Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has declared the zkEVM battle for speed "definitively won" and says the industry's top priority should now shift fully to security. His comments came after ZKsync unveiled Airbender Prime on October 13, a prover that the team says demonstrated real-time Ethereum proving on a single graphics card for the first time.
The new proving system ran on one NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell card and generated proofs for a consecutive batch of 7,200 Ethereum mainnet blocks. According to ZKsync, 99% of those proofs finished in under 10 seconds, and every block completed within 12 seconds including witness preparation. Competing provers have generally required large GPU clusters to reach comparable timings, so the single-card result changes who can realistically operate a prover.
Airbender Prime is built on the open RISC-V instruction set and uses hash-based STARK technology, which ZKsync positions as resistant to quantum attack. It also includes a standalone verifier, allowing results to be checked without trusting the team's internal numbers.
Buterin argued that the next real challenge is not speed but provable correctness. He outlined a three-part security checklist: proving that the arithmetization is equivalent to the Ethereum specification, setting a hard maximum bound on prover cost relative to the gas in a block, and verifying the security of the proof system itself. The distinction matters because a benchmark can be gamed or measured loosely, while the Ethereum specification leaves no slack.
The launch is being watched by DeFi users and developers because more practical zero-knowledge proving could help Ethereum layer-2 transactions move faster and cost less. ZKsync spent months hardening the security of its older EraVM before the Airbender Prime reveal, and the wider market response has been calm so far. The next observable milestone is expected to be formal-verification progress and independent scrutiny of the prover's security rather than a faster headline benchmark.
