ZK Roadmap "Dawn Moment": Is the roadmap for Ethereum's endgame speeding up comprehensively?

Original authors: TechFlow, imToken

Reprint: Mars Finance, Daisy

Fun fact, besides the Ethereum mainnet, what is currently the number one RWA chain?

The answer is——ZKsync.

Indeed, this original L2 “Four Heavenly Kings” that was recently praised by Vitalik for “doing a lot of underrated but very valuable work in the Ethereum ecosystem” is becoming the most representative project sample in the Ethereum ZK path.

Behind this, there are actually signals indicating that Ethereum is accelerating towards the “singularity moment” in the era of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP): Ethereum's ZK route is transitioning from L2 expansion tools to a mainline logic that truly reshapes trust, performance, and ecological structure.

An Ethereum belonging to the “Proof Era” is gradually taking shape.

1. ZKsync, the new flagship of Ethereum ZKP

As an Ethereum scaling solution based on the ZK Rollups architecture developed by Matter Labs, ZKsync can be said to have been born with a golden spoon among many Ethereum Layer 2 projects, being an early funded ZK Rollup scaling solution by the Ethereum Foundation.

It can be said that since 2019, it has almost grown alongside Ethereum's ZK technology route.

In March 2019, received funding from the fifth wave of the Ethereum Foundation's grant program to support its work on L2 scaling with zero-knowledge proofs.

September 2019: Secured $2 million in seed funding led by Placeholder VC;

March 2021: Completed $50 million Series A financing (led by Union Square Ventures);

However, due to the prolonged delay, ZKsync has not been smooth sailing over the years.

First, during the period from 2021 to 2023, when the Rollup competitive landscape was still unclear, OP layer 2 projects such as Optimism and Arbitrum gained an advantage, while new public chains like Solana and Aptos also rose to prominence, resulting in ZK-based solutions like ZKsync being marginalized by the market due to their long iteration cycles.

It was not until the mainnet went live and the airdrop was implemented last year that ZKsync re-entered the public eye, but the response was not all applause. Its airdrop distribution mechanism has been controversial, and the trust crisis triggered by the contract vulnerability incident has not yet subsided. The development team, Matter Labs, has also fallen into a whirlpool of public opinion due to alleged intellectual property disputes.

Amidst this chorus of pessimism, ZKsync's progress on both the technical and ecological fronts remains remarkable. Not only has it continued to advance core underlying research and development, but last month it also officially launched the upgraded version of ZK Stack—Atlas—which represents a critical step for ZKsync towards “enterprise-level blockchain implementation.”

Source: ZKsync

It integrates a high-performance sorter that can handle 25,000 to 30,000 transactions per second and supports sub-second confirmation with the Airbender proof system.

It is worth noting that Airbender is currently the fastest single GPU verification zkVM, for example, on an RTX 4090, the average verification time is only 51 seconds, with costs as low as 0.01 dollars, setting a new industry record.

Another important breakthrough of ZKsync is the Prividiums private chain architecture, which allows enterprises to interact with the Ethereum mainnet in full compatibility while ensuring privacy, enabling the validation of transaction validity without exposing ledger information, thus achieving seamless interoperability between public and private systems.

This means that, whether it is on-chain securities, cross-border payments, or foreign exchange settlements, enterprises can achieve instant settlement and privacy protection within a compliant framework—this capability also makes ZKsync an ideal underlying layer for RWA (real-world assets) on-chain.

For this reason, ZKsync's performance in the RWA field is particularly outstanding. According to rwa.xyz data, as of the time of writing, its on-chain tokenized asset issuance has exceeded 2.4 billion USD, second only to the Ethereum mainnet, making it the second largest RWA issuance network in the entire network.

In other words, ZKsync is not only a testing ground for ZK technology, but is also becoming a primary ledger engine for real asset on-chain.

II. Has the end of zkEVM really arrived?

For a long time, zkEVM has been regarded as one of the “ultimate solutions” for scaling Ethereum, not only because it can solve performance bottlenecks, but also because it redefines the trust mechanism of blockchain.

The core idea is to enable the Ethereum mainnet to have the capability to generate and verify ZK proofs. In other words, after each block is executed, it can output a verifiable mathematical proof, allowing other nodes to confirm the correctness of the results without needing to recalculate.

