Brevis, a zero-knowledge computing company, announced that its Pico Prism zkVM had reached 99.6% proving coverage for Ethereum blocks in under 12 seconds. The October 2025 test used 45 million gas blocks and 64 RTX 5090 GPUs.
The system also proved 96.8% of the tested blocks in under 10 seconds, with an average proving time of 6.9 seconds. Brevis said the setup cost about $128,000, half the hardware cost of the previous benchmark it compared against.
A few weeks ago we revealed the ProverNet whitepaper for the first time.
Today, Brevis ProverNet mainnet beta is live!
Our decentralized marketplace for ZK proof generation is now open to provers & applications🧵 https://t.co/58PmwAUsvb
— Brevis (@brevis_zk) December 8, 2025
The result mattered because Ethereum currently asks validators to re-run transactions in each block. With zero-knowledge proofs, one prover can do the hard work and other computers can check the proof much faster. This could help Ethereum handle larger blocks without making validator hardware too expensive.
How Pico Prism improved Ethereum proving
Pico Prism used a distributed system instead of putting the proving work on one machine. It split the job across several GPUs and servers, allowing many parts of the work to run at the same time. Brevis said this design was a major reason for the speed gain.
The October result was also important because Ethereum had moved to a 45 million gas limit. A gas limit sets how much computation a block can contain. Proving larger blocks quickly is therefore important if Ethereum wants to raise its capacity without making validation harder.
Brevis compared its result with Succinct’s SP1 Hypercube, which had reached 40.9% coverage under 10 seconds on 36 million gas blocks. Pico Prism reached 98.9% on the same 36 million gas test set, while cutting the reported hardware cost from $256,000 to $128,000.
The goal is not simply to make proofs faster. Ethereum researchers want proofs to let ordinary validators verify blocks without having to repeat all the work needed to create them. If that works at scale, the network could raise its capacity while keeping the cost of verification low.
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Pico Prism has moved far beyond the original result
Brevis has since pushed the system much further. In February 2026, it reduced the Pico Prism setup from 64 RTX 5090 GPUs across eight machines to 16 GPUs across two machines. The company reported similar proving performance while cutting the GPU cost to about $32,000 and total hardware cost to roughly $100,000.
The next step came in September 2026 with Pico 3.0. Brevis said the new system can prove 99% of the same 7,200 Ethereum mainnet blocks within 9.10 seconds using only four GPUs on one machine. It also reached 100 bits of provable security.
This is a major change from the original 64-GPU result. It means the hardware needed for real-time proving has fallen sharply in less than a year. The new system is also being tested against Ethereum’s larger 60 million gas blocks, rather than the 45 million gas limit used in the original announcement.
The remaining question is whether this technology can meet Ethereum’s full security and power targets and become part of the network itself. Brevis has shown that fast proving is possible, but turning a working prover into a trusted part of Ethereum still requires testing, open benchmarks, and strong security checks.
Meanwhile, Starknet’s v0.14.0 upgrade enhanced decentralization and transaction speed on Ethereum Layer 2. Its work shows that Ethereum scaling is being tackled from several directions, while real-time proving could change how the base layer checks transactions.
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