airbender

Today, Vitalik singled out ZKsync’s Airbender for praise: in his view, the race for speed is over.
In a post on 10/13, the official blog said Airbender Prime proved 99% of 7,200 consecutive $ETH mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds (including witness generation) on a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, with all of them taking no more than 12 seconds. It also ranks near the top of the public ETHproofs leaderboard. The team says it is “the first Ethereum prover, to our knowledge, to achieve real-time proving on a single GPU.”
Vitalik’s focus isn’t on boasting about being faster; it’s on changing the question: the top priority for zkEVMs should shift entirely to security—formally verifying that the arithmetization is equivalent to the Ethereum specifications, setting a hard cap on proof costs relative to block gas, and securing the proof system itself. The hash-based STARK + RISC-V approach also comes with a post-quantum security narrative from the official blog. The speed figures for $ZK are already impressive; in the next round, let’s see who’s willing to show their security work.