2026 is a pivotal year for Ethereum. The first Ethereum validators will process tiny zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs instead of reexecuting transactions. This unlocks immediate scaling benefits for the layer 1 and sets it on the path toward 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Researcher Justin Drake demonstrated that validating proofs on an old laptop is already possible at EthProofs Day at Devconnect in November. One in 10 validators are expected to make the switch to ZK before the end of the year.
It’s a complete overhaul of the fundamental way the blockchain works: comparable in scale to the Merge in 2022, when Ethereum successfully switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
At present, every validator reexecutes every single transaction, and while the introduction of perfect parallel processing in Glamsterdam will make that process more efficient, it’s only a step along the road.
The plan is to generate a ZK-proof for each block — magical math that proves the block executed properly — and then validators simply check if the proof is legit.
This neatly solves the blockchain trilemma because it’s so easy to validate a ZK-proof that you can theoretically do it on your smartphone or even on a smartwatch. That ensures the network can remain highly decentralized while being unburdened by the lowest-spec devices in the network. Ethereum can manage about 30 TPS at present (it currently does fewer), but the requirements for home validators are already at gaming laptop level.
“It’s a way to scale the network and scale the traffic with just fewer resources having to work harder,” said Gary Schulte, senior staff blockchain protocol engineer on the Besu client. He explained the gas limit can’t be raised much further without increasing the minimum specs for the validator hardware. But under the new system, most of the difficult work that requires beefy equipment is carried out by block builders and ZK provers.
“If we have a small handful of machines that are building these blocks, executing and proving these blocks, and all of our downstream validator network is doing very light work …. it allows us to scale,” said Schulte.
Drake expects around 10% of the network to switch over to validating ZK-proofs this year as part of “phase 1” of Lean Execution. Given that the validators most likely to switch over are the lowest spec home validators, this will enable the gas limit to be increased, as the remaining validators still reexecuting transactions will be running more capable machines.
”The sophisticated operators with large infrastructure will continue onwards, and this means that gas limits can be increased, as you don’t have to worry about solo stakers,” Drake told Bankless.
That said, switchover won’t happen until mid-year, when Ethereum stops penalizing validators for delayed execution. This currently disincentivizes the validation of ZK-proofs because these take longer to generate and propagate through the network.
Schulte says that only validators “willing to pay the penalties” will validate ZK-proofs initially, but the ePBS upgrade in the Glamsterdam upgrade will fix the issue.
“Basically, instead of having to attest immediately when the block arrives, you have more time. You think of a whole slot basically to attest,” said Drake.
“And at that point, I expect the number of validators to opt in to go from roughly 1% to something closer to 10%.”
How Ethereum’s ZK rollout is expected to work
Back in July, Sophia Gold wrote a blog for the Ethereum Foundation setting an ambitious goal to ship a zkEVM within the space of a year.
Several teams have already demonstrated the ability to generate proofs in real time, which in reality means about two seconds faster than Ethereum’s 12-second block times, given the need to propagate the proofs throughout the network.
Because all the current systems have some bugs, and they sometimes fail, one proposed solution is to use five different proving systems to offer up ZK-proofs, and as long as a validator receives three matching proofs, the block is good to go.
The aim is to eventually have one proof (enshrined proofs), but that will require the generation system to be formally verified to have zero bugs. There’s a team working on that, but it’s not expected to be complete until 2030.
Proving doesn’t need to be anywhere near as decentralized as validating (a proof is either correct or not), but the target specs are still set at the level of equipment a home enthusiast could conceivably afford to run in their garage: costing under $100,000 and requiring a similar amount of power to a Tesla Powerwall.
Given the astonishing rate of progress in the field, these specs might be higher than required: In May, it took SP1 Hypercube’s 160 GPUs to prove blocks in under 12 seconds. The ZisK team can now prove blocks in…
cointelegraph.com