Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that ZK-EVMs will become crucial to Ethereum’s layer-1 security and verification process in the future.
In his latest blog post, Vitalik shares how he thinks the way in which Ethereum maintains its security and decentralization is its multi-client philosophy.
Buterin noted that the privacy-enforcing characteristics of ZK technology could disrupt the broader EVM ecosystem. Layer 2 protocols in ZK rollups have scaled Ethereum and successfully utilized ZK proofs.
Vitalik aims to preserve the advantages of the “multi-client philosophy” while making use of ZK-EVMs to increase the Ethereum network’s scalability, security, and decentralization. However, the main technical issues of deploying ZK technology with many clients are related to latency and data inefficiency.
Different ZK-EVM implementations or protocol rules are interpreted differently by different Ethereum clients, so zero-knowledge proofs are handled differently by each client.
Buterin suggests that the latency challenge could be addressed by designing the single-slot finality protocol and the data efficiency issue would have to be addressed by having a separate protocol for aggregating verification-related data.
Compiled by Coinbold