# **Ethproofs 2025 Review & 2026 Roadmap**

**December 6, 2025**

## **2025 in Review: Building the Real-Time Proving Ecosystem**

It’s been an extraordinary nine months since we launched Ethproofs on Jan 28, 2025. What began as a simple dashboard to track zk proofs for Ethereum L1 blocks has grown into a central coordination layer for the zkVM ecosystem. We’ve onboarded 7 zkVMs and 15 provers, verified ~200k blocks, and watched latency fall 5× while costs dropped 15×. Your hardwork, contributions, feedback, and experiments have shaped everything. Thank you.

>Site-wide metrics on Ethproofs from Jan 28, 2025 to Dec 8, 2025:
>**Average Latency:** 16m 44s → to 15.9s
>**Average Cost:** $1.69 → to $0.0376

As the ecosystem pushes toward (and in many cases surpasses) the [zkEVM team’s North-star goals](https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/07/10/realtime-proving)—≤10s P99, ≤$100k CAPEX, ≤10kW, 128-bit security, ≤300KiB proofs, and full open-source stacks—now with line of sight to *five* zkEVMs sustaining P99 <10s on 10kW hardware the pace of progress has made something clear:

**Ethproofs must grow with the ecosystem it measures.**
As proving becomes faster, cheaper, more distributed, and more reproducible, the platform must evolve—simplifying where complexity has accumulated and strengthening the areas where the community now depends on us.

Before looking ahead, it’s worth revisiting the milestones that made 2025 such a transformative year.

**A note on performance:**
> 2025 meaningfully de-risked zkEVM proving performance. We now have line of sight to a diverse set of **n≈5 zkEVMs maintaining P99 <10 seconds on 10kW hardware**. With gas limits expected to rise [~3× in 2026](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7782), current stacks appear ready to keep up.

> This shifts the center of gravity for 2026: from raw speed → toward **quality, [security](https://youtu.be/sKXGt5X6Vm8?si=f4pl74jKMwUw6McU), diversity, and resilience**.

---

## **2025 Highlights: A Year of Breakthroughs (Top Ten)**

#### **1. Multi-GPU & Real-Time Proving Became First-Class**

Real-time (1:1) proving is now routine. Several teams hit sub-10s P99 on clusters under the EF targets for CAPEX and power.

#### **2. Single-GPU Provers Got Fast**

Single-GPU proving fell from 16 minutes to under 60 seconds.

#### **3. Proof Costs Collapsed**

Costs dropped from $1.69 to <$0.01.

#### **4. A Growing Mesh of Always-On Provers**

Multiple teams now submit proofs for every block—something we expect to see much more of in 2026.

#### **5. 100% Reproducibility Across All Provers**

Every prover now links to open-source repos or verified binaries for all provers—an ecosystem-wide baseline for trust.

#### **6. All Verifiers Are Dual-Licensed Open Source**

Every verifier on Ethproofs is also dual-licensed open-source—MIT + Apache 2.0—enabling broad and permissionless integration. These two licenses ensure both commercial teams and open-source contributors can adopt the code without restrictions, patent concerns, or copyleft obligations.

#### **7. Hosting the EF Client-Side Proving Benchmarks**

We now publish the CSP teams quarterly benchmark data across circuits and zkVM stacks.

#### **8. zkLighthouse: Validating Blocks with zk Proofs**

A [modified Lighthouse client](https://github.com/ethproofs/lighthouse/tree/ethproofs/zkattester-demo) successfully [validated blocks](https://youtu.be/BUuNcXiaH3U?si=jmfJ-G8VJseGflRy) using proofs fetched from Ethproofs.

#### **9. Building the Ethproofs Community**

Telegram grew to 600+, our six community calls averaged >250 attendees, and **Ethproofs Day** brought 600+ people to Devconnect.

#### **10. Ethproofs Formally Becomes an EF Team**

We now serve as the research → production bridge between zk teams and Ethereum client teams.

---

## **2026 Roadmap: Scaling, Simplifying, and Preparing for Mandatory Proving**

### **Ethproofs Role in the Race to Mandatory Proving**

Multiple Ethereum Foundation research teams — including the zkEVM team, Protocol Snarkification, Cryptography Research, and others — are pushing toward a future where **Ethereum L1 execution layer blocks are proven continuously and in real time**.

Ethproofs supports this mission by providing the ecosystem’s **public measurement layer**:
a shared surface that defines what is fast, reliable, secure, open, and resilient.

