rewrite this title Brevis Achieves Industry-First 99.6% Real-Time Proving For Current Ethereum Blocks With 50% Cost Reduction

by
Alisa Davidson

Published: October 15, 2025 at 8:00 am Updated: October 15, 2025 at 5:35 am

by Ana

Edited and fact-checked:
October 15, 2025 at 8:00 am

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Infrastructure company specializing in smart, verifiable applications using zero-knowledge proofs, Brevis announced that its Pico Prism zkVM has achieved a major milestone, becoming the first system in the world to reach 99.6% proving coverage in under 12 seconds and 96.8% real-time proving coverage in under 10 seconds for current-generation Ethereum mainnet blocks with a 45 million gas limit.

This advancement transitions Pico Prism from research into production-ready infrastructure, addressing a key bottleneck in Ethereum’s adoption of base layer zero-knowledge verification and preparing the network for future capacity demands. The breakthrough also lowers GPU hardware requirements by 50%, making real-time proving feasible for broader deployment at reduced cost.

Compared to existing solutions, Pico Prism delivers substantial gains across multiple performance metrics. For current 45 million gas blocks, it achieves 99.6% coverage in under 12 seconds, while real-time coverage reaches 96.8% in under 10 seconds, surpassing the 40.9% coverage achieved for 36 million gas blocks by competing technologies. Hardware costs are cut to $128,000 compared with $256,000, average proving times drop to 6.9 seconds for 45 million gas blocks and 6.04 seconds for 36 million gas blocks versus 10.3 seconds previously, and comparable performance now requires just 64 RTX 5090 GPUs instead of 160 RTX 4090 GPUs. Overall, Pico Prism delivers 3.4 times better efficiency when combining speed and cost metrics.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” said Mo Dong, CEO and co-founder of Brevis, in a written statement. “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,” he added.

Pico Prism achieves its performance gains through a full architectural overhaul, transitioning from single-machine proving to distributed multi-GPU clusters. The platform utilizes a modular framework that breaks proving into parallel stages, delegating computation-intensive processes to GPUs while keeping setup operations on CPUs.

Pico Prism Demonstrates Efficient Ethereum Scaling Through Real-Time zkEVM Proofs

Currently, when a user executes a token swap on Uniswap, the transaction is redundantly processed by over 800,000 validators across the network, each performing identical calculations, reading the same blockchain state, and producing the same result. This redundancy leads to computational inefficiency, which intensifies as Ethereum continues to grow, creating a fundamental scaling limitation: block capacity remains constrained because validators require reasonably capable hardware to keep pace with repeated transaction execution.

Pico Prism illustrates that blockchain verification can scale efficiently using cryptographic proofs instead of computational repetition. Rather than having hundreds of thousands of validators re-execute the same transactions, a single prover generates a mathematical proof that all other participants can verify within milliseconds.

The future scalability of Ethereum depends on the ability of zkEVM to produce real-time proofs for Ethereum blocks. Ethereum intends to adopt zero-knowledge proofs across all layers of the stack, encompassing consensus-layer signature aggregation and on-chain privacy with client-side proving, with L1 zkEVM integration representing the initial step in this transition.

The Ethereum Foundation’s July 2025 roadmap established specific targets: achieving 99% coverage, sub-10-second proving, hardware costs under $100,000, and energy consumption below 10 kW for home-based proving, all to ensure high levels of network liveness and censorship resistance.

Pico Prism has brought the goal of Ethereum L1 zkEVM integration into clearer view. Although it remains 2.2 percentage points shy of meeting the updated sub-10-second real-time proving target, Brevis continues to develop new features to reach and surpass this benchmark.

Pico Prism Paves The Way For Scalable, Cost-Efficient Ethereum 

With Pico Prism managing verification, many of Ethereum’s previous limitations are considerably reduced. Gas limits could be raised safely beyond the current 45 million per block, while average transaction costs may decrease substantially, making complex DeFi operations more economically feasible. Smart contracts gain the ability to query historical data without incurring prohibitive gas expenses, and privacy-focused protocols can operate without exceeding user budgets.

For validators and overall network health, Pico Prism lowers the technical barrier to participation, enabling home stakers to validate using standard laptops rather than high-end gaming systems. This promotes greater decentralization as hardware requirements become less restrictive, and transaction throughput can rise without centralizing computation.

Developers are now able to create decentralized applications that leverage effectively unlimited off-chain computational resources while maintaining Ethereum-level trust. Major protocols already utilizing Brevis infrastructure provide a glimpse into Ethereum’s potential future once computational bottlenecks are eliminated. Examples include PancakeSwap’s sophisticated trading mechanisms, Usual’s trustless reward distribution system, and Frax’s cross-chain verification processes, all powered by the same proof technology.

Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.

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