ZkCloud is now proving every Ethereum block

ZK is the endgame.

Apr 15, 2025

At ZkCloud, we are extremely excited to reveal that we are ZK proving all Ethereum mainnet blocks, effective early April 2025. In the past two weeks, we’ve generated over 100K proofs. This marks the first time Ethereum blocks are being ZK-proven continuously.

All proving can be publicly tracked at the staging interface of Ethproofs.

This effort is part of our work to make blockchain-scale proof generation cheap, efficient, and sustainable, and we are grateful to the Ethproofs team for their public initiative and support.

Why are we doing this?

Traditionally there have been two ways to ensure that a computation was done correctly: trust and re-execution. In terms of efficiency, these methods are polar opposites: trust allows you to minimize redundancy and maximize efficiency, while re-execution maximizes redundancy and minimizes efficiency.

ZK can give us the best of both worlds: using succinct proofs, validators can verify the state of Ethereum very efficiently, without re-execution. This means we can begin to approach the performance and redundancy characteristics of trusted computation without actually needing trust. This is why ZK is the endgame.

But until now, nobody has proven all Ethereum blocks in practice. For us proving the entire mainnet is important because it demonstrates that the economic feasibility of snarking the EVM is not a question any longer.

ZK proving the entire execution of Ethereum has been viewed as prohibitively expensive. We want to test that assumption and prove the opposite: ZK is affordable, and the endgame for blockchain scalability is here today.

What’s under the hood

To generate proofs for Ethereum blocks continuously, we are using RSP, Succinct’s open-source Ethereum block prover, and running it on a cluster of 4090s. For now, every block is being proven with a single GPU.

In addition, we’ve modified the prover to utilize resources more efficiently: in the open-source RSP implementation, the GPU allocated for proving a certain block is already “locked in” during the pre-proving phase, even though it does not require GPU resources. To decrease the idle time of GPUs and reach better utilization, we have decoupled the two phases so that the pre-proving phase of one block can be done in parallel with the proving phase of another block, without the GPUs being locked up.

With the cluster being used, our current goal is to ensure that Ethereum blocks are consistently proven, block by block, while we continue to work on further optimizations to decrease the total time to proof.

To see more details and explore the progress of proof generation, visit Ethproofs’ staging interface.

Unlocking new directions in R&D

By generating ZK proofs for the entire Ethereum mainnet, we are looking to unlock new directions in R&D for Ethereum and its ecosystem.

Benchmark data: we aim to provide real-world data on resource requirements and performance characteristics for blockchain-scale proving operations. This could help teams building zkEVMs, zkVMs, light clients, and L2s.
Light client development: consistent block proofs could enable developers to build ZK proof-based light clients that can verify Ethereum's state with minimal computational resources.
Cross-chain interoperability: consistent block proving could allow teams to build and test solutions for ZK-proof-based interoperability, allowing efficient verification of Ethereum’s state.

All ZK proofs generated and benchmarks developed will be available to researchers and developers, advancing the collective knowledge of the entire Ethereum ecosystem and supporting future innovation.

Where we are headed

Consistently proving every Ethereum block is only the first step, the ultimate goal is real-time proving. This will allow ZK-rollups to settle on Ethereum in real time, unlocking flexible L2<->L1 and L2<->L2 interactions, resulting in deposits and withdrawals in 1 block, bridging between rollups in 1 block, and cross-rollup composability in 1 block.

Ultimately, ZK will unify the fragmented L2 ecosystem under one banner: Ethereum.

At ZkCloud, we are committed to supporting Ethereum on its path from re-execution to SNARK verification.

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About ZkCloud:

ZkCloud, built by Gevulot, is the first universal proving infrastructure for ZK. Generate ZK proofs for any proof system at a fraction of the cost. Fast, cheap, and decentralized.

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