• Shipping an L1 zkEVM #2: The Security Foundations Posted by George Kadianakis on December 18, 2025 Research & Development Thanks to Arantxa Zapico, Benedikt Wagner, and Dmitry Khovratovich from the EF cryptography team for their contributions, and to Ladislaus, Kev, Alex, and Marius for the careful review and feedback. • The zkEVM ecosystem has been sprinting for a year. • We crossed the finish line for real-time proving! • Now comes the next phase: building something mainnet-grade. • From speed to security In July,we published a north-star definitionfor realtime proving. • Nine months later, theecosystem crushed it: proving latency dropped from 16 minutes to 16 seconds, costs collapsed 45×, and zkVMs now prove 99% of all Ethereum blocks in under 10 seconds on target hardware.
Article Summaries:
- The zkEVM community has achieved a major speed milestone, cutting real‑time proving latency from 16 minutes to 16 seconds and reducing costs 45×, enabling 99 % of Ethereum blocks to be proven in under 10 seconds. However, security remains a priority. To address this, the team has introduced soundcalc, a tool that quantifies zkVM security based on current cryptographic bounds, and set a three‑phase roadmap: by February 2026 all participating zkEVMs must integrate soundcalc; by May 2026 they must reach 100‑bit provable security with proofs ≤600 KiB and provide a recursion architecture sketch; by the end of 2026 the goal is 128‑bit security with proofs ≤300 KiB and a formal soundness argument. These milestones aim to balance security, proof size, and network‑propagation requirements for a mainnet‑grade zkEVM.
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