What You Need to Know:

• Matter Labs presented its latest cryptographic prover “Airbender” at the Permissionless conference.
• This prover plays a vital role in layer-2 solutions, as it creates zero-knowledge proofs that are essential for integrating with Ethereum, thus assuring security.
• The ZKsync development team boasts that Airbender can generate Ethereum block proofs in a mere 35 seconds using just a single GPU, exceeding its competitors’ performance benchmarks.

Matter Labs, known for the ZKsync layer-2 network, revealed the Airbender at a recent conference focused on blockchain advancements. A critical component of layer-2 solutions, a prover generates zero-knowledge proofs to be published on the main Ethereum blockchain, ensuring the integrity and link between the two systems.

According to ZKsync, Airbender stands out as the fastest in its category, delivering Ethereum block proofs in just 35 seconds on a single GPU, surpassing other solutions in the market.

Fast transaction speeds may reduce costs for users: “We’re entering fraction of a cent territory which is essential for pivotal use cases like micropayments, high-frequency trading, and decentralized social applications,” stated Alex Gluchowski, co-founder of Matter Labs, during a discussion with CoinDesk. “Accelerated proofs lead to quicker finality, more affordable applications, and importantly, proofs that can be generated anywhere—not just in vast GPU farms.”

The Airbender, an open-sourced zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), is built on RISC-V—a new programming framework recommended by Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, to enhance blockchain efficiency.

Gluchowski remarked, “We’ve been developing ZKsync Airbender for over a year, identifying where Ethereum should progress and what applications using ZK technology would eventually require. Vitalik’s recent commentary validated our direction, although we’ve been moving along this path for some time.”

While still in its preliminary stages, Matter Labs has released an application allowing developers to experiment with the new prover. If all proceeds as planned and ZKsync governance endorses it, Airbender will be integrated in a scheduled protocol upgrade later this summer.

“ZKsync Airbender demonstrates Ethereum blocks within 35 seconds using a single GPU. This marks the dawn of transformative changes: home-proving, real-time cross-chain interaction, and ZK applications capable of immediate validation. This is the cornerstone for an Internet of verifiable, interconnected chains,” Gluchowski expressed enthusiastically.

Read more: Vitalik Buterin Proposes Replacing Ethereum’s EVM With RISC-V