A brief history of Ethereum’s relationship with ZK

Why is ZK the endgame?

article-image

Artwork by Crystal Le

share


This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


It all starts with Ethereum. The L1 is too slow. Every node needs to redundantly re-execute transactions in a block to ensure validity, which limits scalability.

By 2020, the Ethereum community coalesced around rollups as the scaling solution. Vitalik’s 2021 landmark blog post on rollups explains how optimistic and zk rollups can scale Ethereum.

Zk rollups are technologically superior for scaling but the tech was still too expensive to use and far behind (more later). 

So optimistic rollups broke into the market first. Optimistic rollups assume all transactions are valid until someone challenges it with a fraud proof within a seven-day challenge period.

Optimistic rollups worked, but they came with hidden costs. The challenge period meant longer transaction finality before users could withdraw funds. Locked liquidity meant capital efficiencies and a generally poorer UX, especially with chain interoperability.

Meanwhile, zk was catching up. At ETHCC 2022, Polygon, zkSync and Scroll all announced zkEVMs, which enable Solidity devs to write code and prove the execution of the EVM — effectively allowing Ethereum to leverage zero knowledge technology.

By 2023, zk rollups started to gain real traction. 

Why exactly are zk proofs better than optimistic fraud proofs? Namely because zk proofs are much smaller (~1-10 KB) compared to raw transaction data (megabytes in size).

By using zk cryptography to prove Ethereum transactions, these highly compressed proofs meant lower data availability costs and better scalability.

How zero knowledge works in a nutshell

Though zk was taking off, proof generation was still expensive. Based on zkstats.io, the average cost to generate a zk proof in December 2023 was $80.21.

Fast forward to 2025. Proof costs have dropped to $1.3 per proof, about a 98.4% improvement.

What changed?

Today, each of the core pieces of the zk rollup stack have been broken up. 

Firstly, zkVMs are here. These specialized virtual machines speed up the zk development experience and make validity proof generation more efficient. Before zkVMs, developers needed to write complex, mathematical “circuits” to prove EVM execution.

Loading Tweet..

ZkVMs like SP1, RISC Zero, Nexus and OpenVM today effectively democratize zk development for all developers (C++, Rust) without zk cryptographic expertise. In the past, zkEVMs only enabled Solidity development on zk rollups. Think of zkVMs as a more general concept than zkEVMs.

Second, the costs to generate proofs are going down because of market competition. Today, there are many competitive marketplaces operated by Risc Zero, Cysic, Lagrange and Succinct. Some are still in testnet, some are operational.

Zk L2s are also turning to proof aggregation techniques to amortize verification costs. The way this roughly works is by batching many proofs inside of one, which makes the final proof faster to verify.

These marketplaces are also permissionless, meaning anyone with a GPU rig can sign up, post a bond and generate zk proofs. Previously, zk rollups used “centralized provers,” meaning they rented GPU/FPGA hardware from Google or Amazon.

Better proof systems are also constantly launching. These proof systems (examples: Groth16, Halo2-KZG, STARK, Plonk, Expander) algorithmically define the rules as to how zk proofs are constructed and verified. They’re getting better, which means zk proofs are getting smaller and faster to verify. This in turn means increased zkVM performance gains.

Finally, there are zk co-processors built on top of zkVMs. These things basically allow onchain apps that do not exist in a zk execution environment to leverage the wonders of zk technology. The way it does so is by moving computation offchain, therefore running asynchronous to the blockchain’s execution. This enables apps to compute complex statistics offchain, prove it with zk, then post that proof onchain.

Apps like Frax, Azuki, Etherfi and Gearbox are using Lagrange’s zk co-processor to get around the limits of the Ethereum L1.

So there you have it. That’s why zk is the endgame.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 24 - 26, 2026

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Report Cover.png

Research

Centrifuge has quietly become one of the fastest-growing players in RWA tokenization, with TVL surging from $78M in March to $1.14B today. Its partnerships with Janus Henderson, Apollo, and S&P Dow Jones Indices have positioned it at the center of institutional adoption, while its multi-chain vault framework unlocks access to treasuries, credit, and equities onchain. With new fund launches on the horizon, protocol fees now live, and liquidity set to improve through upcoming listings, Centrifuge offers investors asymmetric upside in one of crypto’s largest and fastest-growing narratives.

article-image

The company introduced a dollar-backed stablecoin to power instant payments and microtransactions for AI-driven web platforms

by Blockworks /
article-image

The plan is to make GameShift the “consumer portal” that bridges non-crypto gamers into Web3

article-image

Google backs $1.4B of obligations and takes 5.4% stake as Cipher expands AI data center footprint

by Blockworks /
article-image

Nine banks plan MiCA-regulated token to challenge dollar dominance and strengthen Europe’s payments autonomy

by Blockworks /
article-image

Sponsored

The FAIR L1 embeds encrypted execution into the consensus layer and removes the transparency window that makes MEV possible

by Sponsored /
article-image

Corporate crypto ownership can “lift up” blockchain ecosystems to help spur institutional adoption, SharpLink Gaming co-CEO says