From Real-Time Performance to Security-Focused Coordination

Thanks to Justin Drake, Thomas Coratger, Alex Hicks, Kev Wedderburn, and George Kadianakis for feedback and review.

Why Ethproofs Exists

by Will Corcoran

Ethereum’s path toward mandatory, real-time proving of L1 execution blocks is not just a technical race. It is a coordination problem.

Before joining the Ethereum Foundation, I was an architect. One of the last projects I worked on was a Chicago development that combined a public library with affordable housing. It only worked because public and private actors moved in lockstep—each doing what the other could not.

That experience strongly shapes how I see Ethereum’s zk roadmap. I see it as a public-private partnership.

On the private side, zkVM teams and prover operators move quickly: iterating on software, pushing hardware limits, and discovering new performance frontiers. On the public side, the Ethereum Foundation convenes, de-risks, and enforces non-negotiables: security, decentralization, reproducibility, and long-term protocol coherence.

Neither side succeeds alone.

Ethproofs exists to sit at that interface.

Concretely, Ethproofs serves two roles:

1. A public measurement surface — where zkVMs and provers submit proofs against shared, evolving metrics.
2. A coordination layer — where results are discussed, pressure-tested, and translated into ecosystem-wide signals.

In 2025, Ethproofs focused on making real-time performance visible. That work mattered. It showed—using real data—that continuous proving is no longer theoretical. It is happening, on mainnet blocks, by multiple independent teams.

But performance alone is not the end state.

As Ethereum moves closer to mandatory proving, the questions shift from “Is this fast enough?” to “Is this secure enough, diverse enough, and robust enough to rely on?”

Ethproofs must evolve accordingly—not by dictating answers, but by making trade-offs visible and comparable in public.

That is the through line from 2025 into 2026.

2025 in Review: Measuring Real-Time Proving in the Wild

Ethproofs launched on January 28, 2025, initially as an L1 proof tracker. Over the course of the year, it evolved into a coordination and observability layer for the zkVM ecosystem.

To date, Ethproofs has:

• onboarded 7 zkVMs and 15 prover teams
• verified approximately 200,000 Ethereum blocks
• seen a reduced average proving latency by ~5×
• seen a reduced average proving cost by ~15×

Site-wide metrics (Jan 28 → Dec 17, 2025):

• Average latency: 16m 44s → ~60s
• Average cost: $1.69 → $0.0376

These improvements were not achieved in isolation. They reflect sustained, coordinated pressure across software, hardware, and operations—applied in public.

As several teams now approach (and in some cases surpass) the zkEVM team’s north-star targets—≤10s P99 latency, ≤10kW power, ≤$100k CAPEX, ≤300KiB proofs, and fully open stacks—one conclusion is clear:

Ethproofs must evolve alongside the ecosystem it measures.

With L1 gas limits expected to rise ~3× in 2026, raw speed alone is no longer the dominant bottleneck. The center of gravity is shifting toward security, size, diversity, resilience, and security.

(did I mention security?)

2025 Highlights: What Changed

Ethproofs’ first year answered a simple question in public:
Can Ethereum L1 blocks be proven continuously, in real-time, by multiple independent teams?

By the end of 2025, the answer was yes.

Performance & Cost

1. Real-time proving became routine
   Multiple teams sustained sub-10s P99 latency on real L1 blocks under EF hardware targets.
2. Single-GPU proving crossed the one-minute mark
   Down from ~16 minutes at launch, demonstrating that real-time proving is no longer reserved for large clusters.
3. Proof costs collapsed
   Average cost per block fell from $1.69 to well under one cent, reshaping the feasibility envelope for mandatory proving.

Infrastructure & Reliability

4. Always-on prover meshes emerged
   Multiple independent provers routinely covered every L1 block, reducing reliance on any single operator.
5. Reproducibility became the baseline
   All Ethproofs submissions link to open repositories or verifiable binaries.

Openness & Verification

6. Verifier openness converged
   All deployed verifiers are dual-licensed (MIT + Apache-2.0). Ethproofs has developed NPM packages to provide in-browser verification for every proof system on Ethproofs.
7. Client-Side Proving benchmarks stabilized
   CSP benchmarks moved from ad-hoc experiments to regularly published reference measurements across circuits and zkVM stacks.

Integration & Governance

8. Ethereum clients consumed Ethproofs proofs
   A modified Lighthouse client, zkLighthouse validated Ethereum blocks using proofs fetched directly from Ethproofs.
9. The community scaled meaningfully
   600+ Telegram members, six public calls averaging 250+ attendees, and 600+ participants at Ethproofs day.
10. Ethproofs became a formal EF team
    Establishing a long-term coordination layer between industry participants, independent devs + researchers, and other EF zk-focused (zkEF) teams, including: zkEVM team, Cryptography Research, and Protocol Snarkification (stewards of the zkEVM Formal Verification Project).

