L1 zkEVM: The First Step Towards Ethereum's ZK Finale

For those who closely follow the development of Ethereum technology, the recent blog post "Delivering L1 zkEVM #1: Real-Time Proof" by Ethereum engineer Sophia Gold is of significant importance. Although this only represents the technical concepts of the Ethereum core development team and has not yet officially entered the EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) process, there is still a long way to go before it becomes a set plan for a Mainnet upgrade, the signals it releases should not be underestimated.

This article clearly presents the core development blueprint for Ethereum's future: a comprehensive and in-depth integration of Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology into all levels of the Layer 1 protocol, achieving full coverage from the consensus layer to the execution layer. According to this technical roadmap, the first key step is to upgrade the EVM of each node to zkEVM. In this way, nodes can generate the corresponding zero-knowledge proofs during the execution of transactions and the operation of smart contracts, providing the verification nodes with the basis for validating the correctness of this execution.

This is not a conventional technical iteration, but an architectural revolution comparable to "The Merge." Its aim is to fundamentally address the multiple challenges that Ethereum faces in scalability, security, and economic models. So, why has Ethereum chosen to "go all in" on ZK at this moment? What deep logic underlies this strategic shift? How will it reshape the L1 we are familiar with and even the entire L2 ecosystem?

This article will elaborate on the grand narrative of Ethereum's "ZK Endgame" based on existing research, and analyze the motivations, actions, and far-reaching impacts behind it.

🚀 1. From "Re-execution" to "Proof Verification" Paradigm Shift 🚀

The ZK transformation concept of Ethereum is fundamentally about a paradigm shift in the consensus verification mechanism. The recently released L1 zkEVM roadmap clearly outlines the technical path for this change.

• Current Model: Re-execution Currently, when a new block is proposed, all validator nodes in the network must independently and completely re-execute each transaction within that block to compute and verify whether the final state root is consistent with what the proposer claims. This process is resource-intensive and is the main bottleneck limiting Ethereum L1 throughput.
• Future Model: Proof Verification Under the new L1 zkEVM architecture, the block builder generates a concise ZK validity proof (ZK Proof) simultaneously while producing the block. Other validators, upon receiving the block and proof, will no longer need to re-execute transactions and only need to verify this cryptographic proof. Since the computational cost of "verifying ZK Proof" is several orders of magnitude lower than that of "re-executing transactions**, more importantly, the time required to verify a proof is almost independent of the number of transactions covered by that proof, this allows Ethereum to significantly increase the block Gas limit to accommodate more transactions without significantly raising the hardware threshold for validators. Vitalik Buterin has mentioned that the Gas limit for L1 is expected to increase by 10 times, and even reach 100 times in the longer term, thus achieving L1 expansion while maintaining decentralization.

In summary, the future Ethereum L1 is architecturally very similar to a massive, native ZK-Rollup, allowing Ethereum L1 itself to potentially become the "largest ZK application in the world".

Strict technical standards

The Ethereum team has set extremely stringent technical standards for the implementation of L1 zkEVM, aiming to reduce latency and increase throughput while also ensuring security and the commitment to decentralization.

Multi-Proof Security Model

In order to guard against potential unknown vulnerabilities in a single zkEVM implementation, this roadmap introduces a "Multi-Proof" security mechanism. It requires that the validity of the same block must be proven by multiple zkEVMs generating multiple proofs from different teams (such as Scroll, Polygon, Kakarot, etc.). The validator's client will download and verify these proofs from different sources. Only when multiple independent proofs are successfully verified will the consensus layer accept the block. This is essentially an extension and elevation of Ethereum's "client diversity" concept to the proof layer, enforcing redundancy and diversity through the protocol to provide deep defense for L1 and enhance the robustness of the protocol.

🎯 2. Why must Ethereum be "fully ZK-fied"? 🎯

Ethereum fully embraces zero-knowledge proof technology, which is a major strategic transformation based on deep thinking about its economic model, competitive environment, and future market demand.

