tl;dr from the past week of EF workshops in Berlin: Ethereum is all-in zkVMs for scaling the L1. Real-time proving showed that massively scaling the L1 with ZK is possible today. Justin Drake even outlined a path to eventual enshrinement of zkVMs in the L1. They are far more serious about this effort than I realized. More details 🧵

Ethereum’s #1 strategic priority right now is to scale the L1: As highlighted in the recent EF update, one of the EF’s core focus groups (led by @timebeiko + @adietrichs) is to dramatically increase the capacity of L1 to bring more activity to mainnet. The recent “real time proving” announcement made leadership realize scaling the L1 with ZK is possible, today. A major bottleneck in scaling is maintaining low hardware requirements for nodes while pumping the gas. With real-time proving, the gas limit can be substantially increased without sacrificing verifiability, since validators only need to verify proofs (low computational cost) to keep up with the chain. The EF is devoting significant resources to this effort, including several engineering teams dedicated to making a stateless ZK client, incorporating prover networks using ZK boost, and benchmarking zkVMs. The EF has a concrete plan over the next quarters to incorporate zkVMs and RTP into many parts of the stack. There is a team devoted to making a stateless ZK client that can run on minimal hardware while verifying proofs. They are building ZK Boost, a MEV-boost-like sidecar that every builder and proposer will run to request proofs from prover networks. And they have a dedicated zkVM benchmarking team to understand what protocol changes are needed to guarantee real-time proving of 100% of blocks. Justin outlined a concrete path to enshrining zkVM proofs in Ethereum over the next few years. In a presentation, Justin outlined a gradual plan to phase-in zkVMs to L1—ending with eventual enshrinement of formally verified proof systems in the L1. As zkVMs become critical to L1, prover networks will be the infra where proposers source proofs for every Ethereum block. A critical piece of infrastructure in this zkVM push will be prover networks. Prover networks enable proposer, prover separation where proposers can remain decentralized and unsophisticated, while getting real-time proofs for every block at maximal efficiency from a competitive set of provers. This is what we’re building with Succinct’s Prover Network :) zkVMs are about to power the world’s best blockchain. ZK tidal wave, incoming.