ZKsync’s Airbender hits real-time proving on one GPU, and Vitalik Buterin weighs in
ZKsync said Airbender Prime reached real-time proving on a single GPU, and the project also said the prover handled 99% of proofs in under 10 seconds across 7,200 consecutive mainnet blocks. Vitalik Buterin responded after that claim and said the race to make zero-knowledge proofs fast enough for Ethereum is over, while one Crypto Briefing item framed the single-GPU result as part of Ethereum’s scalability and security verification work.
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What it means
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Ethereum users and developers see a new benchmark in ZKsync’s Airbender Prime claim, because the system is described as running real-time proving on a single GPU and handling 99% of proofs in under 10 seconds over 7,200 mainnet blocks. That makes the proving performance itself the thing now visible to the ecosystem, rather than only the broader idea of faster ZK systems.
In practice, the event shifts attention from proving speed alone to what comes next for Ethereum infrastructure, since Vitalik Buterin said the speed race is over and the focus should move to security. The earlier framing that linked the single-GPU result to Ethereum scalability and security verification also suggests the setup being discussed is not just about raw throughput, but about verification work in the network.
Market reaction
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Where this sits in the Ethereum series
| When | What happened | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 years ago | ETH a 4.245 $ high | today it sits -43.0 % from there |
| 4 months ago | ETH a 1.566 $ low | today it sits +54.7 % from there |
From what we have stored, starting 1.0 years ago.
What could happen next
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