2026 Roadmap: From Leaderboard to Coordination Layer

by Fara Woolf

In 2025, Ethproofs emphasized real-time performance, latency, and cost as the dominant axes of progress. That focus is not going away. Performance remains a prerequisite for mandatory proving to be viable at all.

What changes in 2026 is the center of gravity.

As real-time proving becomes more routine, security becomes the primary axis along which progress is evaluated—with performance increasingly treated as a constraint rather than the only story.

Ethproofs’ role in this shift is not to invent new security standards, but to surface and amplify the ones emerging from core Ethereum research.

In 2026, Ethproofs will work more closely with the EF Cryptography, zkEVM, and Protocol Snarkification teams to iteratively improve how security is represented on the platform—making it more visible, legible, and comparable across projects.

You should expect Ethproofs to increasingly reflect upstream EF security milestones, such as:

• higher cryptographic security thresholds,
• improvements in proof size and verifier efficiency,
• integration with shared verification and analysis tooling.

This post does not pre-commit to specific thresholds or timelines. Concrete criteria will be led by the EF cryptography and zkEVM teams. Ethproofs’ responsibility is to adopt and broadcast those standards in a way that preserves nuance while enabling comparison.

As those standards emerge, Ethproofs’ dashboards and visual language will evolve as well. Tables, cohort views, and comparative visualizations will increasingly highlight teams that invest in stronger security properties, not just faster proving.

Directionally, if you are a prover or zkVM team, you should expect Ethproofs in 2026 to reward serious security work more explicitly—both in the UI and in how leaderboards and recognition are framed.

The goal is not to slow progress, but to ensure that as Ethereum moves toward mandatory proving, the ecosystem optimizes for what ultimately matters most:

trustworthy, decentralized, and durable correctness at scale

2026 Product Roadmap Themes

To support this shift from raw performance toward security, reliability, and coordination, Ethproofs’ 2026 roadmap focuses on three tightly coupled upgrades.

1. A Unified Metrics & Visualization Layer

The highest-leverage change in 2026 is a full refresh of Ethproofs’ measurement and visualization stack. Every chart, leaderboard, and cohort view will become meaningfully comparable, more interpretable, and more directly aligned with how real prover teams operate.

At the core of this shift is a deliberately simplified prover input model. Ethproofs now anchors its two Prover Personas to a shared, decentralization-aligned cost baseline expressed directly in GPU-hours (RTX-5090 or RTX-6000). This replaces brittle cloud-equivalent mappings and makes uptime, reliability, and long-term performance trends legible rather than noisy:

• Persona 1 — Single-GPU, 1:100
• Persona 2 — Multi-GPU, 1:1

The full design rationale—why these personas, why GPU-hour indices, and why this abstraction is necessary for fair comparison and coordination—is laid out in The Ethproofs Prover Personas & GPU Price Indices:
https://ethproofs.org/blog/the-ethproofs-prover-personas-gpu-price-indices

On top of this foundation, Ethproofs will standardize several core metrics across all zkVMs:

• Liveness & uptime via continuous reliability scoring
• Energy efficiency, measured as kWh per proof
• Proof sizes and verification times, tracked consistently across systems

This unified measurement layer underpins the rest of the roadmap and enables meaningful comparison without collapsing important nuance.

2. Real-World Hard-Block Monitoring (RTP Cohort)

One immediate application of the new metrics stack is deeper visibility into real-world block difficulty.

Ethproofs’ RTP Cohort—provers sustaining P99 <10s latency with ≥90% uptime—serves as a real-time reference set. For every L1 block proven by this cohort, Ethproofs will surface two production-grounded signals:

• Prover Stunners: blocks eventually proven by multiple cohort provers but exceeding the 10s P99 target
• Prover Paralyzers: blocks that multiple provers queued but never completed

These signals complement synthetic stress tests currently under way by the zkEVM team.

3. Contributor Admin Dashboard

With costs and metrics simplified, Ethproofs can finally expose contributor controls without distorting incentives or measurements.

The new admin dashboard will allow teams to:

• manage team details
• manage prover clusters
• manage prover personas
• rotate verification keys

This improves metadata quality, onboarding, and coordination across the ecosystem—making it easier for contributors to participate correctly and for observers to interpret results accurately.

Looking Ahead

Together, these efforts evolve Ethproofs from a simple leaderboard into the coordination and observability layer for a decentralized proving ecosystem.

Mandatory proving is not a single milestone. It is a long transition.

Ethproofs exists to make that transition measurable, public, and collectively navigable.