Brevis, a leading infrastructure company powering smart, verifiable applications with zero-knowledge proofs, announced that its Pico Prism zkVM has become the world’s first to achieve 99.6% proving coverage (sub-12 seconds) and 96.8% real-time proving coverage (sub-10 seconds) for current-generation Ethereum mainnet blocks with 45M gas limit.
With this breakthrough, Pico Prism has gone from research into production-ready infrastructure that eliminates a critical bottleneck in Ethereum’s transition to base layer zero-knowledge verification to handle its future capacity needs. This performance leap reduces GPU hardware costs by 50%, making real-time proving economically viable for widespread deployment.
Pico Prism delivers significant improvements across all key metrics compared to existing solutions:
- •99.6% (<12s) and 96.8% (<10s) proving coverage for current 45M gas blocks vs 40.9% for 36M gas blocks tested by competing solutions
- •$128K hardware cost vs $256K
- •6.9 second average proving time for 45M gas blocks; 6.04 seconds for 36M gas blocks vs 10.3 seconds
- •64 RTX 5090 GPUs vs 160 RTX 4090 GPUs for comparable performance
- •3.4x better performance using combined speed and cost efficiency metrics
"The numbers speak for themselves," said Mo Dong, CEO and co-founder of Brevis. “We've built infrastructure that can handle what Ethereum is actually producing today. This is faster performance leading to economic efficiency that makes real-time proving viable for production deployment."
Pico Prism's performance improvements result from a complete architectural redesign that moves from single-machine proving to distributed multi-GPU clusters. The system leverages Pico's modular design to decompose proving into parallel phases, with computation-heavy workloads shifted to GPUs while setup tasks remain on CPUs.
A Leap for Ethereum
Today, when a user swaps tokens on Uniswap, that transaction gets independently re-run by over 800,000 validators worldwide. Each performing identical calculations, reading the same state, and arriving at the same result. It leads to computational waste that only gets worse as Ethereum grows. This creates Ethereum's core scaling constraint: block capacity stays artificially low because validators need reasonable hardware to keep up with re-execution demands.
Pico Prism demonstrates that blockchains can scale verification through cryptographic proofs rather than computational brute force. Instead of hundreds of thousands of validators re-executing identical transactions, one prover generates mathematical proof and everyone else verifies it in milliseconds.
The future of Ethereum scaling relies heavily on zkEVM’s ability to prove Ethereum blocks in real-time. Ethereum plans to eventually migrate to using ZK proofs at all levels of the stack, from consensus layer signature aggregation to onchain privacy with client side proving. The first step in that direction is L1 zkEVM integration.
In its July 2025 roadmap, the Ethereum Foundation outlined clear goals: 99% coverage, sub-10 second proving, hardware under $100K, and power consumption under 10kW for home proving to maintain the highest levels of liveness and censorship resistance.
The path to Ethereum L1 zkEVM integration has become significantly clearer with Pico Prism. While it is still just 2.2% percentage points away from the updated <10s real-time proving goal, Brevis is working to roll out new features to cross that bar.
Unconstrained Verification
With Pico Prism handling verification, constraints are significantly eased:
- •Gas limits can safely increase beyond the current 45M per block
- •Average transaction fees drop significantly
- •Complex DeFi operations become economically viable
- •Smart contracts can access historical data without prohibitive gas costs
- •Privacy-preserving protocols can deploy without breaking user budgets
For validators and network health:
- •Home stakers can validate with basic laptops instead of gaming rigs
- •Network decentralization increases as participation barriers collapse
- •Transaction throughput increases significantly without hardware centralization
Developers can now build dApps by tapping into an infinite amount of off-chain computing resources while maintaining the same level of trust as Ethereum L1. Major protocols running on Brevis infrastructure are already experiencing what Ethereum could look like in the near future when computational constraints disappear. PancakeSwap's advanced trading hooks, Usual's trustless reward distribution, and Frax's cross-chain verification systems all run on the same proving technology.
About Brevis
Brevis is an efficient, verifiable off-chain computation engine that brings limitless computation capacity to existing smart contract blockchains. Utilizing zero-knowledge proofs, Brevis offloads data-intensive, costly computations from on-chain environments to a drastically lower-cost off-chain engine, and empowers Web3 applications to scale seamlessly while preserving the security of L1 trust assumptions.