• First, this is an important revision to the "L2-centric" economic model. After the introduction of the blob mechanism in EIP-4844, while it successfully reduced the transaction costs on Layer 2, it also brought about unintended side effects—seriously weakening the value capture ability of Layer 1. The sharp decline in L1 transaction fee revenue and ETH burn rate directly impacted the deflationary expectations of ETH, leading to poor price performance and rising discontent within the community. By upgrading the EVM to zkEVM, validation nodes can shift from the time-consuming "re-execution" mode to an efficient "verification" mode, significantly reducing L1 latency and increasing throughput. In this way, Ethereum can re-attract high-value transactions that have extremely high requirements for security and instant finality, increase L1 fee revenue, reactivate the burn mechanism of EIP-1559, and achieve a rebalancing of the economic relationship between L1 and L2.
• Secondly, this is an asymmetric strategy to cope with the competition of high-performance public chains. In the face of the strong performance of new generation high-performance L1s like Solana and Sui in terms of TPS, Ethereum has chosen a unique competitive path. It has not followed its competitors by sacrificing decentralization (such as significantly increasing the hardware threshold for validators and reducing the number of validation nodes) to pursue performance improvement, but instead leverages ZK technology, to achieve a leap in performance by transforming the validation work from "expensive replay" to "cheap validation" while maintaining its core advantage of a million-level validator network. This strategy aims to consolidate Ethereum's moat in terms of decentralization and security while improving performance, striving to achieve both security and high performance.
• Finally, this is a forward-looking layout to迎接 the RWA and institutional finance wave. RWA tokenization is widely regarded as the next trillion-dollar market opportunity for blockchain. With financial giants like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton entering the scene, unprecedented strict requirements have been imposed on the underlying public chains in terms of performance, security, privacy, and compliance. Although L1s like Solana and Sui excel in performance, they have relatively fewer validating nodes and a higher degree of centralization, coupled with a history of outages, making it difficult to meet the security and stability demands of high-value financial activities. On the other hand, various OP Rollups in the Ethereum ecosystem (such as Base and MegaETH) offer good performance and sound security due to state rollbacks to L1, but their 7-day challenge period represents an unacceptable risk exposure for high-value financial settlements. In contrast, the cryptographic-level finality provided by ZK technology, along with the ability to prove compliance without disclosing sensitive data (such as proving that a certain address has passed KYC), perfectly aligns with the core needs of institutional finance. If the zkEVM upgrade can successfully enhance throughput, then the Ethereum ecosystem natively integrating ZK technology (L1+ZK Rollup) will achieve a balance of 'performance, security, and stability,' making it an ideal global settlement layer to accommodate the RWA wave.

🛠️ Section 3: ZK Endgame in Action 🛠️

The ZK endgame of Ethereum has long been in sight, apart from the blog published by Sophia Gold this time:

• As early as April 2025, Vitalik Buterin proposed a forward-looking idea: to replace the existing EVM with a RISC-V instruction set architecture that is more friendly to ZK. Supporters believe that compared to the inefficient performance of EVM in generating ZK circuits, the more streamlined architecture of RISC-V could bring an order of magnitude improvement in proof efficiency. Although this proposal has sparked controversy due to its potential to disrupt the existing ecosystem, it has set a clear "North Star" for the ZK transformation of Ethereum—defining the standards for the ideal zkEVM and pointing the way for optimization.
• At the Berlin workshop in June 2025, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake explicitly announced that Ethereum is "going all in on ZK" regarding L1 scaling. This statement confirms the core development team's firm determination.

The ZK endgame of Ethereum is definitely not just a theoretical discussion. Although Optimistic Rollup still leads ZK Rollup in various key metrics, the difficulties hindering the practical application of ZK technology are being tackled one by one. The three fundamental reasons that have historically caused ZK Rollup to lag severely are:

• First is technical complexity and performance bottlenecks: In the past, generating ZK proofs for general EVM computation was considered extremely difficult, slow, and expensive, and even computationally infeasible.
• Secondly, there is a developer experience gap: ORU has achieved high EVM compatibility from the very beginning, while early ZKRs (such as early versions of StarkNet) are not EVM compatible, requiring developers to learn an entirely new programming language, which creates a very high barrier to entry.
• Finally, liquidity fragmentation and network effects: ORU has gathered a large number of users and liquidity due to its first-mover advantage, creating a strong network effect.

