Is the roadmap to Ethereum's endgame accelerating across the board?

Written by: imToken

Fun fact: Besides the Ethereum mainnet, who is currently the leading RWA chain?

The answer is—ZKsync.

That's right, this project, recently praised by Vitalik Buterin for "doing a lot of undervalued but very valuable work in the Ethereum ecosystem," is becoming the most representative project example in the Ethereum ZK route.

Behind this lies a signal that Ethereum is accelerating towards its "singularity moment" in the era of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP): Ethereum's ZK path is moving from an L2 scaling tool towards the main logic of truly reshaping trust, performance, and ecosystem structure. An Ethereum belonging to the "proof era" is gradually taking shape.

I. ZKsync, the New Flag Bearer of Ethereum ZKP

As an Ethereum scaling solution developed by Matter Labs based on the ZK Rollups architecture, ZKsync was born with a silver spoon in its mouth among many Ethereum Layer 2 projects. It was an early ZK Rollup scaling solution funded by the Ethereum Foundation.

It can be said that, since 2019, it has grown almost alongside Ethereum's ZK technology roadmap: In March 2019, it received funding from the Ethereum Foundation's fifth wave of grants to support its work on L2 scaling of zero-knowledge proofs; in September 2019, it secured $2 million in seed funding led by Placeholder VC; and in March 2021, it completed a $50 million Series A funding round (led by Union Square Ventures). However, due to the long development timeline, ZKsync has not had a smooth ride over the years. Firstly, during the period from 2021 to 2023, when the competitive landscape of Rollup was still unclear, Optimism, Arbitrum, and other OP-based L2 projects gained an early advantage, while new public chains such as Solana and Aptos also rose to prominence. This led to ZK-based projects like ZKsync being marginalized by the market due to their long iteration cycles. It wasn't until the mainnet launch and airdrop last year that ZKsync re-entered the public eye, but it wasn't met with widespread acclaim. Its airdrop distribution mechanism was highly controversial, the trust crisis triggered by the contract vulnerability incident hadn't subsided, and its developer, Matter Labs, was embroiled in controversy due to alleged intellectual property disputes. Amidst widespread pessimism, ZKsync's progress in both technology and ecosystem remains remarkable. Not only has it continued to advance its core underlying R&D, but it also officially launched the upgraded Atlas version of ZK Stack last month—a crucial step for ZKsync towards "enterprise-grade on-chain" solutions. [Image of ZKStack Atlas] Source: ZKsync It's worth noting that Airbender is currently the fastest zkVM for single-GPU verification. For example, on an RTX 4090, the average verification time is only 51 seconds, with a cost as low as $0.01, setting a new industry record. Another significant breakthrough of ZKsync is its Prividiums private blockchain architecture, which allows enterprises to achieve fully compatible interaction with the Ethereum mainnet while ensuring privacy. It verifies transaction validity without exposing ledger information, achieving seamless interoperability between public and private systems. This means that, whether it's on-chain securities, cross-border payments, or foreign exchange settlement, enterprises can achieve instant clearing and privacy protection within a compliant framework—a capability that makes ZKsync an ideal underlying layer for RWA (Real-World Asset) on-chaining. This is why ZKsync's performance in the RWA field is particularly outstanding. According to data from rwa.xyz, as of the time of writing, its on-chain tokenized asset issuance has exceeded $2.4 billion, second only to the Ethereum mainnet, making it the second largest RWA issuance network. In other words, ZKsync is not only a testing ground for ZK technology, but also becoming a major ledger engine for putting real assets on-chain. II. Has the End of zkEVM Really Arrived? For a long time, zkEVM has been regarded as one of the "endgame solutions" for scaling Ethereum, not only because it can solve performance bottlenecks, but also because it redefines the trust mechanism of blockchain. The core idea is to enable the Ethereum mainnet to generate and verify ZK proofs. In other words, after each block is executed, it can output a verifiable mathematical proof, allowing other nodes to confirm the correctness of the result without having to recalculate it. Specifically, zkEVM's advantages are concentrated in three aspects: Faster verification: Nodes do not need to reenact transactions; they only need to verify zkProof to confirm the validity of blocks. Lighter burden: Effectively reduces the computational and storage pressure on full nodes, making it easier for light nodes and cross-chain validators to participate. Stronger security: Compared to the OP route, ZK's state proofs are confirmed on-chain in real time, offering higher resistance to tampering and clearer security boundaries. And now, all of this is rapidly becoming a reality. Recently, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) officially released the L1 zkEVM real-time proof standard, marking the first time the ZK roadmap has been formally incorporated into the mainnet's technical plan. This standard is considered a key starting point for the comprehensive introduction of zero-knowledge proof mechanisms—over the next year, the Ethereum mainnet will gradually transition to an execution environment that supports zkEVM verification, achieving a structural shift from "heavy execution" to "proof verification." According to the technical roadmap announced by EF, the block proof latency is targeted to be controlled within 10 seconds, the size of a single zk proof is less than 300 KB, and it adopts a 128-bit security level, avoids trusted setups, and plans to allow home devices to participate in proof generation, lowering the barrier to decentralization. This means that the Ethereum mainnet is no longer just a settlement layer, but has been upgraded to a "verifiable world computer" with self-verification capabilities. Against this backdrop, ZKsync is becoming one of the earliest practitioners. Its founder, Alex, stated that with the completion of the Atlas upgrade, ZKsync has truly achieved verification integration with the Ethereum mainnet—their operating rhythm, confirmation speed, and liquidity are almost completely synchronized.

Currently, the final confirmation time for transactions on ZKsync is approximately 1 second, far faster than the 12-second block interval on the Ethereum mainnet. This means that transactions on ZKsync are essentially the same as on the mainnet, requiring only waiting for mainnet confirmation. More importantly, the cross-chain mechanism of ZK Rollup no longer has a 7-day challenge period like Optimistic Rollup, thus achieving an order-of-magnitude increase in transaction and fund transfer speed.