Author: ZHIXIONG PAN

The Ethereum community has recently been discussing "Real-time Proving" (RTP). Simply put, it means that instead of requiring all Ethereum nodes to expend significant resources re-executing every transaction, a small proof can be verified more cheaply and quickly. However, achieving this is extremely difficult. Previously, even the most powerful technology could only verify approximately 40% of blocks within 10 seconds, and the hardware cost reached hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now, the Brevis team's new Pico Prism technology has broken this bottleneck: using affordable consumer graphics cards (64 RTX 5090s), they have achieved, for the first time, the generation of valid proofs within 10 seconds for 96.8% of Ethereum's latest mainnet blocks (45M gas), an average of just 6.9 seconds. This reduces hardware costs to half that of competing products. This means that the Ethereum mainnet has the potential to achieve significant capacity expansion without sacrificing decentralization—making transactions cheaper, faster, and more secure.

What problem are you solving?

Currently, Ethereum generates a block every 12 seconds. Tens of thousands of nodes worldwide must redo all calculations and repeatedly verify transactions. Imagine this: every time you receive a transfer notification, you have to recalculate all of your bank's ledgers—extremely inefficient and costly. This is the current state of Ethereum.

The Ethereum Foundation has proposed a new approach: Real-Time Proof (RTP). Rather than requiring each node to rerun the transaction execution process, dedicated machines efficiently compute a compact "proof file." Other nodes only need to download and verify this proof—a method that reduces costs and increases efficiency.

However, the challenges are enormous: Ethereum transactions are inherently computationally complex, and generating mathematically rigorous proofs requires tens or even hundreds of times more computation than standard execution. Consequently, over the past two years, numerous zkVM technology companies around the world have been continuously working to reduce costs and shorten latency.

Features of Brevis and Pico Prism

Before 2025, the industry's most powerful real-time proof solution was the Succinct team's SP1 Hypercube. On a 36M gas block, it generated proofs within 10 seconds for approximately 40.9% of blocks, but required 160 RTX 4090 graphics cards, costing approximately $256,000.

Under the same conditions, Brevis' Pico Prism achieved proof generation for 98.9% of blocks within 10 seconds, an average of only 6.04 seconds, and at half the cost (64 RTX 5090s, with a total cost of approximately US$128,000).

Even more impressive is that even after Ethereum raised the mainnet block gas limit to 45M in July 2025, Pico Prism still achieved:

• 99.6% of blocks are proven within 12 seconds;
• 96.8% of blocks were proven within the strict real-time standard of “under 10 seconds”;
• The average proof time is only 6.9 seconds.

This demonstrates that Brevis' engineering design has made significant progress.

How does Pico Prism do it?

Pico Prism's ability to complete zero-knowledge proofs for Ethereum blocks in an incredibly short time isn't due to a single algorithmic breakthrough, but rather a system-wide engineering innovation. The team restructured the entire proof pipeline, optimizing the division of tasks between the CPU and GPU. Lightweight scheduling and preparation work is handled in parallel by the CPU, while all the intensive encryption and computational work is offloaded to the GPU, allowing each graphics card to operate at near-full capacity. This extreme resource utilization is the core reason Pico Prism outperforms its competitors on comparable hardware.

A more critical innovation lies in its multi-GPU, multi-machine collaborative architecture. Traditional proof systems are often limited to single-machine, single-GPU environments, limited by video memory and bandwidth, and their performance quickly reaches a ceiling. Pico Prism redesigns task sharding and communication methods, allowing GPUs on different servers to work together like an assembly line. Data is sliced, transferred, and aggregated across multiple nodes with exceptional efficiency, achieving near-linear scalability. In other words, adding GPUs is no longer just a matter of adding more resources; it increases speed proportionally.

All of this ultimately converges to a clear outcome: real-time proofs have become accessible to the masses. Generating a proof for an Ethereum block once required a cloud-based supercomputing cluster, but now, a commercially available RTX 5090 GPU can accomplish the same task. Pico Prism's success isn't the result of a single algorithmic miracle, but rather the reconstruction and industrial optimization of the entire proof process. It demonstrates that zero-knowledge proofs can be both efficient and cost-effective, a crucial step in Ethereum's journey toward the era of real-time proofs.

Visualization platform Ethproofs

In 2025, the Ethereum Foundation launched a public platform called Ethproofs to display proofs of Ethereum mainnet blocks generated in real time by various teams. The Ethproofs platform:

• Provide real-time data to publicly compare the speed and cost of proof generation among different teams;
• Encourage transparent competition in the ecosystem and promote continuous breakthroughs in the industry;
• Provide block proof files for download, allowing the public to verify authenticity by themselves.

Pico Prism has been incorporated into Ethproofs, and you can view the proofs they generate online in real time and even verify them in your browser.

What it means to ordinary users

The real-time proof technology brought by Pico Prism means that Ethereum will be even cheaper to use and transaction speeds will increase in the future. When the network no longer requires every node to rerun all transactions, instead verifying simple proof documents, on-chain congestion will be significantly alleviated. For ordinary users, daily operations like transferring funds, purchasing NFTs, and participating in DeFi will become more streamlined and significantly reduce fees.

At the same time, the widespread adoption of real-time proofs will further decentralize the Ethereum network. Previously, verifying each block required extensive hardware resources and high electricity costs, making it virtually impossible for ordinary households to participate. Now, Pico Prism has proven that real-time verification of mainnet blocks is possible using ordinary consumer-grade GPUs. This means that in the future, even ordinary people at home will be able to easily run an Ethereum node and participate in the verification and protection of the network.

Even more exciting is the potential for this technology to spawn entirely new application scenarios. For example, cross-chain transactions will become more secure, eliminating the need for additional trusted parties. Mobile wallets can become true light clients, eliminating the need for remote nodes. Even AI reasoning and large-scale off-chain computations can generate compact proof files that can be easily submitted to the blockchain for trusted verification. These new scenarios will inject new vitality into the entire blockchain ecosystem.

How far are we from our final goal?

• The Ethereum Foundation has set clear goals:
• More than 99% of block proofs are completed within 10 seconds;
• It can be run using no more than 10 kilowatts of power and hardware costing no more than $100,000;
• All code must be completely open source and allow third-party reproduction.

Currently, Pico Prism is close to this target line (hardware cost $128,000, and performance reaches 96.8% of blocks meeting the 10-second requirement). The Brevis team's next plan is to further reduce the number of GPUs to less than 16, so as to fully meet the "home-level" standard set by the Ethereum Foundation.

Summarize

The Ethereum community is undergoing a significant technological leap: transitioning from the traditional "re-execution of every transaction" to "real-time verification and proof." Pico Prism, launched by the Brevis team, is one of the key drivers of this crucial shift. Using a multi-GPU parallel architecture, they achieved real-time proofs for the latest 45M gas blocks on the Ethereum mainnet using standard consumer graphics cards for the first time. 96.8% of blocks were verified within 10 seconds, with an average time of just 6.9 seconds, and the hardware cost was halved compared to the previous state-of-the-art solution.

This breakthrough means that the Ethereum network can significantly scale in the future without sacrificing decentralization or security, resulting in lower transaction costs, stronger network performance, and affordable participation in blockchain verification for even ordinary households. Ethproofs, a transparent platform launched by the Ethereum Foundation, is tracking and verifying these developments in real time, allowing the public to stay informed of the latest technological advances and personally verify the real-time proofs produced by various teams.

Therefore, Brevis and Pico Prism are not only technological milestones for Ethereum, but also open up new prospects for the entire crypto ecosystem and deserve continued attention.