Shipping an L1 zkEVM #2: The Security Foundations

After a year of intense work, the zkEVM ecosystem has achieved what once seemed out of reach: real‑time proving. Latency has dropped from minutes to seconds, costs have plummeted, and zkVMs can now prove nearly all Ethereum blocks in under 10 seconds. With performance breakthroughs largely solved, the focus now shifts to something even more fundamental - security strong enough for mainnet.

Key Ideas

The shift from speed to provable security - While performance has surged, many STARK‑based zkEVMs still rely on unproven mathematical assumptions. Recent research has even disproven some of these conjectures, reducing effective security levels. For an L1 zkEVM that could secure hundreds of billions of dollars, the only acceptable target is 128‑bit provable security - the standard recommended by global cryptography bodies and validated by real‑world computation.
Three milestones to reach mainnet‑grade security - Milestone 1. (Feb 2026): integrate all circuits with soundcalc, a shared tool for estimating security using the latest cryptographic bounds. Milestone 2. Glamsterdam (May 2026): reach 100‑bit provable security, keep proofs under 600 KiB, and document recursion architecture. Milestone 3. H‑star (End of 2026): reach the full 128‑bit target, shrink proofs to ≤300 KiB, and provide a formal security argument for the recursion design.
Stabilizing architectures to unlock formal verification - zkEVMs rely on complex recursive compositions of many circuits, and each team structures them differently. Documenting these architectures and proving their soundness is essential. Once designs stabilize, formal verification can finally catch up, enabling rigorous proofs and specifications that match deployed code.

Why It Matters?

The zkEVM race is entering a new phase. Performance is no longer the bottleneck; trustworthiness is. By locking in security targets now and aligning teams around shared tools and milestones, the ecosystem can transition from rapid experimentation to durable, verifiable foundations. This is the work required to deliver a secure L1 zkEVM, which is capable of protecting the full economic weight of Ethereum.