Within a year, Ethereum (ETH) is expected to see the integration of the first clients with zero-knowledge proofs on its layer 1. What does this mean and what changes can we expect?
Ethereum (ETH) to move towards zero-knowledge proofs (ZK)
On Thursday, developer Sophia Gold published an article on the Ethereum Foundation website detailing a major upcoming change: the migration of Ethereum (ETH) to zero-knowledge (ZK) technology.
More specifically, this is not a complete technological overhaul, as was the case with the transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), but rather a transition of its technology stack to a faster and more scalable system:
Ethereum is betting everything on ZK. Ultimately, we plan to adopt ZK proofs at every level of the stack, from signature aggregation at the consensus level to on-chain privacy with client-side proof generation, and to simplify the protocol to make it fully ZK-compatible. But the first step will be to deploy a layer 1 zkEVM.
Today, Ethereum runs on multiple clients, both for its consensus layer and execution layer. This means that validators can choose different software to secure the Ethereum network. Within a year, the Ethereum Foundation plans to begin integrating zkEVM clients to initiate this ambitious transition for the protocol:
Our main strength in implementing this plan lies in our ability to mobilize the entire zkVM industry to make Ethereum the world’s largest ZK application. Many zkVMs are already testing Ethereum blocks, and performance advances are being announced every week.
On the technical side, the author estimates that the cost of deploying a validator with current technology (at the time of writing) was estimated at $80,000. However, it should be noted that the recent rise in the price of ETH qualifies this estimate, as 32 ETH now costs $96,000.
Nevertheless, initial calculations estimate that the cost of a validator running at home with ZK technology should be increased to $100,000 and require 10 kW of electrical power to run the GPUs.
Other advantages of migrating to ZK clients include the reduced weight of proofs on the network, which is less than 300 KB. The weight of these proofs is of paramount importance, as block after block, they add to the blockchain, which consequently takes up more and more storage space.
With the Devconnect Argentina event set to take place from November 17 to 22, the Ethereum Foundation expects further innovations in this area between now and then.
