Ethereum Prepares zkEVM Upgrade to Cut Validator Hardware Requirements

Ethereum is planning to bring zkEVM, a technology that enables validators to verify proofs — small data packets that prove blocks are valid — by the end of 2025 to help lower hardware requirements.

In a recent blog post, Ethereum developers said validators will soon verify tiny zero‑knowledge proofs instead of re‑running every transaction in a block.

“On-prem realtime proving should require a maximum capital expenditure of 100k USD (at time of writing, it requires ~$80k in stake to run a validator). We expect this to come down over time even as the gas limit is increased,” the post says.

That change means home-based stakers can take part in securing the network using less powerful hardware, without needing high-end servers to run validator software.

Sophia Gold, a developer in the Ethereum Foundation’s protocol support team, explained to The Defiant that validators currently perform two functions: proposing blocks and attesting to their validity.

“Attesting is what matters for security, and switching to verifying execution proofs will significantly lower the barrier to entry by reducing the hardware required from a consumer desktop machine to a smartwatch or Raspberry Pi,” Gold said.

Gold went on to explain that proposers currently “matter for liveness and for censorship resistance, although censorship resistance will be ensured primarily through FOCIL [First-Order Censorship In Liveness, a mechanism to guarantee transaction inclusion] before verifying proofs is mandatory.”

Gold pointed out that only one prover needs to be live on the network to ensure liveness, adding that “proving doesn’t require as much decentralization as other network roles,” so long as provers operate outside of data centers and are geographically distributed.

Raye Hadi, a research associate at ARK Invest, said in an X post that the upgrade “represents the cultural shift Ethereum has been promising.”

“Along with expanding blobspace (cheaper DA), Ethereum is paving the way for scalable and privacy-preserving L1 infra. Execution still remains the challenge, but the vision is becoming clearer,” he said.

Commenting on the roadmap, ARK Invest founder and CEO Cathie Wood wrote in an X post: “I can’t say I understand all of the details here, but the Ethereum Foundation does seem to be proposing the right moves for scalability and privacy to maintain its lead in the institutional world.”

Optimism On All Fronts

A zero‑knowledge proof is a small piece of data that shows a block was processed correctly without revealing all steps. This approach already powers Layer 2 chains like zkSync Era and Polygon zkEVM beta, where it has demonstrated high throughput, average fees around $0.03, and a 96% success rate.

Put simply, a zkEVM adapts Ethereum’s smart contract engine to work with proofs, allowing validators to check blocks in milliseconds instead of re-executing transactions, which reduces CPU load and power usage.

The Ethereum Foundation says the upgrade will roll out in stages: First, validators will have the option to run ZK clients that verify three separate proofs for each block, offering diversity in validation. Second, once enough stake shifts to ZK clients, Ethereum plans to raise the gas limit and move fully to proof verification.

The Ethereum Foundation wants ZK proofs to be small and fast. Each proof should be under 300 KB, take less than 10 seconds to generate, and use no more than 10 kilowatts of power, about the limit of what a home setup can handle.

“Most residential homes have at least 10kW entering from the street, and some will have circuits intended for electric appliances or charging electric vehicles with 10kW capacity. Therefore, real-time proving must be possible on hardware running at 10kW or less,” the Ethereum Foundation said.

The long-term goal is to make it easier for more people to run the system from home while keeping the network secure as transaction volume grows. According to data from Etherscan, Ethereum has seen a steady rise in total transactions since 2017, hitting a peak of over 1.9 million on January 14, 2024.

Asked whether there are specific targets or timelines for lowering the cost of proving hardware, Gold said Ethereum will first raise the gas limit through improvements in client performance and protocol upgrades like pipelining and repricing. During this stage, “we expect proving performance to increase at a much faster rate than gas limit increases,” Gold predicted.

“After verifying proofs is mandatory, the gas limit will be increased based on prover performance itself. There will be a limit to the L1 gas limit based on execution becoming the bottleneck to proving — at which point we’ll consider protocol changes to accelerate it, like changing the VM and state tree — and eventually the ultimate bottleneck of data throughput,” Gold said.

As for hardware costs, Gold explained that the timeline depends on how prover performance progresses relative to client efficiency, the pace of protocol development, and scaling solutions like blobs. Still, the track record of innovation in the zero-knowledge space offers “great optimism on all fronts,” Gold said.