Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledges a major breakthrough in zero-knowledge (ZK) technology this week

Buterin's comments came in response to a post from developer Uma Roy, who announced that her team had achieved real-time Ethereum proving

In a recent post on X, a social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his skepticism towards a major breakthrough in zero-knowledge (ZK) technology.

Buterin's comments came in response to a post from developer Uma Roy, who announced that her team at StarkWare had achieved real-time Ethereum proving, an accomplishment many in the cryptography community considered a "moonshot" just a year ago.

Roy's post, which quickly amassed over a million views and 60,000 likes, highlighted the persistent efforts of her team and the StarkWare company to overcome performance gaps and verification hurdles.

The post concluded with a video showcasing a real-time prover, capable of processing transactions at speeds relevant for Layer 1 integration.

Buterin, known for his contributions to the blockchain space, raised several concerns regarding the technology's readiness for production.

"The good news is, this is truly amazing progress, and we're getting close to the types of performance figures that would be useful for integrating into the base protocol," Buterin stated.

However, he pointed out that the current proving system only accounts for average-case scenarios and does not yet address worst-case performance, something necessary for reliable and secure Layer 1 implementation.

Moreover, Buterin emphasized the lack of formal verification, meaning the system has not undergone rigorous mathematical proof to guarantee its correctness.

"In the high-stakes world of crypto, especially for a chain like Ethereum with its core structure and financial risk, this is a critical weakness," Buterin added.

Buterin also noted the high energy consumption of the system, which reportedly uses around 100 kilowatts of power, making it impractical for general-purpose or home-based use.

"Ideally, we'd want a system that can fit on a machine with around 10 kilowatts of capacity, Buterin said, adding that "if the prover can be small enough to put in someone's house, we can also have more decentralized proving, e.g., with a new prover every epoch."

Finally, Buterin touched upon Ethereum's long-term scaling goals, specifically plans to increase the Layer 1 gas limit by 10x to 100x.

"To handle that kind of gas limit, we'd need the chain to be able to process about 1000 to 4000 transactions per second, on average, throughout the whole epoch (64k blocks). But to get to 10x to 100x gas limit, we'd need even more optimization in the proving performance."

Despite these concerns, Buterin expressed his admiration for Roy and her team's work, which he described as "awesome."

"Still lots of work to do to get to the point where we can use this in the base protocol, but this is still a huge milestone in the amazing progress of the zkbchain space."