Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the race for speed in the zero-knowledge Ethereum era is over and that security should now come first. In a post on X on October 15, 2026, he congratulated the ZKsync Airbender team for a new milestone, stating that the battle for speed is definitively won and that teams building zkEVMs should shift their top priority fully to security.
Buterin outlined three formal verification goals. The first is proving that the mathematics behind proofs matches the Ethereum specification exactly. The second is establishing a hard maximum on prover cost relative to the amount of gas in a block. The third is ensuring the security of the proof system itself. He warned that a proof that is fast but incorrect is dangerous as Ethereum's roadmap leans more on zero-knowledge proofs to check blocks. He also noted that a prover that costs too much for heavy blocks could push smaller operators out and hurt decentralization.
Ethereum's price is near $2,365, down about 15% from the late September high near $2,800. ETH is sitting at the orange average near $2,360, with the next support at the black average near $2,305, just below the recent low of $2,313. The RSI is near 38, close to oversold, while a move back above $2,490 would be an early sign of recovery. Buterin's message is not a short-term price trigger, but it sets a clear technical direction for Ethereum's roadmap.
