Pico Prism zkVM Boosts Ethereum Proving Speed
Brevis, a company focused on zero-knowledge proof applications, announced a major breakthrough. Its Pico Prism zkVM achieved 99.6% proving coverage in under 12 seconds. It also reached 96.8% real-time coverage in less than 10 seconds for Ethereum blocks with a 45 million gas limit.
This improvement makes real-time proving more efficient. It could cut hardware costs by 50% and prepare Ethereum for future capacity demands.
How Pico Prism Improves Ethereum Validation
Pico Prism moves Ethereum from experimental to practical use. The technology allows one prover to create mathematical proofs. Other validators can then verify these proofs in milliseconds. This replaces the need for hundreds of thousands of validators to repeat the same calculations.
The average proving time is now 6.9 seconds for 45 million gas blocks. Costs dropped to $128,000, using 64 RTX 5090 GPUs instead of 160 RTX 4090 GPUs previously required.
Brevis CEO Mo Dong said, “The numbers speak for themselves. We’ve built infrastructure that can handle what Ethereum is actually producing today. This is faster performance leading to economic efficiency that makes real-time proving viable for production deployment.”
Currently, Ethereum validators repeat calculations for every transaction. For example, a token swap on Uniswap is recalculated by over 800,000 validators. Pico Prism lets one prover do the work, while others verify it quickly. This allows developers to use more off-chain computing power while maintaining Ethereum-level security.
Major projects using Brevis technology include PancakeSwap, Usual, and Frax. These projects demonstrate how complex tasks and cross-chain verification can run smoothly.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted, “Excited to see @brevis_zk’s Pico Prism entering the ZK-EVM proving arena! An important step forward in ZK-EVM proving speed and diversity.”
Technical Advances and Future Plans
Pico Prism breaks the proving process into parallel stages. GPUs handle heavy calculations, while CPUs manage setup tasks. This reduces power consumption and allows home validators to run nodes on regular laptops.
Ethereum aims for 99% coverage, verification in under 10 seconds, and hardware costs below $100,000. Pico Prism nearly reaches these goals but misses real-time proving by 2.2%.
Zero-knowledge virtual machines like Pico Prism prove that programs ran correctly without redoing all the work. This technology is key to scaling Ethereum efficiently.
