Ethereum News Today: Brevis' Pico Prism Makes Ethereum Real-Time Proving Economically Viable

Brevis, a Singapore-based blockchain infrastructure firm, has unveiled , a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) that achieves for Ethereum mainnet blocks with a 45 million gas limit-using consumer-grade hardware. This marks a significant leap in Ethereum's scalability efforts, outperforming prior state-of-the-art solutions by 3.4x in combined speed and cost efficiency.

Pico Prism leverages a distributed multi-GPU architecture, utilizing 64 NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs to prove 96.8% of Ethereum blocks under 10 seconds, meeting the Ethereum Foundation's (EF) real-time proving standard. By comparison, Succinct's SP1 Hypercube, previously the leading solution, achieved only 40.9% real-time proving coverage for 36 million gas blocks using 160 RTX 4090 GPUs and $256,000 in hardware costs. Pico Prism reduces GPU costs by 50% ($128,000) and halves average proving time to 6.04 seconds.

The system's efficiency stems from a modular design that decomposes the proving process into parallelizable phases, offloading compute-heavy tasks to GPUs while CPUs handle setup operations. This approach enables near-linear acceleration across multiple machines, achieving what the EF terms "true real-time proving" at Ethereum scale.

Ethereum's current consensus model requires over 800,000 validators to re-execute every transaction, creating computational waste as the network grows. Pico Prism shifts this paradigm by generating cryptographic proofs that eliminate the need for redundant re-execution. Instead of thousands of validators performing identical calculations, a single prover generates a proof that others verify in milliseconds.

The Ethereum Foundation's 2025 roadmap targets , , and for on-prem proving. Pico Prism is just 2.2% shy of the 99% coverage goal and plans to further reduce GPU requirements to 16 RTX 5090 units in the coming months.

Mo Dong, Brevis CEO, called the achievement "faster performance leading to economic efficiency that makes real-time proving viable for production deployment". The breakthrough could unlock higher gas limits, lower transaction fees, and complex DeFi operations previously constrained by Ethereum's computational limits.

For developers, Pico Prism enables trustless smart contracts, privacy-preserving protocols, and scalable dApps by offloading computation to an off-chain engine while preserving L1 security guarantees. Protocols like PancakeSwap and Frax are already testing the technology.

While Pico Prism addresses hardware costs and speed, scalability challenges remain. The system requires specialized GPUs and stable infrastructure, potentially limiting adoption in regions with energy or cooling constraints. Additionally, widespread deployment depends on community adoption and further optimization.

Brevis aims to close the 2.2% gap to the EF's 99% coverage target and reduce costs further. The company also plans to contribute to open benchmarking initiatives to ensure transparency in Ethereum's transition to zero-knowledge verification.

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[1] Pico Prism-99.6% Real-Time Proving for 45M Gas Ethereum Blocks (https://blog.brevis.network/2025/10/15/pico-prism-99-6-real-time-proving-for-45m-gas-ethereum-blocks-on-consumer-hardware/)

[2] Brevis Achieves Industry-First 99.6% Real-Time Proving for Current Ethereum Blocks (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/brevis-achieves-industry-first-99-6-real-time-proving-for-current-ethereum-blocks-with-50-cost-reduction-1035367729)

[10] Succinct SP1 Hypercube. All about Hypercube from Medium (https://medium.com/@victorokolieau/succinct-sp1-hypercube-3309fa27b388)

[11] Succinct Labs SP1 Hypercube Breakthrough Generates Proof of History for Ethereum Scalability (https://www.tekedia.com/succinct-labs-sp1-hypercube-breakthrough-generates-proof-of-history-for-ethereum-scalability/)