However, these historical obstacles are being overcome one by one.

• In terms of proof speed, thanks to the advancements in next-generation proof algorithms such as PLONK and STARKs, as well as the development of hardware acceleration technologies like GPUs, FPGAs, and even ASICs, ZK proof generation time has been significantly reduced. For example, Succinct's SP1 zkVM can now prove 93% of Ethereum mainnet blocks in an average of 10.3 seconds, very close to the 10-second target set by the Ethereum Foundation.
• In terms of compatibility, zkEVM has undergone an evolution process from Type 4 to Type 1 compatibility. Today, projects such as Scroll, Taiko, and Polygon zkEVM have achieved near-perfect EVM equivalence (reaching Type 2 and even Type 1 standards), fundamentally eliminating the gap in developer experience with ORU. Moreover, the Multi-Proof security model of L1 ZK relies on multiple independent proof systems, and the vigorous development of the current zkEVM track lays the foundation for achieving this security model.

In summary, the core obstacles that historically hindered ZK technology—performance and compatibility—are being rapidly overcome. The technology is fully prepared for large-scale practical applications, but the previous stereotype of ZK technology being "slow, expensive, and difficult" has made people reluctant to accept it for a time. The vision of the Ethereum core team to "make Ethereum the world's largest ZK application" is precisely endorsing modern ZK technology and sounding the horn for large-scale investment in practical applications of ZK technology.

🌊 Four, ROLLUP ecological transformation 🌊

NATIVE ROLLUP paves the highway for ZK ROLLUP

The comprehensive ZKification of Ethereum L1 will fundamentally reshape the competitive landscape of Layer 2, with the most revolutionary change being the proposal of "Native Rollup". Currently, ZK-Rollup requires deploying complex validator smart contracts containing thousands of lines of code on L1 to verify the ZK proofs submitted by L2, which not only increases development difficulty but also poses security risks due to varying developer skill levels. After implementing zkEVM on L1, the EXECUTE precompiled function will be introduced, allowing ZK Rollup to directly call the embedded validation logic of the L1 protocol in its smart contracts without having to write contracts themselves.

This change brings threefold advantages to ZK-Rollup:

• First, there is a fundamental enhancement in security; Rollup project teams can completely outsource the enormous engineering challenge of building and maintaining EVM validators to L1, simplifying complex technical problems into a single line of code call.
• Secondly, it has achieved true EVM equivalence and forward compatibility, with native Rollup synchronizing with L1 upgrades without the need for an independent governance process;
• Finally, there is a significant improvement in cost-effectiveness, the use of L1 protocol embedded pre-compiled functions avoids the overhead of virtual machine interpretation execution, and the verification efficiency is several orders of magnitude higher than that of smart contract implementation, thus it is expected to greatly reduce the operating costs of ZK Rollup.

This Native Rollup feature is equivalent to Ethereum L1 providing a standardized, highly secure, and efficient verification layer for all ZK-Rollups for free, directly addressing the core challenges that have long plagued the development of ZK-Rollups: the high costs of on-chain proof verification, the technical challenges of maintaining EVM equivalence, and the security risks of validator contracts.

Strategic Transformation of OP ROLLUP

In contrast, the ZKification of L1 poses an existential challenge to Optimistic Rollup. The core weakness of ORU lies in its withdrawal confirmation period of up to 7 days, which is unacceptable for many high-value applications. If L1 ZKification successfully increases throughput, it could lead to a massive outflow of capital and applications from the OP Rollup ecosystem.

However, at present, OP Rollups (such as Base, Arbitrum, Optimism) dominate in terms of TVL and user activity, this vested interest pattern raises doubts about the prospects of a fully ZK-ified L1. But it is reassuring that leading ORU project teams have not chosen to confront but actively adapt, turning potential conflicts into technological convergence.

