Brevis has received collective praise from the Ethereum community, has ZK finally landed towards practical use?

Original Title: “Ethereum Community Gives Collective Thumbs Up, Has ZK Technology Finally Transitioned from Laboratory to Production-Grade Tools?”

Original author: 1912212.eth

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Reprint: Mars Finance

Recently, the discussion around Brevis has spread from technical forums to social media, with the official Ethereum Twitter and renowned Ethereum researcher Justin Drake posting a lengthy article, and Vitalik also sharing it. What remarkable breakthroughs does Brevis have that suddenly puts it at the center of the technical stage?

ZK Data Computing and Verification Platform

Brevis is a full-chain data computation and verification platform powered by ZK technology, allowing smart contracts to easily access and utilize multi-chain historical data as if reading an open encyclopedia.

To understand the core value of Brevis, we must start with the fundamental challenges of Ethereum. As the world's largest smart contract platform, Ethereum has a massive amount of on-chain data, but developers often face difficulties when building dApps: how to efficiently and securely process this data? Traditional methods either rely on centralized oracles (like Chainlink), introducing trust risks, or compute directly on-chain, consuming huge Gas fees, which limits scalability.

The emergence of Brevis fills this gap. Simply put, Brevis acts as a “smart assistant”: it performs complex calculations off-chain and then generates zero-knowledge proofs to verify the correctness of the results for on-chain contracts. This design not only reduces costs but also ensures the integrity and availability of the data.

The technology stack of Brevis is built on an advanced ZK framework. It supports multiple blockchains, including the Ethereum mainnet and its Layer 2 solutions, allowing users to access the complete on-chain historical data—from transaction records to state changes. For example, a DeFi protocol can use Brevis to calculate users' cross-chain credit scores without the need to manually aggregate data; an NFT marketplace can verify the on-chain history of assets in real-time, mitigating the risk of counterfeiting.

The developer behind Brevis is Celer Network, founded by Mo Chen, who holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an expert in applying algorithmic game theory to protocol design and teaches full-stack smart contract courses. In November 2024, Brevis Network completed a $7.5 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital and Binance Labs, with participation from IOSG Ventures, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, Hashkey, and others.

ZK has transitioned from laboratory technology to “production-grade tools”.

The official Ethereum Twitter has retweeted, giving it a high rating: “This is a significant step towards the future of Ethereum. ZK technologies like Pico Prism will help Ethereum scale to meet global demand while still maintaining its credibility and decentralized characteristics.”

Pico Prism is a distributed multi-GPU zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine) released by the Brevis team in October 2025. It is essentially an evolved version of Pico zkVM, optimized for real-time Ethereum block proofs.

In traditional ZK systems, generating proofs often takes a lot of time and effort, requiring high-end hardware and computation times of several minutes, which limits the implementation of real-time applications. Pico Prism breaks this bottleneck: it proves 99.6% of Ethereum blocks within 12 seconds, with an average time of only 6.9 seconds, accomplished using 64 RTX 5090 GPUs.

The SP1 Hypercube solution from Succinct achieved a 40.9% real-time proof coverage (with a delay of less than 10 seconds) on a block with a gas limit of 36 million, utilizing 160 GPUs, with hardware capital expenditures of approximately $256,000. Pico Prism is 32 times faster than competitors like SP1, while also reducing GPU hardware costs by 50%.

This efficiency is attributed to its modular architecture: Pico Prism breaks down the proof process into parallel tasks, leveraging multiple GPUs to work together, thus avoiding single-machine bottlenecks.

The advantages of Pico Prism also lie in the expansion of real-world application scenarios. It transforms Ethereum's validation model from “re-execution” to “one-time validation,” theoretically allowing the network capacity to increase by 100 times. Imagine a real-time DeFi lending scenario: users submit transactions, and Pico Prism instantly generates ZK proofs to confirm the borrower's on-chain historical credit, without the need for full nodes to recompute. This not only reduces Gas fees but also enhances security— the proof process is completely zero-knowledge, ensuring user privacy is protected.

In the past, each validator had to re-execute every transaction to validate the block. This required expensive hardware and created a fundamental bottleneck: the more transactions there were, the greater the workload for each validator. Real-time proof breaks this pattern. A prover generates a proof, and all others complete the verification within milliseconds. Pico Prism has already demonstrated that its technology is viable at production scale.

Another highlight of Pico Prism is its compatibility: it supports custom calculations, allowing users to adjust the proof logic according to dApp requirements, rather than being limited to fixed templates. This gives it great potential in Layer 2 Rollups or cross-chain bridges, for example, by helping Optimism or Arbitrum to verify main chain data in real-time, reducing latency risks.

Brevis, through Pico Prism, not only addresses the pain point of proof speed but also lowers the barrier to entry: previously requiring hundreds of GPUs in specialized equipment, now it can run on consumer-grade hardware. This is a boon for small and medium developers, who can easily integrate Brevis to build smarter dApps. The parallel optimization and cost reduction of Pico Prism allow ZK to transition from laboratory technology to production-grade tools.

Of course, Brevis and Pico Prism are not perfect, and there is still a 2.2% gap from the goal of completing real-time proofs within 10 seconds. The officials stated that the next step for Pico Prism is to focus on reducing proof costs. They plan to achieve 99% real-time proof using fewer than 16 RTX 5090 GPUs in the coming months.