L1 zkEVM: The First Step Towards Ethereum ZK Finality

For those closely following the development of Ethereum technology, the recent blog post "Delivering L1 zkEVM #1: Real-Time Proof" published by Ethereum engineer Sophia Gold is of significant importance. Although this only represents the technical ideas of the Ethereum core development team and has not yet officially entered the EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) process, there is still a long way to go before it becomes an established plan for a Mainnet upgrade, the signals it releases should not be underestimated.

This article clearly presents the core development blueprint for the future of Ethereum: to comprehensively and deeply integrate Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology into all levels of the Layer 1 protocol, achieving full coverage from the consensus layer to the execution layer. According to this technological roadmap, the first key step is to upgrade each node's EVM to become zkEVM. This way, nodes can synchronously generate corresponding zero-knowledge proofs during the execution of transactions and running of smart contracts, providing verification nodes with the basis for validating the correctness of this execution.

This is not a routine technical iteration, but an architectural revolution comparable to "The Merge." It aims to fundamentally address the multiple challenges Ethereum faces in scalability, security, and economic models. So, why has Ethereum chosen to "go all in" on ZK at this time? What deep logic underlies this strategic shift? How will it reshape the L1 we know and the entire L2 ecosystem?

This article will narrate the grand narrative of Ethereum's "ZK Endgame" based on existing research, and analyze the motivations, actions, and far-reaching impacts behind it.

1. From "Re-execution" to "Proof Verification" Paradigm Shift?

The concept of ZKification of Ethereum is fundamentally about a paradigm shift in the consensus verification mechanism. The recently released L1 zkEVM roadmap provides a clear technical path for this transformation.

• Current Model: Re-execution Currently, when a new block is proposed, all validator nodes in the network must independently and completely re-execute each transaction within that block to compute and verify whether the final state root matches the one claimed by the proposer. This process is resource-intensive and is the main bottleneck limiting Ethereum L1 throughput.
• Future Model: Proof Verification In the new L1 zkEVM architecture, the block builders generate a concise ZK validity proof (ZK Proof) at the same time they create a block. Other validators, upon receiving the block and proof, will no longer need to re-execute transactions, but only verify this cryptographic proof. Because the computational cost of "verifying a ZK Proof" is several orders of magnitude lower than "re-executing transactions**, more importantly, the time required to verify a proof is almost independent of the number of transactions covered by that proof, this allows Ethereum to significantly increase the block Gas limit to accommodate more transactions without significantly raising the hardware threshold for validators. Vitalik Buterin has mentioned that the Gas limit for L1 is expected to increase tenfold as a result, and could even reach 100 times in the longer term, thus achieving L1 scalability while maintaining decentralization.

In summary, the future Ethereum L1 is architecturally very similar to a massive, native ZK-Rollup, which makes Ethereum L1 itself expected to become the "largest ZK application in the world".

Strict technical standards

The Ethereum team has set extremely stringent technical standards for the implementation of L1 zkEVM, aiming to ensure security and the commitment to decentralization while reducing latency and increasing throughput.

Multi-Proof Security Model

To prevent potential unknown vulnerabilities in a single zkEVM implementation, this roadmap introduces a "Multi-Proof" security mechanism. It requires that the validity of the same block must be supported by multiple zkEVMs generating multiple proofs from different teams (such as Scroll, Polygon, Kakarot, etc.). The validator's client will download and verify these proofs from different sources. Only when multiple independent proofs are all validated will the block be accepted by the consensus layer. This is essentially an extension and elevation of Ethereum's "client diversity" concept at the proof layer, enforcing redundancy and diversity through the protocol, providing deep defense for L1, and enhancing the robustness of the protocol.

2. Why Must Ethereum be Fully "ZK-ified"?

Ethereum fully embraces zero-knowledge proof technology, which is a major strategic transformation based on in-depth consideration of its economic model, competitive environment, and future market demands.

