test on 7,200 blocks differs fundamentally from sustaining continuous proof generation in a live network environment. EthProofs publicly measures the performance and operational status of multiple systems generating real-time proofs for Ethereum blocks. As of the October 26 dashboard snapshot: - 8 provers under evaluation; only 2 met recent weekly eligibility criteria. - 69.7% of evaluated block slots had proofs generated within 10 seconds. - 26.2% of provers were classified as offline. These figures are not from Airbender Prime’s single-GPU test—they represent aggregated operational data across multiple provers, with varying hardware, execution environments, and eligibility standards. Yet they underscore a critical point: to be useful in a live network, proof systems must deliver not just high individual performance but also operational reliability. Even if a prover averages only 5 seconds per proof, frequent downtime or inability to process certain blocks makes any verification architecture relying solely on that system inherently unstable. It’s essential to verify whether alternative implementations can step in when one prover fails—and whether proof delays accumulate when difficult blocks arrive consecutively. Hardware requirements also require independent validation. The Airbender open-source documentation states that GPU resources are used for base and recursive proof stages, while the final proof stage requires CPU and approximately 150 GB of RAM. It remains unconfirmed whether this configuration matches the exact setup used in the latest Prime benchmark. Therefore, the result of “one GPU” cannot be taken as definitive evidence of total system memory requirements or operational cost. On October 15, @VitalikButerin praised the Airbender team’s achievement and outlined three next steps for zkEVM: First: Mathematically verify that the computations used in proving match Ethereum’s actual execution semantics. Second: Impose strict upper bounds on proof cost relative to block gas usage. Third: Verify the cryptographic security of the proof system itself. The second condition directly relates to real-world operational costs. What if someone deliberately constructs a block containing operations that are computationally trivial to execute but extremely expensive to prove—while still staying within the allowed gas limit? The block executes normally with standard fees paid, yet generating its proof requires disproportionately high computation and time. If such scenarios are possible, even an average proof time of a few seconds becomes meaningless: predicting the network’s maximum sustainable load becomes impossible. The economic viability of real-time proving depends not only on average proof cost but also on how much resource is needed under worst-case conditions. EthProofs’ roadmap is already moving in this direction.The current performance optimization phase is complete, and the security verification phase is underway. Next, the integration of proof into the delay proof, obligation proof, and protocol layers is scheduled. This sequence matters because creating a fast proof system is fundamentally different from making Ethereum trust that proof within its consensus process. The announcement of Airbender Prime provided strong evidence that hardware overhead for real-time proofs can be significantly reduced. The next milestone cannot be evaluated solely by faster metrics. What matters is how long high proof success rates can be sustained in real-world conditions, whether proof costs remain bounded even in worst-case blocks, and whether different implementations can accurately prove identical Ethereum execution results. ZK proof technology is transitioning from demonstrating fast computation to becoming infrastructure that networks can reliably depend on. #Ethereum #zkEVM