ZKsync’s ZK token rose 6.2% after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly praised Airbender Prime, the project’s new Ethereum prover.
What Airbender Prime actually does
ZKsync unveiled Airbender Prime on October 13, 2026. The pitch is real-time Ethereum proving without a rack of specialized hardware.
A prover is the machine that produces cryptographic receipts showing that a batch of transactions was processed correctly. Anyone can check those receipts quickly without redoing the original work.
In ZKsync’s test run, Airbender Prime proved 99% of 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds each. Every single block in that stretch was proven in under 12 seconds.
The hardware behind those numbers was one NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU.
ZKsync also leads the ETHproofs.org public leaderboard on average proving time, GPU efficiency, and cost.
Under the hood, Airbender Prime is built on hash-based STARKs, a proof system chosen with post-quantum security in mind. ZKsync plans to implement Keccak-256 for Layer 1 proofs. The system also supports multi-GPU configurations, so one card is the floor rather than the ceiling.
Buterin’s compliment came with homework
Buterin weighed in on October 15, 2026, two days after the launch. He congratulated ZKsync and said the speed race for zkEVMs is “definitively won.”
Then came the pivot. Buterin argued that attention should now shift away from how fast zkEVMs are and toward how secure they are. He called for formal verification to make sure provers align with Ethereum’s specifications. He also advocated for hard limits on prover costs relative to gas prices.
The ZK token’s 6.2% gain coincided with the announcement and Buterin’s comments.
Why accessible hardware is the real headline
ZKsync frames its work on efficient, verifiable computation as part of a broader Ethereum goal: lowering the hardware barriers to verification. The project has also pointed to finance and other industries as places where cheaper independent verification could matter.
What this means for ZK holders and the zkEVM field
There are concrete items worth tracking. These include the planned Keccak-256 implementation for Layer 1 proofs, how multi-GPU setups perform in practice, and how the post-quantum design holds up under outside scrutiny.
The biggest signal may be how ZKsync responds to Buterin’s call for formal verification. Matching Ethereum’s specifications with mathematical proof is slower, harder work than shaving seconds off a benchmark.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.