• First, this is an important revision to the "L2-centric" economic model. After EIP-4844 introduced the blob mechanism, although it successfully reduced the transaction costs of Layer 2, it also brought about unexpected side effects—severely weakening the value capture ability of Layer 1. The sharp decline in L1 transaction fee revenue and ETH burn volume directly impacted the deflationary expectations of ETH, leading to a sluggish price performance and heightened community dissatisfaction. By upgrading the EVM to zkEVM, validation nodes can transition from the time-consuming "re-execution" mode to an efficient "validation" mode, which will significantly reduce L1 latency and increase throughput. In this way, Ethereum can regain the high-value transactions that have extremely high demands for security and immediate finality, increase L1 fee revenue, reactivate the burn mechanism of EIP-1559, and rebalance the economic relationship between L1 and L2.
• Secondly, this is an asymmetric strategy to cope with the competition of high-performance public chains. In the face of the strong performance of new generation high-performance L1s like Solana and Sui in terms of TPS, Ethereum has chosen a unique competitive path. It has not followed its competitors by sacrificing decentralization (such as significantly raising validator hardware thresholds and reducing the number of validating nodes) to pursue performance enhancement, but instead leverages ZK technology, while maintaining its core advantage of a million-strong validator network, to achieve a leap in performance by transforming validation work from "expensive replay" to "cheap validation." This strategy aims to solidify Ethereum's moat in terms of decentralization and security, while enhancing performance, striving to achieve both security and high performance.
• Finally, this is a forward-looking layout to embrace the wave of RWA and institutional finance. RWA tokenization is widely regarded as the next trillion-dollar market opportunity for blockchain. With the entry of financial giants like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton, unprecedented strict requirements have been imposed on the underlying public chains in terms of performance, security, privacy, and compliance. Although L1s like Solana and Sui have excellent performance, they have relatively few validation nodes and a higher degree of centralization, along with a history of outages, making it difficult to meet the needs for security and stability in high-value financial activities. Various OP Rollups within the Ethereum ecosystem (like Base and MegaETH) have decent performance and good security due to state write-back to L1, but their 7-day challenge period presents an unacceptable risk exposure for high-value financial settlements. In contrast, the cryptographic-level finality provided by ZK technology, along with the ability to prove compliance without leaking sensitive data (such as proving that a certain address has passed KYC), perfectly aligns with the core needs of institutional finance. If the zkEVM upgrade can successfully enhance throughput, then the Ethereum ecosystem natively integrated with ZK technology (L1+ZK Rollup) will achieve a balance of "performance, security, and stability," becoming the ideal global settlement layer to accommodate the RWA wave.

3. ZK Endgame in Action

The ZK endgame of Ethereum has long been revealed, besides the blog published by Sophia Gold this time:

• As early as April 2025, Vitalik Buterin proposed a visionary idea: to replace the existing EVM with a RISC-V instruction set architecture that is more friendly to ZK. Supporters believe that compared to the inefficient performance of EVM in generating ZK circuits, the more streamlined architecture of RISC-V could bring an order of magnitude improvement in proof efficiency. Although this proposal has sparked controversy due to its disruptive effect on the existing ecosystem, it has set a clear "North Star" for Ethereum's ZK transition—defining the standards for the ideal zkEVM and pointing the way for optimization.
• At the Berlin workshop in June 2025, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake explicitly announced that Ethereum will "go all in on ZK" (Ethereum is going all in on ZK). This statement confirms the core development team's firm determination.

The ZK conclusion of Ethereum is by no means just a theoretical discussion. Although Optimistic Rollup still leads in various key metrics compared to ZK Rollup, the difficulties hindering the practical application of ZK technology are being tackled one by one. The three fundamental reasons that have historically caused ZK Rollup to lag significantly are:

• First is technical complexity and performance bottlenecks: In the past, generating ZK proofs for general EVM computations was considered extremely difficult, slow, and expensive, and even computationally infeasible.
• Secondly, there is a developer experience gap: ORU has achieved a high degree of EVM compatibility from the very beginning, whereas early ZKRs (such as early versions of StarkNet) were not EVM compatible, requiring developers to learn an entirely new programming language, which creates a very high barrier to entry.
• Finally, it is liquidity fragmentation and network effects: ORU has gathered a large number of users and liquidity through its first-mover advantage, forming a strong network effect.

