Vitalik Buterin Declares ZK Proving Speed Race Won Following Airbender Prime Launch

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the race for zkEVM raw proving speed is effectively won, calling for development priorities to shift toward formal verification and security. His remarks followed Matter Labs and ZKsync unveiling Airbender Prime, an open-source zero-knowledge prover that successfully proved 99% of 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds and 100% within 12 seconds using a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU. Despite the scalability milestone, immediate price effects for ETH remained minimal, with the token falling over 5% in 24 hours.