Specifically, the advantages of zkEVM are concentrated in three aspects:

Faster verification: Nodes do not need to replay transactions, they just need to verify the zkProof to confirm the validity of the block;

Lighter burden: effectively reduces the computational and storage pressure of full nodes, making it easier for light nodes and cross-chain validators to participate.

Stronger security: Compared to the OP route, ZK's state proofs are confirmed on-chain in real-time, with higher resistance to tampering and clearer security boundaries.

And now, all of this is accelerating to become a reality.

Recently, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) officially released the L1 zkEVM real-time proof standard, marking the first formal integration of the ZK approach into the mainnet-level technical roadmap. This standard is seen as a crucial starting point for the comprehensive introduction of zero-knowledge proof mechanisms—within the next year, the Ethereum mainnet will gradually transition to an execution environment that supports zkEVM verification, achieving a structural shift from “heavy execution” to “verification proof.”

According to the technical roadmap published by EF, the block proof delay target is controlled within 10 seconds, the size of a single zk proof is less than 300 KB, and it adopts a 128-bit security level, avoids trusted setup, and plans to allow household devices to participate in proof generation, lowering the threshold for decentralization.

This means that the Ethereum mainnet is no longer just a settlement layer, but has upgraded to a “verifiable world computer” with self-verification capabilities.

Against this backdrop, ZKsync is becoming one of the earliest practitioners. Its founder Alex stated that with the completion of the Atlas upgrade, ZKsync has truly achieved verification integration with the Ethereum mainnet—the operating rhythm, confirmation speed, and liquidity of both are almost completely synchronized.

Currently, the transaction final confirmation time of ZKsync is about 1 second, which is much faster than the 12-second block interval of the Ethereum mainnet. This means that conducting transactions on ZKsync is essentially consistent with the mainnet, only requiring a wait for the mainnet confirmation. More importantly, the cross-chain mechanism of ZK Rollup no longer has a challenge period of up to 7 days like Optimistic Rollup, resulting in a significant increase in transaction and fund flow speed.

Under this structure, L2 is no longer a fragmented extension branch, but truly becomes a “parallel expansion network” of the Ethereum mainnet. Liquidity does not have to be repeatedly divided, and verification delays are significantly shortened. The long-standing issue of “L2 fragmentation” that has plagued the Ethereum ecosystem has finally found a technical solution.

Three, what kind of future is Ethereum heading towards?

If you have been following Vitalik's activities on social media recently, you will notice a clear trend - he frequently retweets discussions related to Ethereum scalability, especially topics about zkEVM and the evolution of L2 architecture.

Among these mentions, in addition to ZKsync, there are representative projects in the ZK ecosystem such as Starknet, all of which point in the same direction: the ZK era of Ethereum is accelerating comprehensively.

It is worth noting that, barring any unforeseen circumstances, Ethereum's next network upgrade, Fusaka, will be launched on the mainnet on December 3. It can be said that this version is one of the most influential network evolutions following The Merge and Dencun, with the core goal of making L2 cheaper, faster, and more open.

It brings higher data throughput for Rollup through the PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) mechanism; at the same time, it introduces a new branch process called Blob-only parameter, reconstructing network bandwidth, storage, and data writing methods, further optimizing mainnet resource utilization.

For Rollup developers, this means lower data write costs and more flexible interaction space; for wallet and infrastructure providers, it means supporting more complex interactions and heavier load node environments; for end users, it results in lower experience costs and faster response times for on-chain operations; for enterprises and compliant users, EVM expansion and state proof simplification will also make on-chain interactions easier to integrate into regulatory systems and large-scale deployments.

Therefore, when zkEVM is launched together with Fusaka, the Rollup ecosystem is expected to enter a truly scalable phase. Looking back over the past few years, Ethereum's roadmap has been constantly evolving:

From the consensus upgrade of The Merge, to the data layering of Dencun, and the upcoming Fusaka and zkEVM, the entire main line revolves around a core proposition: how to achieve a balance between decentralization and scalability.

Today, this answer seems to be emerging in the light of ZK's mathematics.