• Optimism has demonstrated a clear strategic shift towards ZK, with its OP Stack emphasizing modularity from the design phase, allowing for the replacement of core components like proof systems. The Optimism Foundation has invested funds to support multiple teams (such as RISC Zero, O(1) Labs, Succinct) in developing ZK fraud proofs. For example, RISC Zero's Zeth has achieved integration with the OP Stack, enabling the Optimism ecosystem to validate block states and resolve disputes through ZK technology.
• Arbitrum adopts a more pragmatic hybrid approach, explicitly stating the research direction of "ZK+Optimistic Hybrid Proof" in its official technical roadmap for 2024-2025. This design allows the system to use ZK proofs as an "instant confirmation channel" when they can be generated in a timely manner, providing instant finality for on-chain state changes and significantly reducing the delay in fund withdrawals and cross-chain communication; when ZK proofs cannot be generated in time, the system automatically falls back to the traditional optimistic proof path, ensuring security through a dispute period and challenge mechanism.

🌍 Five, Systemic Impact 🌍

The impact of this revolution will be systemic, encompassing performance, decentralization, and economic models.

• Performance Vision: By reducing the validation cost to a very low level, Ethereum will be able to increase the block Gas limit by 10 to even 100 times, allowing the total TPS of L1 + L2 to exceed 10,000, becoming a truly high-performance platform.
• New Economic Division of Labor: The ZKification of L1 will give rise to a specialized division of labor system similar to PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation).

• Provers (Provers): Specialized hardware that is expensive (cost cap of $100,000) and has high power consumption (cap of 10 kilowatts), responsible for generating ZK proofs. Due to its high capital and operational costs, this role is likely to trend towards centralization.
• Validators (Validators): Their role has been greatly simplified and reduced. They no longer need to run powerful execution clients for transaction replay. A regular laptop or low-spec device is sufficient to download and verify a lightweight proof of less than 300 KiB in a short time.
• This design addresses the contradiction between scalability and decentralization by centralizing computation-intensive tasks while maintaining broad decentralization of verification. A brand new off-chain proposer market will emerge. Proposers will be rewarded through transaction fees, MEV sharing, and token incentives.

• ETH Value Capture Restructuring: A stronger L1 can accommodate more high-value transactions, directly driving up transaction fees, thereby increasing the burn rate of ETH, which is crucial for stabilizing the price of ETH.
• Synergy with Danksharding: The ZK vision of L1 complements the Danksharding roadmap, together forming Ethereum's "dual-drive" scaling strategy.

• EIP-4844 and the subsequent complete Danksharding provide Rollups with cheap and massive data availability space (Blobs).
• ZK-based L1 provides an ultra-secure and ultra-fast finality execution and settlement layer for Rollup (especially ZK Rollup).
• Both are highly coordinated technically, enabling Ethereum to scale simultaneously on the execution layer (via ZK) and data layer (via Danksharding), comprehensively enhancing network utility and thus driving overall demand for ETH as the network's native asset.

🏁 Conclusion: Moving Towards a Verifiable World Computer 🏁

Ethereum's strategic transformation towards comprehensive ZK is another decisive moment in its development history. This is not an isolated technological upgrade, but a systematic and multidimensional comprehensive strategy to address technological bottlenecks, economic challenges, and intense market competition. It profoundly confirms Ethereum's role as the global ultimate settlement layer, provides a unique solution to the "impossible triangle" problem, optimizes the economic model of ETH, and leads the entire L2 ecosystem towards maturity.

The road ahead is still full of challenges, but the direction is already incredibly clear. Ethereum is evolving from a "world computer" into a "verifiable world computer." By deeply embedding cryptographic truths into its core, Ethereum is not only paving the way for its own future but also building a more secure, trustworthy, and scalable foundation for the future of the entire decentralized world. The ZK finale is Ethereum's strongest commitment to this future.

• This article is based on publicly available information and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant risks; please make decisions cautiously and DYOR.
• If you like this article, feel free to follow, like, and share your support!
• It should be noted that this article is just a "simplified popular science version" of a professional research report. If you want to learn more in-depth content, feel free to follow the blogger and send a private message to request the complete research report. The complete research report contains richer and more detailed content, including more analysis, charts, data, and references.