Ethereum Blocks Now Proven in Seconds

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Brevis’ Pico Prism achieves 99.6% real-time Ethereum block proving, cutting hardware costs by 50%.
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Vitalik Buterin praises the breakthrough as a key step for faster, scalable Ethereum and ZK-EVM adoption.
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The system enables cheaper, faster verification, higher gas limits, and more decentralized network participation.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has voiced excitement over a major technical breakthrough from Brevis.
On Twitter, he said: “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.”
And he’s right to be impressed – Brevis’s Pico Prism is moving Ethereum closer to real-time block verification.
Pico Prism: Faster, Cheaper, Smarter
Brevis, a company building infrastructure for zero-knowledge proofs, unveiled Pico Prism, a zkVM designed for real-time Ethereum block proving. The results are eye-catching: 99.6% of current Ethereum blocks are proven in under 12 seconds, averaging just 6.9 seconds using 64 RTX 5090 GPUs.
Compared to older methods, this is a huge jump. Hardware costs are cut by half, performance is 3.4 times better, and the system handles almost every block immediately.
“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,” said Mo Dong, CEO of Brevis.
Read More: Vitalik Buterin Warns EU’s Chat Control Could Break Digital Privacy: “Fight It”
Why It Matters
Today, Ethereum validators each run the same calculations on every transaction. On Uniswap, for example, more than 800,000 validators repeat the same work. This slows down the network and limits block capacity. Pico Prism changes that: one prover does the work, everyone else verifies the proof in milliseconds.
This opens the door to higher gas limits, lower transaction fees, and more complex DeFi operations. Validators don’t need gaming rigs and basic laptops can do the job. Developers can tap off-chain computing power without losing trust in the network.
In Step With Ethereum’s Roadmap
Ethereum’s 2025 goals are clear: 99% coverage, sub-10 second proving, under $100K hardware, and power under 10kW for home setups. Pico Prism is already at 96.8% real-time proving, showing a clear path toward L1 zkEVM integration and broader network efficiency.
A Peek at Ethereum’s Future
Protocols like PancakeSwap, Usual, and Frax are already running advanced operations on Brevis infrastructure. This shows what Ethereum could look like when computational limits disappear: faster, cheaper, and more decentralized.
Vitalik’s reaction highlights the importance of this milestone.