In 2026 we expect our contributions to fall into two clear tracks:

## **Track A — Platform Upgrades (Ethproofs-owned)**

>These are the areas where Ethproofs can design, build, and ship concrete improvements to the platform.

### **A1. Improved Metrics & Visualization Layer**

Our highest-leverage upgrade for 2026 is a complete refresh of Ethproofs’ data and visualization layer.
Every chart, leaderboard, and metric becomes more comparable, more meaningful, and more aligned with the needs of prover teams, zkVM researchers, and Ethereum client teams.

Key enhancements include:

- **Prover type & cost input simplification** — Ethproofs now pairs the four Prover Personas with a single cost unit (5090 GPU-hour).
This removes cloud-mapping distortions and gives each Persona a clean, comparable, decentralization-aligned cost baseline - and allows us to score uptime accordingly:

• **Persona 1 — Single-GPU, 1:100**
• **Persona 2 — Multi-GPU, 1:1**

*(see: The Ethproofs 5090 Price Index – https://hackmd.io/@willcorcoran/Sk8lhzXfbe)*

* **Liveness & uptime** — continuous reliability scoring
* **Energy** — **kWh per proof** as the primary efficiency metric
* **Proof sizes & verification times** — tracked across all zkVMs

This unified measurement layer is the foundation for everything else in the roadmap.

---

### **A2. Real-World Hard-Block Monitoring (RTP Cohort)**

A key example of the new metrics we are emphasizing is **real-world block difficulty**.

The RTP Cohort — provers consistently sustaining **P99 <10 seconds** and **≥90% uptime** — serves as our real-time reference set.
Ethproofs will analyze all L1 blocks they prove and surface two important signals:

* **Prover Stunners:** blocks that multiple cohort provers eventually complete but exceed the **10s P99 target**
* **Prover Paralyzers:** blocks that multiple provers queued but never proved

These measurements complement synthetic “Prover Killer” workloads from the zkEVM team’s authoritative **[zkEVM Benchmarking Suite](https://eth-act.github.io/zkevm-benchmark-workload/)** and provide a grounded, production-facing picture of proving difficulty.

---

### **A3. Contributor Admin Dashboard**

With the underlying cost and metrics infrastructure simplified, we can now deliver a cleaner and more powerful contributor interface.

The new admin dashboard enables teams to:

* manage team details
* manage prover clusters
* manage prover personas
* rotate verification keys

This dramatically improves metadata quality, onboarding flow, and ecosystem coordination.

---

## **Track B — Ecosystem Alignment (Ethproofs-supported)**

>These are areas where Ethproofs cannot directly ship the underlying improvements — but where we can **measure**, **highlight**, and **apply healthy community pressure** to move the ecosystem forward in collaboration with EF research teams.

Throughout 2026, Ethproofs will help surface and support progress in the following areas:

---

### **B1. Security & Rigor Signals**

* audits & formal verification coverage
* provable-security indicators
* progress toward 100–128-bit cryptographic strength
* proof-size & verifier-time performance
* robustness under adversarial / Prover Killer workloads

These are increasingly critical as proving becomes production infrastructure.

---

### **B2. Openness & Reproducibility**

* dual-licensed open-source prover and verifier components

Ethproofs will use transparency and community visibility to help make openness the default.

---

### **B3. Diversity & Decentralization Benchmarks**

* guest VM diversity (WASM, EVM, RISC-V, custom VMs)
* zkCL diversity
* on-prem proving (reducing cloud monoculture risk)

These signals help ensure no single guest program, prover style, or hosting model becomes a systemic point of failure.

---

Together, **Track A (Platform Upgrades)** and **Track B (Ecosystem Alignment)** transition Ethproofs from a simple leaderboard into **the real-time observability and coordination layer** for a decentralized, globally distributed proving ecosystem.

---

## **Wrapping Up & Community Momentum**

The ecosystem has moved fast—and we’re evolving so that Ethproofs remains a trustworthy, transparent, reproducible platform for real-time proving.

2026 brings a deep community focus:

* **Ethproofs buildooors channel** (DM @corcoranwill on Telegram)
* **December 19 community call**
* **Beast Mode**, **Fort Mode**, and **Villa Lean** before EthCC
* [https://lu.ma/beast_mode](https://lu.ma/beast_mode)
* [https://lu.ma/fort_mode](https://lu.ma/fort_mode)
* [https://lu.ma/villa_lean](https://lu.ma/villa_lean)

Thank you to every prover team, zkVM team, researcher, and home operator pushing this forward.

**Onward to Mandatory Proving!**