Written by: Ebunker Source: medium
One of the most frequently asked questions recently is, how should we view the Ethereum narrative?
Admittedly, Ethereum focused on ICOs and world computing in 2017, and DeFi and the financial settlement layer in 2021. However, in this cycle of 2025, there seems to be **few** new narratives that can rival the previous ones in terms of their sophistication.
ETFs and Staking ETFs might count as half, but these are not under the control of Ethereum developers.
If we have to talk about the other half, it can only be ZK.
Ethereum is indeed the public chain with the most bets on ZK in the entire crypto world, without a doubt.
... A few days ago, Vitalik was quite excited, officially announcing on Twitter that ZKEVM has now entered the Alpha stage. Why is Ethereum so obsessed with ZK? Actually, Ethereum's TPS is already quite high, with a theoretical peak of over 200 TPS. The reason for this is that Ethereum has repeatedly increased the gas limit. However, increasing the gas limit comes at a cost; it cannot be increased indefinitely. The cost is that nodes need more expensive servers to run it. However, Ethereum wants to retain its prized high degree of decentralization, so it can't push the server performance of its nodes too high (consider that a single Solana server is roughly 5–10 times more expensive than a single ETH server). Therefore, the mainnet must be ZK-enabled. Note that this isn't simply about creating a few ZK L2 instances; it's about fully ZK-enabled the entire L1 mainnet. So what are the benefits of ZK? ETH nodes can easily verify these ZK proofs without the tedious process of verifying each transaction individually. To illustrate, imagine you're a teacher grading papers (a node), and those transactions are like the students' exam papers. Manually grading papers used to be very slow. But since the advent of the answer sheet filling (ZK-ification), machines can calculate a student's total score in a second. As the teacher, wouldn't that make your job much easier? You're much more efficient; where one person could grade 50 papers, you can now grade 1000. The number of people remains the same, but efficiency has increased dramatically. Therefore, Ethereum must first implement ZK-ification on its mainnet before it can significantly increase the Gas limit. ZK-ification itself doesn't directly increase TPS; it's a prerequisite. Improving performance still relies on increasing the gas cap, but after ZK-ification, nodes don't need to increase server costs much, making the cost very small. After the last Fusaka upgrade (especially the PeerDAS upgrade), which ran smoothly, Ethereum has taken another step closer to mainnet ZK-ification, hence Vitalik's excitement. Imagine a mainnet with over 1000 TPS; for Ethereum, that would indeed be a respectable achievement. Someone raised the question: If Ethereum itself implements ZK-EVM for the mainnet, is there still any point in other ZK teams? The conclusion is: yes, there is. Why? First, ZK is one of the most challenging projects to develop on the entire network, on par with FHE. It requires a large number of cryptography talents. While the Ethereum Foundation likely has some reserves in this area, as an open-source community, Ethereum adheres to the principle that many hands make light work, and it needs a large number of third-party ZK teams to conduct trial and error and innovation. In return, Ethereum will provide substantial support. Second, there are four types of ZK-EVM, from type 1 to type 4. Several teams, including Polygon, Scroll, ZKsync, and Taiko, are implementing one type, somewhat like each person taking on a task. In addition, there are ZK-VMs, such as Brevis. In fact, ZK-VM's position is even more stable than ZK-EVM. The reason is that among the four ZK-EVM types mentioned above, it's highly likely that the most cost-effective solution will ultimately be chosen and become part of the officially adopted ZK-EVM solution for the Ethereum mainnet, potentially impacting the other three. However, ZK-VM itself is not EVM-compatible, therefore it will definitely be part of Ethereum's diversity strategy. Furthermore, because VM is not subject to EVM limitations, its performance will be very high. Ethereum's ZK-EVM poses no threat to it; on the contrary, the Ethereum team will continue to encourage it. For example, Vitalik previously mentioned the performance of Brevis's ZK-VM and expressed his expectation for its entry into the ZK-EVM field. What about L2? It might have some impact, but still not a significant one. Vitalik once said when discussing Polygon that ZK and L2 should be separated. A ZK-based L1 architecture will likely attract some users back to ZK L2, since if L1 becomes cheap enough, fewer users might switch to L2. However, conversely, if we use an analogy, L1 is the foundation, and L2 is the skyscraper. The more solid the foundation, the better. Therefore, the L1 mainnet's ZK-ification will also reduce L2 fees, which is beneficial. Furthermore, Vitalik specifically mentioned Brevis, who works on ZK-VM, in that tweet. The reason is that much of Brevis's ZK work isn't limited to L2; that is, "ZK research and L2 research are separate." For example, they have a market for ZK computing power and help Uniswap's hooks with ZK-ification reward distribution, which is application-driven. In short, Ethereum has been online for 10 years, and the ZK-ification slogan has been around for 5 or 6 years. After years of hard work, ZK-ification has finally entered the Alpha stage, thanks to the continuous investment from Ethereum and many third-party ZK teams, including Brevis and Polygon.