Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, published a post on October 15 setting formal-verification priorities that include bounding prover cost relative to block gas, adding a resource-accounting test to the push for faster zero-knowledge proofs.
Buterin outlined three priorities in his post: matching the mathematical representation of execution to Ethereum’s specification, bounding prover cost relative to block gas, and securing the proof system itself. The second priority directly addresses a gap in current Ethereum improvement proposals.
EIP-7904, which remains in Last Call status with a November 1 review deadline, analyzes execution costs on bare CPU but does not cover proof generation. This creates a structural separation between execution-cost accounting and proving-cost accounting that Buterin’s call seeks to bridge. EIP-7904 targets 100 million gas per second on optimized native execution clients and recommends no compute repricing at its CPU throughput target.
ZKsync Performance Benchmark
On October 13, the ZKsync Airbender team announced single-GPU proving performance. Testing with one NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU, the team proved 99% of 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds each, including witness preparation. Maximum proving time for sampled blocks reached 12 seconds.
Nethermind Research Findings
Nethermind Research published operation cost measurements on January 27, testing SP1 v5.2.3 and RISC0 v3.0.4 with reth v1.9.3 and four NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs. The research found that cryptographic precompiles and modular arithmetic or division operations were relatively expensive to prove per gas. Nethermind’s measurements omitted block-header validation and accidentally omitted BLOCKHASH operations.
Ethereum Foundation Framework
The Ethereum Foundation established a worst-case benchmarking framework in January that relates required proving throughput to the chosen block gas limit and proving deadline. In December 2025, the Foundation set a security-focused phase for proof systems. In September, the Foundation placed mandatory proofs later in fork ordering, deprioritizing them relative to other protocol changes.
Related Proposals
EIP-7999 remains in Draft status and separates calldata into its own resource. EIP-8025, also in Draft, provides no prover incentives and retains re-execution even when proofs are available.
Buterin did not specify a hard limit value for proving cost per unit of block gas in his post. The mechanism for implementing weighted ZK-gas metering or opcode repricing remains undetermined, as does the timeline for mandatory proof implementation.
