Ethereum could be one step closer to achieving 10,000 transactions per second, following the introduction of a new Ethereum scaling technology called Pico Prism. 

Ethereum scaling firm Brevis announced on Wednesday a new state-of-the-art zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) for real-time proving. 

The technology can now prove Ethereum blocks almost instantly using regular retail gaming processors (GPUs) instead of expensive supercomputers.

“Brevis has achieved real-time proving of Ethereum L1 using consumer-grade hardware,” the firm stated, adding that it used 64 Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics cards, the current flagship model for gaming. 

In a test conducted in September, Pico Prism achieved 99.6% real-time proving in under 12 seconds. Real-time proving (RTP) means generating a cryptographic proof that a block was executed correctly faster than new blocks are being produced.

“This marks a major step toward scaling Ethereum by 100x and a future where you can validate the chain from a phone.”

Brevis has a roadmap to achieve 99% real-time proving with fewer than 16 RTX 5090 GPUs “in the next couple of months.”

Big step toward Ethereum scaling

This breakthrough means that proving, which is computationally expensive, has finally caught up to block production speed using affordable consumer hardware, which makes lightweight validation practical for the first time.

Currently, every validator re-executes every transaction to verify blocks, which requires expensive hardware and creates a fundamental bottleneck, Brevis explained.

“Real-time proving breaks this model. One prover generates a proof, and everyone else verifies it in milliseconds.”

The path to 10,000 TPS

According to the Ethereum roadmap, validators will switch from re-executing transactions to simply verifying ZK-proofs, enabling the base layer to hit 10,000 transactions per second.

“At 3x per year, scaling Ethereum L1 would reach 10k TPS by April 2029,” said Ryan Sean Adams from Bankless. 

Related: Ethereum Foundation roadmap targets zkEVM in mainnet within a year

Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade, expected in December, will simplify real-time proving, explained Bitcoin security researcher Justin Drake.

“EIP-7825 caps per transaction gas usage, enabling more parallel proving via subblocks,” he said before adding, “By year’s end, several teams will prove every L1 EVM block on a 16-GPU cluster, drawing less than 10kW total.”

Phone as a node future 

It is “one big step toward Ethereum’s future,” said the Ethereum Foundation, which added: 

“ZK technology like Pico Prism will enable Ethereum to scale to meet global demand, while still remaining trustworthy and decentralized.”

“The phone-as-a-node future just got real,” said tech entrepreneur Mike Warner. 

Ethereum is transforming into a zk-chain, said Adams, who explained that layer-1 will run global DeFi, with big blocks at 10,000 TPS, and nodes that run on a phone, while layer-2 will run everything else.

This is essentially the holy grail of blockchain: massive scalability without sacrificing decentralization or security.

Magazine: Ethereum’s roadmap to 10,000 TPS using ZK tech: Dummies’ guide