When Ethereum no longer needs "re-execution," the real-time proof revolution of Brevis Pico

Author: ZHIXIONG PAN

Recently, the Ethereum technical community has been discussing "Real-time Proving" (RTP). Simply put, it means that we no longer need all Ethereum nodes to spend a lot of resources "re-executing" every transaction, but instead use a cheaper and faster way to verify a small proof. However, achieving this is very difficult. Previously, even the best-performing technologies could only verify about 40% of blocks within 10 seconds, with hardware costs reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now, the Brevis team's new technology, Pico Prism, has broken through this bottleneck: they have achieved the generation of valid proofs for 96.8% of Ethereum's latest specification (45M gas) mainnet blocks within 10 seconds using consumer-grade graphics cards (64 RTX 5090), with an average time of only 6.9 seconds, and hardware costs reduced to half of previous competitors. This means that the Ethereum mainnet truly has the potential for significant scaling without sacrificing decentralization—transactions will be cheaper, faster, and more secure.

What Problem Does It Solve?

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

The Ethereum Foundation has proposed a new idea: Real-time Proving (RTP). This means that instead of having each node rerun the transaction execution process, specialized machines calculate a small "proof file" efficiently, and other nodes only need to download and verify this proof—resulting in lower costs and higher efficiency.

But the challenges are immense: the computational load of Ethereum transactions is inherently complex, and generating mathematically rigorous proofs requires computation that is dozens or even hundreds of times higher than ordinary execution. Therefore, over the past two years, many zkVM technology companies around the world have been trying to reduce costs and shorten delays.

Features of Brevis and Pico Prism

Before 2025, the strongest real-time proving solution in the industry was the SP1 Hypercube from the Succinct team. It achieved about 40.9% of blocks generating proofs within 10 seconds on a 36M gas block, but required 160 RTX 4090 graphics cards, with a total cost of about $256,000.

In contrast, Brevis's Pico Prism achieved 98.9% of blocks generating proofs within 10 seconds under the same conditions, with an average time of only 6.04 seconds, and costs reduced to half (64 RTX 5090, total cost about $128,000).

Even more impressively, when Ethereum raises the mainnet block gas limit to 45M in July 2025, Pico Prism still achieved:

99.6% of blocks proved within 12 seconds;
96.8% of blocks generating proofs under the strict "10 seconds" real-time standard;
An average proof time of only 6.9 seconds.

This indicates that Brevis's engineering design has made significant progress.

How Does Pico Prism Achieve This?

Pico Prism can complete zero-knowledge proofs for Ethereum blocks in an extremely short time not through a single algorithm breakthrough, but through a system-level engineering innovation. The team restructured the entire proof pipeline, making the task division between CPU and GPU more reasonable. Lightweight scheduling and preparation work are handled in parallel by the CPU, while all intensive cryptographic and computational parts are pushed to the GPU, allowing each graphics card to operate at nearly full load. This extreme resource utilization is the core reason why Pico Prism leads competitors with the same hardware.

The more critical innovation lies in its multi-GPU, multi-machine collaborative architecture. Traditional proving systems are often limited to single-machine, single-card environments, constrained by memory and bandwidth, leading to rapid performance ceilings. Pico Prism redesigned task sharding and communication methods, allowing GPUs on different servers to work together like a production line. The efficiency of data being cut, transmitted, and aggregated between multiple nodes is extremely high, achieving nearly linear scalability. In other words, adding GPUs no longer just means stacking resources, but proportionally increasing speed.

All of this ultimately converges into an obvious result: real-time proving becomes "democratized." In the past, generating a proof for an Ethereum block might require a cloud supercomputing cluster, but now, the same task can be accomplished with commercially available RTX 5090s. The success of Pico Prism is not a miracle of a single algorithm, but a reconstruction and industrial optimization of the entire proof process. It proves that zero-knowledge proofs can be both efficient and economical, which is a key step for Ethereum towards the "real-time proving" era.

Visualization Platform Ethproofs

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

Provides real-time data, publicly comparing the speed and cost of proofs generated by different teams;
Encourages transparent competition in the ecosystem, promoting continuous breakthroughs in the industry;
Offers block proof file downloads, allowing the public to verify authenticity independently.

Pico Prism has been included in Ethproofs, and you can view their real-time generated proofs online and even verify these files in your browser.

Significance for Ordinary Users

The real-time proving technology brought by Pico Prism means that the future cost of using Ethereum will be lower, and transaction speeds will be faster. When the network no longer needs each node to repeatedly run all transactions but only verifies simple proof files, the issue of on-chain congestion will be significantly alleviated. For ordinary users, the experience of daily operations such as transferring funds, purchasing NFTs, and participating in DeFi will be smoother, and costs will be significantly reduced.

At the same time, the popularization of real-time proving will also make the Ethereum network truly more decentralized. Previously, due to the enormous hardware resources and high electricity costs required to verify each block, ordinary households could hardly participate. Now, Pico Prism has proven that real-time verification of mainnet blocks can be achieved using ordinary consumer-grade GPUs, meaning that in the future, ordinary households can easily run Ethereum nodes and participate in network verification and protection.

Even more exciting is that this technology may give rise to entirely new application scenarios. For example, cross-chain transactions will become safer without the need for additional trusted parties; mobile wallets can truly become light clients without relying on remote nodes; even AI reasoning and large off-chain computations can generate small 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 the ultimate goal?

The Ethereum Foundation has set clear goals:
More than 99% of block proofs completed within 10 seconds;
Hardware that consumes no more than 10 kilowatts of power and costs no more than $100,000 to operate;
All code must be fully open-source, allowing third parties to reproduce it.

Currently, Pico Prism is close to this target line (hardware cost $128,000, performance reaching 96.8% of blocks meeting the 10-second requirement), and the Brevis team's next plan is to further reduce the number of GPUs to 16 or fewer, thereby fully achieving the "household-level" standard set by the Ethereum Foundation.

Conclusion

The Ethereum community is undergoing a significant technological leap: transitioning from the traditional "re-executing every transaction" to "real-time verifying proofs." The Pico Prism launched by the Brevis team is one of the key drivers of this critical shift. Through a multi-GPU parallel architecture design, they have achieved real-time proofs for Ethereum's latest 45M gas blocks using ordinary consumer-grade graphics cards for the first time: 96.8% of blocks can complete verification proofs within 10 seconds, with an average time of only 6.9 seconds, and hardware costs reduced to half of the previous most advanced solutions.

This breakthrough means that in the future, the Ethereum network can significantly scale without sacrificing decentralization and security, transaction costs will be lower, network performance will be stronger, and even ordinary households can participate in blockchain verification at a lower cost. The public and transparent platform Ethproofs initiated by the Ethereum Foundation is tracking and verifying these advancements in real-time, allowing the public to stay updated on the latest technological achievements and personally verify the real-time proof results of various teams.

Therefore, Brevis and Pico Prism are not only a technological milestone for Ethereum but also open up a new landscape for the entire crypto ecosystem, warranting continued attention.

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