Ethereum's Last Big Upgrade: The zkEVM | Ansgar Dietrichs

What It Covers

Ethereum Foundation researcher Ansgar Dietrichs outlines the zkEVM transition on Bankless, explaining how zero-knowledge proofs eliminate blockchain re-execution overhead, enabling Ethereum to scale compute, IO, and bandwidth simultaneously. The rollout spans roughly four years: optional proofs in ~12 months, mandatory proofs in ~2.5 years, targeting roughly 1,000x throughput growth by 2030.

Key Questions Answered

• •zkEVM Core Mechanism: Zero-knowledge proofs allow any node to verify block validity without re-executing transactions. Block production effort stays constant, but verification becomes computationally trivial. This breaks the fundamental symmetry of all blockchains since Bitcoin, where every node redundantly duplicates execution work, and removes the hardware floor that has historically constrained Ethereum's throughput ceiling.
• •Three-Constraint Scaling Framework: Blockchain scaling is bounded by three constraints: bandwidth, IO, and compute. zkEVM directly compresses compute via constant-size proofs. Partial statelessness (VOPS proposal) reduces IO by letting nodes store only relevant state subsets. Block-in-Blobs architecture plus data availability sampling addresses bandwidth. All three must be addressed together; zkEVM alone is insufficient without the complementary upgrades.
• •Rollout Timeline — Four Phases: The transition follows a performance, security, productionization, mandatory-proof sequence. Optional proofs arrive in roughly 12 months for experimental validators. Mandatory proofs follow in approximately 2.5 years. Traditional scaling delivers 3x throughput annually for the first three years; zkEVM-backed scaling continues that same 3x annual rate afterward, compounding to roughly 1,000x total over six years from 2025.
• •State Tree Migration to Binary Trees: Ethereum must replace its current Merkle Patricia tree with a unified binary tree before mandatory proofs become viable. Unlike the previously planned Verkle tree, the binary tree uses a post-quantum-secure hash function optimized for zkEVM proving. Guillaume Ballet leads this work, and the binary tree upgrade will likely become the dominant Ethereum engineering story over the next two years.
• •Client Diversity Restructured for ZK Era: Instead of each node running one execution client, the zkEVM model pairs multiple execution clients compiled to RISC-V with multiple independent proving systems. A node can require at least three valid proofs from distinct client-prover combinations before accepting a block, providing stronger redundancy than today's cross-node diversity model. Formally verified RISC-V execution clients are a longer-term possibility that could eliminate one redundancy layer entirely.
• •Layer-2 Composability Unlocked: Real-time zkEVM proving reduces cross-L2 settlement from hours or days to seconds. Any EVM L2 adopting real-time proofs gains near-instant bridging to other proven L2s and to Ethereum L1, eliminating the current seven-day withdrawal window for optimistic rollups. This positions the entire EVM L2 ecosystem as a direct beneficiary of L1 zkEVM infrastructure without requiring those chains to redesign their architecture from scratch.