However, these historical obstacles are being overcome one by one.

• In terms of proof speed, thanks to the advancements in next-generation proof algorithms such as PLONK and STARKs, as well as the development of hardware acceleration technologies like GPU, FPGA, and even ASIC, the ZK proof generation time has been significantly reduced. For example, Succinct's SP1 zkVM can now prove 93% of Ethereum Mainnet blocks in an average of 10.3 seconds, very close to the 10-second target set by the Ethereum Foundation.
• In terms of compatibility, zkEVM has undergone an evolutionary process from Type 4 to Type 1 compatibility. Today, projects such as Scroll, Taiko, and Polygon zkEVM have achieved near-perfect EVM equivalence (meeting Type 2 or even Type 1 standards), fundamentally eliminating the gap in developer experience compared to ORU. Moreover, the Multi-Proof security model of L1 ZK relies on multiple independent proof systems, and the vigorous development of the current zkEVM track has laid the foundation for achieving this security model.

In summary, the core obstacles that historically hindered ZK technology—performance and compatibility—are being rapidly overcome. The technology is fully prepared for large-scale practical applications, but the previous stereotype of ZK technology being "slow, expensive, and difficult" has made people reluctant to accept it for the time being. The vision of the Ethereum core team to "make Ethereum the largest ZK application in the world" is indeed endorsing modern ZK technology and sounding the horn for the large-scale investment of ZK technology into practical use.

4. Rollup Ecosystem Transformation

NATIVE ROLLUP paves the highway for ZK Rollup

The comprehensive ZK-ization of Ethereum L1 will fundamentally reshape the competitive landscape of Layer 2, with the most revolutionary change being the proposal of "Native Rollup". Currently, ZK-Rollups require deploying complex validator smart contracts containing thousands of lines of code on L1 to verify ZK proofs submitted by L2, which not only increases development difficulty but also introduces security risks due to the varying skill levels of developers. However, after implementing zkEVM on L1, the EXECUTE precompiled function will be introduced, allowing ZK Rollups to directly invoke the embedded verification logic of L1 protocols from smart contracts on L1, without the need to write their own contracts.

This change brings threefold advantages to ZK-Rollup:

• First is the fundamental enhancement of security, Rollup project teams can completely outsource the huge engineering challenges of building and maintaining EVM validators to L1, simplifying complex technical problems into a single line of code call;
• Secondly, it has achieved true EVM equivalence and forward compatibility, with native Rollups synchronizing with L1 upgrades without the need for a separate governance process.
• Finally, there is a significant improvement in cost-effectiveness, the use of the L1 protocol's embedded precompiled functions avoids the overhead of virtual machine interpretation execution, and the verification efficiency is several orders of magnitude higher than that of smart contract implementations, which is expected to greatly reduce the operating costs of ZK Rollup.

The Native Rollup feature is equivalent to providing a standardized, highly secure, and efficient verification layer for all ZK-Rollups for free on Ethereum L1, directly addressing the core challenges that have long plagued the development of ZK-Rollups: the high on-chain proof verification costs, the technical challenges of maintaining EVM equivalence, and the security risks of verifier contracts.

Strategic Transformation of OP Rollup

In contrast, the ZK implementation of L1 poses a survival-level challenge to Optimistic Rollup. The core weakness of ORU lies in its withdrawal confirmation period of up to 7 days, which is unacceptable for many high-value applications. If L1's ZK implementation successfully improves throughput, it could lead to a massive outflow of capital and applications from the OP Rollup ecosystem.

However, at present, OP Rollups (such as Base, Arbitrum, Optimism) dominate in terms of TVL and user activity, this entrenched interest pattern raises doubts about the prospects of full ZKification of L1. But it is reassuring that leading ORU project teams have chosen not to confront but to adapt actively, transforming potential conflicts into technical convergence.

