Ethereum researchers are racing to close a zkEVM security gap before December

The article says Ethereum researchers are using CryptoSlate’s covered better.codes benchmark to quantify a zkEVM security gap ahead of Ethereum’s December 2026 roadmap deadline. The live koalaIRS12 benchmark shows a 63.99-bit lower certificate and a 116.13-bit upper certificate, leaving a 52.14-bit unresolved interval after nine submissions from seven solvers. While this is meaningful progress for the underlying proof-system research, it does not yet translate into whole-system zkEVM security. Ethereum’s production target remains 128-bit provable security, plus proof-size limits, recursion-architecture soundness, and implementation/composition evidence. The piece frames the contest as a reproducible research path that can improve component-level certainty, but emphasizes that additional work is needed before the results can support a full production zkEVM claim.