ZKsync’s Airbender hits real-time proving on one GPU, and Vitalik Buterin weighs in

ZKsync says it has built the first Ethereum prover that can generate proofs in real time on a single GPU. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded two days later with praise, and with homework. The system is called Airbender Prime, and ZKsync announced it on October 13, 2026. Buterin publicly commended the team on October 15, 2026. He also argued that the focus should now move toward verifying zkEVM security, including system correctness and limits on how much proving can cost. What Airbender Prime actually did ZKsync’s headline numbers come from a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU. Across 7,200 Ethereum mainnet blocks, Airbender Prime proved 99% in under 10 seconds. Every block in the set was proved within 12 seconds. The result places Airbender at the top of the ETHproofs.org public leaderboard, where it leads on proving time, GPU efficiency and cost-effectiveness. A prior iteration of Airbender posted 21.8 MHz of throughput on an H100 GPU. The new version moves the conversation from raw throughput figures to something more tangible: keeping up with live Ethereum blocks on hardware you could plausibly buy. Under the hood, Airbender relies on hash-based STARKs, a famil...