Brevis achieves unprecedented 99% proving speed on Ethereum

Brevis is now knocking on the door of the Ethereum Foundation’s ultimate proving goals. Its latest numbers show 96.8% real-time coverage, putting it a whisper away from the sub-ten-second target that would redefine base-layer security.

According to a press release shared with crypto.news on Oct. 15, Brevis’s Pico Prism zkVM has become the first to achieve 99.6% proving coverage for current Ethereum blocks under 12 seconds, with 96.8% of blocks proven in what the industry considers real time, under 10 seconds.

This performance, benchmarked against the mainnet’s current 45 million gas limit, was achieved alongside a 50% reduction in the GPU hardware costs previously required for such operations.

Brevis CEO and co-founder Mo Dong stated that the infrastructure now handles “what Ethereum is actually producing today,” marking a transition from research to a production-ready system.

A step toward Ethereum’s zero-knowledge future

Brevis frames this performance leap as a direct answer to one of Ethereum’s most fundamental inefficiencies: the massive computational redundancy of its consensus mechanism.

Today, every transaction on a platform like Uniswap is re-executed by more than 800,000 validators globally, a design that ensures security at the cost of immense waste. This redundancy is the primary reason block gas limits have remained artificially low, as validators require affordable hardware to keep pace with re-execution demands.

Pico Prism demonstrates that verification can be scaled through cryptographic proofs instead of computational brute force. In this model, a single prover generates a mathematical proof of a block’s validity, and the entire network can verify that proof in milliseconds, bypassing the need for redundant execution.

From Brevis’s perspective, this performance milestone also clarifies the roadmap toward full Ethereum Layer-1 zkEVM integration. The Ethereum Foundation’s July 2025 goals set ambitious thresholds: 99% coverage, sub-10-second proving, and affordable hardware capable of home-level validation.

With only a 2.2% gap from those metrics, Brevis is positioning Pico Prism as a near-ready layer for Ethereum’s base protocol. The result is an environment where validators, developers, and users all benefit from higher liveness and stronger censorship resistance.

Per the statement, developers are already leveraging this infrastructure to build a new class of dApps. Major protocols, including PancakeSwap, Usual, and Frax, are using Brevis’s proving technology for advanced trading hooks, trustless reward distribution, and cross-chain verification.

These applications offer a live preview of a post-scaling Ethereum, where developers can tap into what is effectively infinite off-chain computing power while maintaining the ironclad security guarantees of Ethereum L1.