Brevis Pico Prism Achieves 99.6% Ethereum Proofs in 12 Seconds

Brevis, a company specializing in smart, verifiable applications using zero-knowledge proofs, shared today that its Pico Prism zkVM achieved 99.6% proving coverage in under 12 seconds and 96.8% real-time coverage in under 10 seconds for Ethereum blocks with a 45 million gas limit. 

This breakthrough makes real-time proving more efficient, which could help reduce hardware costs by 50%, and prepares Ethereum for future capacity needs.

Speed That Changes the Game 

According to the news release, Pico Prism moves Ethereum from research-level experiments to real-world use. The technology allows a single prover to create mathematical proofs that other validators can check in milliseconds, rather than having hundreds of thousands of validators repeat the same calculations. 

The average proving time is now 6.9 seconds for 45 million gas blocks, while costs dropped to $128,000, and only 64 RTX 5090 GPUs are needed instead of 160 RTX 4090 GPUs which were previously used. 

“The numbers speak for themselves. 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.” Brevis CEO Mo Dong said.

Currently, Ethereum repeats calculations for every transaction. For example, a token swap on Uniswap is recalculated by over 800,000 validators. Pico Prism fixes this by letting one prover do the work, while others verify it quickly. Developers can now use much more computing power off-chain while keeping Ethereum-level security. Some major projects using Brevis technology are PancakeSwap, Usual, and Frax. These systems already show how complex tasks and cross-chain verification can run smoothly.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin in a tweet said he is “Excited to see Pico Prism entering the ZK-EVM proving arena”

Building the Future of a Faster Blockchain

The platform achieves this by breaking the proving process into parallel stages. GPUs handle the heavy calculations, while CPUs manage setup tasks. This reduces the power consumption and enables home validators to operate a node using a regular laptop that distributes the network.  Additionally, the plan for Ethereum is 99% coverage, verification in less than 10 seconds, and the cost of hardware in sub-$100,000. Pico Prism comes very close but falls short of real time by 2.2%.

Zero-knowledge virtual machines like Pico Prism show that programs ran correctly without having to do all the work again.