Brevis, a zero-knowledge infrastructure project, has achieved a critical performance breakthrough that brings it remarkably close to the Ethereum Foundation’s ultimate proving targets. The project’s Pico Prism zkVM now provides 96.8% real-time coverage for Ethereum blocks, a milestone that could help redefine the security and efficiency of the base layer.

Tackling Ethereum’s Core Inefficiency

This development directly addresses one of Ethereum’s most significant challenges: computational redundancy. In the current model, every transaction is re-executed by more than 800,000 validators across the globe. While this design ensures robust security, it’s also immensely wasteful and is the primary reason block gas limits are kept artificially low.

Brevis’s Pico Prism technology offers an alternative by scaling verification through cryptographic proofs instead of computational brute force. In this system, a single prover generates a mathematical proof confirming a block’s validity. The entire network can then verify this proof in milliseconds, eliminating the need for every validator to re-execute the transactions.

A Leap in Performance and Efficiency

According to an announcement on October 15, Pico Prism is the first system to achieve 99.6% proving coverage for Ethereum blocks within 12 seconds. More importantly, 96.8% of those blocks are proven in under 10 seconds, meeting the industry standard for real-time verification. This performance was benchmarked against the mainnet’s current 45 million gas limit and was accomplished while halving the required GPU hardware costs.

Mo Dong, CEO and co-founder of Brevis, stated that the infrastructure can now handle what the Ethereum network is producing today, marking a shift from a research concept to a production-ready system. He emphasized that this faster performance leads to economic efficiencies that make real-time proving viable for widespread deployment.

Closing the Gap to a Zero-Knowledge Future

This achievement places Brevis within striking distance of the Ethereum Foundation’s ambitious goals set for July 2025, which call for 99% coverage, sub-10-second proving times, and hardware affordable enough for home validation. With just a 2.2% gap to close on those metrics, Pico Prism is positioned as a near-ready solution for integration into Ethereum’s base protocol, promising higher liveness and stronger censorship resistance for the entire network.

Developers are already putting this technology to use. Major protocols, including PancakeSwap, Usual, and Frax, are leveraging Brevis for advanced trading hooks, trustless reward distribution, and cross-chain verification. These applications demonstrate how developers can tap into vast off-chain computing power while still benefiting from the ironclad security guarantees of the Ethereum mainnet.