Brevis's Pico Prism Achieves 99.6% Real-Time Ethereum Proving on Consumer Hardware, Reducing Costs by 50%

Executive Summary

Brevis, an infrastructure company specializing in zero-knowledge proofs, announced that its Pico Prism zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) has achieved 99.6% real-time proving for current-generation Ethereum mainnet blocks. This breakthrough significantly reduces hardware costs by 50% and improves proving times, aligning closely with the Ethereum Foundation's long-term goals for network scalability and decentralization.

The Event in Detail

On October 15th, 2025, Brevis reported that its Pico Prism zkVM demonstrated 99.6% proving coverage within 12 seconds for Ethereum mainnet blocks with a 45 million gas limit. Furthermore, the system achieved 96.8% real-time proving coverage within 10 seconds. This performance is a notable improvement over existing solutions, which previously achieved 40.9% coverage for 36 million gas blocks. The average proving time for 45 million gas blocks with Pico Prism was 6.9 seconds, and 6.04 seconds for 36 million gas blocks, significantly faster than the 10.3 seconds reported by competing technologies.

Financial Mechanics and Technical Breakthroughs

The financial efficiency of Pico Prism is evidenced by a 50% reduction in GPU hardware costs. Brevis's solution requires 64 RTX 5090 GPUs at an approximate cost of $128,000 to achieve comparable performance to systems requiring 160 RTX 4090 GPUs priced at $256,000. This translates to a 3.4x improvement in performance when considering combined speed and cost efficiency metrics.

This advancement stems from a complete architectural redesign, moving from single-machine proving to a distributed multi-GPU clustering system. This new multi-machine, multi-GPU architecture allows for the parallelization of high-compute tasks across multiple GPUs, while CPU resources manage setup tasks. This modular design, treating the central VM as a "glue" for specialized co-processors, directly addresses the trade-off between generality and performance in zkVMs.

The Ethereum Foundation, in its July 2025 roadmap, outlined clear goals for zkEVM integration, including 99% coverage, sub-10 second proving, hardware costs under $100,000, and power consumption under 10kW for home proving. While Pico Prism is currently at 96.8% for sub-10 second proving and $128,000 for hardware, its performance metrics bring the technology significantly closer to these established targets, making the path to Ethereum L1 zkEVM integration clearer.

Business Strategy and Market Positioning

Brevis positions itself as an "infinite compute layer" for Web3, aiming to enable more powerful and scalable decentralized applications. The Pico Prism zkVM is a key component of this strategy, addressing a critical bottleneck in Ethereum's transition to base layer zero-knowledge verification. By making real-time proving economically viable and production-ready, Brevis is directly supporting Ethereum's future capacity needs and its goal of integrating a native Layer 1 zkEVM by mid-2026. This move also supports the Ethereum Foundation's vision of "home proving," allowing more individuals to participate as validators with lower hardware requirements, thereby enhancing decentralization.

Broader Market Implications

This breakthrough by Brevis has significant implications for the broader Web3 ecosystem and Ethereum's scalability. By substantially reducing the computational cost and time for verifying Ethereum transactions, Pico Prism can enhance the network's security, scalability, and decentralization. It facilitates the acceleration of ZK-rollups and other ZK-based solutions by providing a more efficient and accessible underlying proof generation mechanism. This efficiency is expected to attract more developers and projects to the Ethereum ecosystem, fostering innovation and potentially increasing transaction throughput and reducing fees. The advancement aligns with Ethereum's long-term strategy to solve key challenges: improving scalability by reducing validator processing burden, increasing decentralization through lower hardware barriers, and enhancing privacy by validating transactions without revealing user data.

Expert Commentary

Mo Dong, CEO and co-founder of Brevis, commented on the development, stating, "The numbers speak for themselves. We've built infrastructure that can handle what Ethereum is actually producing today. This is faster performance leading to economic efficiency that makes real-time proving viable for production deployment." This statement underscores the practical and economic viability that Pico Prism brings to real-time zero-knowledge proving for Ethereum.