Vitalik Backs ZKsync Airbender Prime & Eyes zkEVM Security

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Buterin posted the message on Wednesday, two days after ZKsync unveiled the milestone. He then urged every zkEVM team to treat security as the new top priority. His comment reframes a field that has chased raw speed for years.

What ZKsync Airbender Prime Claimed

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ZKsync announced Airbender Prime on 13 October. The team calls it the first Ethereum prover to show real-time proving on a single GPU.

According to the ZKsync blog, the test ran on one NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU. It proved 99% of 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds each. Every block finished in under 12 seconds, which is roughly Ethereum’s block time.

That marks a sharp jump from earlier work. Prior Airbender builds reported about 35 seconds per block on a single H100 GPU, at roughly 21.8 MHz throughput. ZKsync also says the system now leads the ETHproofs public leaderboard on average proving time, GPU efficiency, and cost. Live 2-GPU and 4-GPU configurations appear on the board too.

Why Vitalik Says the Speed Race Is Won

Buterin framed the result as a turning point. In his view, provers are now fast enough for the use cases that matter, so speed is no longer the bottleneck.

Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski echoed the point. “Real-time proving on a single GPU is here,” he wrote in a follow-up post. He tied the milestone to a ZK-centric Ethereum roadmap and to independent verifiability for global finance.

Still, the numbers come from ZKsync’s own evaluation. Independent teams have not yet replicated the exact 7,200-block benchmark. For now, the figures remain self-reported, and several reports stressed that caveat alongside the praise.

The Shift to Formal Verification

Buterin spelled out three security goals for the field. First, teams should formally verify that the prover’s arithmetization matches the Ethereum spec. In plain terms, the circuit must prove exactly the rules Ethereum actually runs.

Second, he wants a hard maximum bound on prover cost relative to the gas in a block. That cap would block economic attacks that make proving suddenly expensive.

Third, he wants the proof system itself formally verified for soundness. Because a fast but subtly broken prover could accept invalid state, correctness now matters more than raw throughput. Formal verification uses math, often checked by tools like Lean, to prove a circuit is correct rather than just well tested.

The Ethereum Foundation flagged a similar path last year. Its zkEVM security post argued that soundness is the harder problem once speed improves.

How Airbender Fits the zkEVM Landscape

Buterin’s own 2022 taxonomy still shapes this debate. His zkEVM types post ranked designs from Type 1, fully Ethereum-equivalent, to Type 4, highly optimized but less strictly equivalent.

ZKsync historically sat toward the efficient end of that scale. Airbender is a RISC-V zkVM built alongside ZKsync OS, so it proves execution through a general-purpose virtual machine rather than a bespoke EVM circuit.

What Single-GPU Proving Means for Ethereum

The hardware claim carries real weight. Earlier provers often needed large GPU clusters, so only well-funded operators could run them.

A single consumer-class GPU lowers that barrier sharply. As a result, more independent provers could join, which supports decentralization and faster finality. Several replies to Buterin’s post made exactly this point.

Airbender is open source and built on that RISC-V design. Its public repository ships under MIT and Apache-2.0 licenses, so other teams can inspect and reuse the work. Matter Labs also runs a separate prover service repo for production setups.

Market Reaction Stays Muted

The technical news did not move markets much. The ZK token traded roughly between $0.014 and $0.018 near the announcement. It gained about 11.5% on 13 October, then gave back ground on mixed days.

On-chain activity also stayed flat. ZKsync Era holds about $14.5 million in total value locked, according to DefiLlama data. No large spike followed the Airbender Prime reveal.

So the market impact looks limited for now, even as the technical claim draws praise. This article is not financial advice.

What Comes Next for ZKsync Airbender Prime

The next test is independent verification. Outside researchers still need to reproduce the single-GPU results under their own conditions and hardware.

Beyond that, the formal verification work Buterin described could take years. No major zkEVM has yet proven full arithmetization equivalence, cost bounds, and proof-system soundness together. The speed milestone is real, but the security race for ZKsync Airbender Prime and its rivals is just starting.