ZKsync Claims Real-Time Ethereum Proving on One GPU as Vitalik Buterin Weighs In

ZKsync announced on October 13, 2026, that it has built Airbender Prime, which it describes as the first Ethereum prover capable of generating real-time proofs on a single GPU. Across a set of 7,200 Ethereum mainnet blocks, the system proved 99% of blocks in under 10 seconds and every block within 12 seconds using one NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin commended the team on October 15, 2026, stating that the race to make proving fast is effectively over. He argued that the industry's priority should now move toward formal verification that the prover matches Ethereum's specifications and establishing limits on proving costs tied to gas fees. The performance results put Airbender at the top of the ETHproofs-org public leaderboard in proving time, GPU efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. A previous iteration of Airbender recorded 21.8 MHz of throughput on an H100 GPU. Airbender is already operating across ZKsync's supported chains following the project's earlier Atlas upgrade. The open-source system is built on the RISC-V instruction set standard and uses hash-based STARKs, which ZKsync describes as secure against quantum attacks. "Speed battle… definitively won" — Vitalik Buterin