Vitalik Buterin believes Ethereum's ZK Edving Stack is rounding the corner and hopes the ecosystem will use its momentum to eliminate one of the most sustained UX obstacles – the L2 drawer for the week in an optimistic rollup.
Buterin wrote in an X post last week.
“This creates a great incentive to use a solution instead with an unacceptable trust assumption (e.g. Multisigs/MPC) that undermines the overall point of having an L2 instead of a completely independent L1,” he said.
The centrality of the Ethereum mainnet as an economic link will become a key element in the future, Butaline suggests in a new interview published today.
“The thing that is associated with L1 is maintained if the assets are actually issued in L1, even if most of the assets arise in L2,” adds Buterin, “We encourage people to actually issue assets in L1 and make them economically viable to do so.
Historically, optimistic proof systems required a few days of challenge. To remove that limitation, some proof-of-effectiveness rollups already have, so a transition from optimistic evidence is necessary. The technical lift is much lower today.
“ZKVMS is almost production-ready in a way that was completely untrue this year,” Buterin says.
Against the backdrop, last week's release of the concise Prover Network MainNet is more than just another Infra story.
A concise, decentralized marketplace allows applications to submit proof requests, but independent prover competes to meet them and receives payments with new proof tokens. The network already supports more than 35 protocols, and according to a brief lab, it has met over 5 million requests, securing $4 billion worth of it.
Developers can access global proof power using API calls that do not require custom infrastructure. Co-founder Uma Roy said Buterin is more economical to create evidence of frequent validity, with the goal of creating “criterion for how cryptography integrates with the broader internet” that will help commoditize proof generation.
Speaking in the brief lab launch stream, Tarun Chitra framed the long-term impact in terms of “faster and cheaper” surpassing the L2.
“If Eth Mainnet has ZK as a top-class citizen, you can do this type of thing, like using your collateral on the mainnet elsewhere without a bridge,” Chitra said.
Buterin also outlined the pass beyond the hour's target. “In the long run, aggregation can solve this. N-rollup (TXS from privacy protocol users) proof can be replaced by a single proof that proves the validity of the N-proof.
When these developments become a reality, increasing capital efficiency can be important. Fastest standard exits reduce reliance on trusted bridge operators, free up liquidity for market manufacturers and asset issuers, and concentrate centralised settlement activities and ETH demands back to the baseline.
However, Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, who builds Arbitrum, is not convinced that the pure ZK approach is primetime ready.
Despite work to accelerate progress in proof of effectiveness, “ZK technology has not reached the idea that ZK technology is optimistic and competitive in terms of technical parity, especially in its packaging with these complete ZK rollups,” Goldfeder told Blockworks.
