Executive Summary
- Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake announced “extraordinary” progress in real-time proving, a crucial scaling technology for the network.
- This advancement is expected to increase Ethereum’s transaction capacity by over 100 times and reduce transaction finalization time by over 98%, addressing long-standing scalability challenges.
- Real-time proving works by outsourcing transaction finalization off-chain using zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) to synchronize with block production, with rapid development showing significant efficiency gains and predicted reductions in energy consumption.
The Story So Far
- Ethereum has long struggled with scalability, characterized by limited transaction capacity and lengthy finalization times, which led to the proliferation of Layer 2 networks to handle overflow. This new “real-time proving” technology, leveraging zero-knowledge proofs, is crucial because it aims to dramatically reduce transaction finalization time and increase the network’s throughput by over 100 times, thereby addressing these historical bottlenecks and enabling the main Ethereum network to process significantly more transactions efficiently.
Why This Matters
- The “extraordinary” progress in real-time proving is poised to dramatically enhance Ethereum’s scalability, enabling it to process over 100 times its current transaction volume while significantly reducing finalization times. This breakthrough addresses long-standing network bottlenecks, promising lower user fees and potentially lessening the reliance on Layer 2 solutions by bringing comparable throughput to the mainnet, all while ongoing advancements aim to maintain decentralization and improve energy efficiency.
Who Thinks What?
- Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake believes “extraordinary” progress in real-time proving will dramatically increase the network’s transaction capacity by over 100 times, address long-standing scalability challenges, and significantly reduce transaction finalization times by over 98%.
- Developers utilizing zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs), such as those from Succinct and Brevis, are demonstrating the technical feasibility of real-time proving, with their projects already able to prove a high percentage of blocks within the 12-second block production timeframe.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has announced what he calls “extraordinary” progress in real-time proving, a crucial scaling technology poised to dramatically increase the Ethereum network’s transaction capacity. This advancement is expected to enable the network to process more than 100 times its current transaction volume, addressing long-standing challenges in scalability.
Scaling Breakthrough
Drake, who previously predicted the network could scale to millions of transactions per second, highlighted the rapid development of real-time proving. He stated that while throughput has grown 100x since Ethereum’s inception a decade ago, the network could achieve another 100x increase in half that time.
Real-time proving utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to reduce the time it takes for transactions to finalize on the network by over 98%. This significant reduction eliminates a major bottleneck, allowing Ethereum to handle a substantially higher volume of transactions.
Addressing Long-Standing Challenges
The Ethereum network has historically faced challenges in scaling to meet growing demand. This limitation led to the proliferation of numerous Layer 2 networks, which are more performant but often less decentralized, to manage transaction overflow. With the continued advancement of real-time proving, the main Ethereum network could eventually achieve throughput levels comparable to these Layer 2 solutions.
How Real-Time Proving Works
Currently, Ethereum bundles transactions into new blocks approximately every 12 seconds. While transactions are confirmed relatively quickly, they are not truly finalized until validators process them, a procedure that presently takes around 13 minutes.
This lengthy finalization period restricts the network’s ability to process more transactions without requiring expensive, specialized hardware and ultra-fast internet connections, which could compromise decentralization. To circumvent this, developers are exploring outsourcing transaction finalization off-chain using zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs).
ZkVMs enable “provers” to finalize outsourced transactions and verify their correctness to validators without transmitting large data volumes. Real-time proving aims to synchronize transaction finalization with block production, allowing blocks to carry more information, boosting throughput, and reducing user fees.
Rapid Development and Future Outlook
The development of real-time proving is accelerating, with notable advancements from various projects. In May, Succinct released SP1 Hypercube, which Drake noted could prove 94% of blocks in under 12 seconds. More recently, Brevis announced that its zkVM, Pico Prism, can prove 99.9% of blocks within the same 12-second timeframe.
While these projects currently rely on powerful, energy-intensive hardware, Drake anticipates a rapid decrease in these costs. He predicts that by the end of the year, multiple teams will be able to prove blocks using less than 10 kilowatts total, an energy consumption level comparable to a home electric car charger.