• Optimism has demonstrated a clear ZK transition strategy, with its OP Stack emphasizing modularity from the design stage, allowing for the replacement of core components such as the proof system. The Optimism Foundation has invested funds to support multiple teams (such as RISC Zero, O(1) Labs, Succinct) in developing ZK fraud proofs. For example, Zeth launched by RISC Zero has achieved integration with OP Stack, enabling the Optimism ecosystem to validate block states and resolve disputes through ZK technology.
• Arbitrum adopts a more pragmatic hybrid approach, clearly stating the research and development direction of "ZK+Optimistic hybrid proof" in its official technical roadmap for 2024-2025.** This design allows the system to use ZK proofs as an "instant confirmation channel"** when they can be generated in a timely manner, providing instant finality for on-chain state changes and greatly reducing the delay for fund withdrawals and cross-chain communication; when ZK proofs cannot be generated in time, the system automatically reverts to the traditional optimistic proof path, ensuring security through the dispute period and challenge mechanism.

V. Systemic Impact

The impact of this transformation will be systemic, encompassing performance, decentralization, and economic models.

• Performance Vision: By reducing validation costs to an extremely low level, Ethereum will have the capability to increase the block Gas limit by 10 to 100 times, allowing the total TPS of L1 + L2 to reach over 10,000, becoming a truly high-performance platform.
• New Economic Division of Labor: The ZK-ification of L1 will give rise to a specialized division of labor system similar to PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation).

• Provers (Provers): Specialized hardware that is expensive to run (cost cap of $100,000) and has high power consumption (cap of 10 kW), responsible for generating ZK proofs. Due to their high capital and operational costs, this role is likely to trend towards centralization.
• Validators (: Their role has been greatly simplified and reduced. They no longer need to run powerful execution clients for transaction replay. A regular laptop or low-spec device is sufficient to download and verify a lightweight proof of less than 300 KiB in a short time.
• This design addresses the contradiction between scalability and decentralization by centralizing computation-intensive tasks while maintaining broad decentralization of validation. A brand new, off-chain prover market will emerge. Provers will be rewarded through transaction fees, MEV sharing, and token incentives.

• ETH Value Capture Reimagined: A more powerful L1 can support more high-value transactions, directly driving up transaction fees, thereby increasing the burn rate of ETH, which is crucial for stabilizing the price of ETH.
• Synergy with Danksharding: The vision of ZKification for L1 complements the Danksharding roadmap, together forming Ethereum's "dual-drive" scaling strategy.

• EIP-4844 and the complete Danksharding that follows provide Rollups with cheap and abundant data availability space (Blobs).
• ZK-powered L1 provides an ultra-secure and ultra-fast finality execution and settlement layer for Rollup (especially ZK Rollup).
• The two are highly coordinated technically, allowing Ethereum to scale simultaneously on the execution layer (via ZK) and the data layer (via Danksharding), significantly enhancing network utility, thereby driving the overall demand for ETH as the network's native asset.

Conclusion: Moving Towards a Verifiable World Computer

The strategic transformation of Ethereum towards comprehensive ZK is another decisive moment in its development history. This is not an isolated technological upgrade, but a systematic and multidimensional comprehensive strategy to address technological bottlenecks, economic challenges, and fierce market competition. It profoundly confirms Ethereum's role as the global ultimate settlement layer, provides a unique solution to the "impossible triangle" problem, optimizes the economic model of Ether, and leads the entire L2 ecosystem towards maturity.

The road ahead is still full of challenges, but the direction is already incredibly clear. Ethereum is evolving from a "world computer" into a "verifiable world computer". By deeply embedding cryptographic truth at its core, Ethereum is not only paving the way for its own future but also building a more secure, trustworthy, and scalable foundation for the future of the entire decentralized world. The ZK finale is Ethereum's most steadfast commitment to this future.