Brevis Pico Prism Achieves Real-Time Proving on Consumer GPUs
Ethereum’s scalability has taken a significant leap forward with Brevis’s announcement of its Pico Prism zkVM technology. The system can generate proofs for 99.6% of Ethereum blocks in under 12 seconds. This breakthrough represents a major step toward making blockchain validation accessible from everyday devices, including smartphones.
Using 64 NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs, Pico Prism achieves an average proving time of 6.9 seconds. This performance demonstrates that real-time verification can happen on consumer-grade hardware rather than expensive data center equipment. The development addresses one of Ethereum’s most pressing challenges: computational redundancy.
Pico Prism zkVM Performance Metrics
Brevis’s system achieved 96.8% proving coverage for Ethereum blocks in under 10 seconds, meeting the industry standard for real-time proving. The technology generates mathematical proofs of block validity, which the entire network can verify within milliseconds.
Pico Prism delivers a 71% speed improvement over comparable systems such as SP1 Hypercube. When benchmarked against existing solutions, the difference becomes clear. Previous systems achieved only 40.9% coverage for the smaller 36 million gas blocks. Pico Prism handles the current 45 million gas limit blocks with superior efficiency.
Real-Time Ethereum Proving Costs Drop
The hardware setup for Pico Prism costs approximately $128,000, reducing GPU hardware expenses by 50%. Competing solutions require 160 RTX 4090 GPUs at $256,000 for comparable performance. This cost efficiency makes zero-knowledge proving economically viable for broader deployment.
In July 2025, the Ethereum Foundation set targets for real-time proofs: 99% coverage, completion within 10 seconds, and hardware costs below $100,000. While Pico Prism’s hardware cost slightly exceeds this target, the widespread availability of consumer GPUs enhances accessibility significantly.
Ethereum Scalability Through Zero-Knowledge Technology
Pico Prism demonstrates that verification can be scaled through cryptographic proofs instead of computational brute force. Currently, when transactions occur on Ethereum, over 800,000 validators worldwide independently re-run identical calculations. This creates massive computational waste that grows with network expansion.
Zero-knowledge virtual machines solve this problem by allowing one prover to generate proof of validity. The entire network then verifies that proof without redundant execution. Brevis is within 2.2% of the Ethereum Foundation’s 2025 proving benchmarks.
Vitalik Buterin Endorses Pico Prism Progress
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin praised the development, calling it an important step forward in ZK-EVM proving speed and diversity. His endorsement highlights the significance of this technological advancement for Ethereum’s ecosystem.
Brevis CEO Mo Dong stated that Pico Prism brings the company closer to making high-speed proving practical and accessible for any blockchain requiring real-time verifiability. The architecture redesign moves from single-machine proving to distributed multi-GPU clusters, enabling extreme parallelization.
Phone-Based Ethereum Validation Future
Brevis noted that Ethereum could become 100 times faster, with phones potentially becoming full network nodes. This vision aligns with the Ethereum Foundation’s roadmap for validators to transition from re-executing transactions to verifying zero-knowledge proofs.
The technology already powers major protocols. PancakeSwap’s advanced trading hooks, Usual’s trustless reward distribution, and Frax’s cross-chain verification systems run on Brevis infrastructure. These applications demonstrate what Ethereum could achieve when computational constraints disappear.
Ryan Sean Adams of Bankless predicts that if Ethereum Layer 1 maintains a threefold annual increase in throughput, it could reach 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) by 2029. The Fusaka update scheduled for December will further simplify block verification through EIP-7825.
Conclusion
Brevis’s Pico Prism represents a critical milestone in Ethereum’s evolution toward practical zero-knowledge verification. The combination of real-time proving speeds, reduced hardware costs, and consumer-grade accessibility positions this technology as production-ready infrastructure. As Ethereum moves toward native Layer 1 zkEVM integration, developments like Pico Prism demonstrate that decentralized, scalable blockchain computation is achievable.
