Ethereum’s scaling ambitions received a significant boost with the unveiling of Pico Prism, a cutting-edge zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) designed for real-time block proving using standard consumer graphics hardware.
The Ethereum scaling company Brevis revealed on Wednesday that their novel zkEVM technology achieves near-instantaneous cryptographic proofs of Ethereum blocks by harnessing affordable, off-the-shelf GPUs, specifically 64 Nvidia RTX 5090 cards — widely recognized as high-end gaming processors.
In tests conducted in September, Pico Prism demonstrated an impressive 99.6% real-time proving rate within under 12 seconds. Real-time proving (RTP) refers to the generation of a cryptographic proof verifying the block’s correctness faster than new blocks are produced on the network.
According to Brevis, this is a landmark advancement, potentially enabling Ethereum to scale its base layer transactions by 100 times and bringing closer the vision of operating full validation nodes on personal smartphones.
Building on this momentum, Brevis aims to reach 99% real-time proving using fewer than 16 RTX 5090 GPUs in upcoming months, indicating the technology’s growing efficiency and reduced hardware requirements.
Currently, Ethereum validators must re-execute every transaction for block verification—a process that demands high-powered and costly computing resources. This approach inherently bottlenecks throughput and accessibility.
Pico Prism’s approach dramatically shifts this paradigm by delegating block proving to a single “prover” node. Other validators can then verify the provided proof within milliseconds, vastly reducing the computational burden and enabling lightweight validation.
This breakthrough ties directly into Ethereum’s roadmap, which envisions a transition where validators will prioritize verifying zk-proofs rather than re-executing transactions. Doing so is expected to unlock throughput capacities in the vicinity of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) on layer 1.
Ryan Sean Adams of Bankless projected that with scaling improving roughly threefold per year, Ethereum’s base layer could attain 10,000 TPS by around April 2029.
Additional protocol enhancements, such as the upcoming Fusaka upgrade anticipated in December, will further accelerate efficient real-time proving. This upgrade introduces EIP-7825, which caps gas usage per transaction and allows more parallel ETH Virtual Machine (EVM) proving via subblocks, facilitating proofs on GPU clusters with reduced electrical consumption.
The Ethereum Foundation underscored the significance of this development: zk-based technologies like Pico Prism are essential to scaling the network sustainably without sacrificing trust or decentralization.
Tech entrepreneur Mike Warner summarized the implications succinctly, stating, “The phone-as-a-node future just got real.” Indeed, the ability to validate blocks from consumer-grade devices signifies a fundamental shift in network participation.
Ethereum’s evolution toward a zk-centric protocol, as noted by Adams, will feature a base layer capable of handling global decentralized finance (DeFi) deployments with high throughput, while layer-2 solutions will manage additional scaling demands. This architecture aims to combine massive scalability with robust security and decentralization—addressing a critical blockchain trilemma.
In essence, Pico Prism marks a key step toward realizing blockchain’s long-sought goal: scaling to global demand while ensuring wide accessibility and maintaining trustless validation.
