ZKsync has announced the release of Airbender Prime, described as the first Ethereum prover capable of generating proofs in real time using a single GPU. Following the October 13, 2026 announcement, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly commended the team two days later while outlining new priorities for zero-knowledge scaling systems.
Performance Metrics and Leaderboard Standing
Operating on a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU, Airbender Prime proved 99% of 7,200 tested Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds, with every block in the dataset proved within 12 seconds. This performance places the system at the top of the public ETHproofs.org leaderboard for proving time, GPU efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
A previous version of Airbender achieved 21.8 MHz of throughput on an H100 GPU. The new system utilizes hash-based STARKs, which ZKsync notes are quantum-resistant, and is built on the open-source RISC-V instruction set standard.
Vitalik Buterin Responds
While Buterin stated that the performance race to achieve fast proving has been definitively won, he emphasized that attention must now shift toward safety and verification. His feedback highlighted two key areas:
- Formal verification to ensure the prover accurately matches Ethereum's specifications.
- Establishing limits on prover costs linked to gas fees.
Broader Integration and Roadmap
Airbender follows ZKsync's previous Atlas upgrade and is already active across the network's supported chains. The technology was designed to run efficiently on commodity hardware to accommodate both institutional operators and independent participants.
